MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Easy Mode Holiday Shopping – Buy Gifts by Text (Reply YES to Purchase)
by brettville | 2025-11-19 00:10:31+00:00
Every year I procrastinate my Christmas shopping and end up panic-scrolling through a dozen tabs, adding the wrong size/color, forgetting shipping cutoffs…and ultimately giving people gift cards.

So I built something I wanted:

Once a day, we text you ONE great gift idea. If you want it, you reply “YES”. It shows up at your door a few days later. No app. No checkout. No brainpower.

It’s designed for:

- Busy people - Last-minute gifters - People who want to seem thoughtful without the homework

How it works

Membership is $4–6 once, for life

We curate 30 high-quality products from small or indie brands

If you want to learn the brand story (so you sound good when someone unwraps it), reply “MORE” and we email you a short story behind the gift.

Shipping and payment are handled automatically after your first setup

We’re ~500 users today, and so far:

- 52% reply YES at least once - ~20% buy 5+ times - The brands love the incremental distribution without marketplace margins

This month (Nov 17–Dec 17) is our Holiday Shopping on Easy Mode run: 30 days, 30 gifts. The first drop just went live.

Try it: https://yesmore.co (US only for now)

Why HN?

I’m especially curious about:

- Thoughts on ways to make an SMS-only UX better than apps for commerce - Thoughts on scaling a low-frequency, high-intent purchasing model - Predicting LTV when the # of “drops” is finite

Also, if anyone has product ideas / favorite small brands we should try to feature — I’d love intros.

Happy to answer anything: Payments, logistics, SMS deliverability, membership economics…

Thanks for checking it out — and may all your holiday shopping happen in under 30 texts this year!
by morganherlocker | 2025-11-19 00:10:48+00:00
- notepad++: 56.4 MB (went gray-window unresponsive for 10 seconds when opening the explorer)

- notepad.exe: 54.3 MB

- emacs: 15.2 MB

- vim: 5.5MB

I would argue that notepad++ is not really comparable to VSCode, and that VSCode is closer to an IDE, especially given the context of this thread. TUIs are not offering a similar GUI app experience, but vim serves as a nice baseline.

I think that when people dump on electron, they are picturing an alternative implementation like win32 or Qt that offers a similar UI-driven experience. I'm using this benchmark, because its the most common critique I read with respect to electron when these are suggested.

It is obviously possible to beat a browser-wrapper with a native implementation. I'm simply observing that this doesn't actually happen in a typical modern C++ GUI app, where the dependency bloat and memory management is often even worse.
by trengrj | 2025-11-19 00:11:41+00:00
Classic combination of errors:

Having the feature table pivoted (with 200 feature1, feature2, etc columns) meant they had to do meta queries to system.columns to get all the feature columns which made the query sensitive to permissioning changes (especially duplicate databases).

A Crowdstrike style config update that affects all nodes but obviously isn't tested in any QA or staged rollout strategy beforehand (the application panicking straight away with this new file basically proves this).

Finally an error with bot management config files should probably disable bot management vs crash the core proxy.

I'm interested here why they even decided to name Clickhouse as this error could have been caused by any other database. I can see though the replicas updating causing flip / flopping of results would have been really frustrating for incident responders.
by refulgentis | 2025-11-19 00:11:55+00:00
Speech recognition, as described above, is an AI too :) These LLMs are huge AIs that I guess could eventually replace all other AIs, but that’s sort of speculation no one with knowledge of the field would endorse.

Separately, in my role as wizened 16 year old veteran of HN: it was jarring to read that. There’s a “rules” section, but don’t be turned off by the name, it is more like a nice collection of guidelines of how to interact in a way that encourages productive discussion that illuminates. One of the key rules is not to interpret things weakly. Here, someone spelled out exactly how to do it, and we shouldn’t then assume its not AI, then tie to a vague demeaning description of “AI hype”, then ask an unanswerable question of what’s the point of “AI hype”.

If you’re nontechnical, to be clear, it would be hard to be nontechnical and new to HN and know how to ask that a different way, I suppose.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-11-19 00:11:57+00:00
You raise a valid point that doesn't deserve the downvoting...

But have you considered it fully? We're in a heap of shit if the pay that employers can truly afford is lower than the pay that employees require to earn the minimal livelihood. If there is really realsy no overlap there, then you need to stock up on canned food and shotgun shells.
by Yeroc | 2025-11-19 00:12:47+00:00
Fair enough. I use git worktrees (with a script that creates the git branch, worktree and opens a new vs code workspace). You're right, managing more than about two active sessions at once is probably the limit though I'm somewhat hopeful that better tooling similar to the Agent Manager window here would allow me to scale a bit past that especially if some of those sessions are more design explorations.
by Aeolun | 2025-11-19 00:12:50+00:00
> I think it's quite rare for any company to have exact similar scale and size of storage in stage as in prod.

We’re like a millionth the size of cloudflare and we have automated tests for all (sort of) queries to see what would happen with 20x more data.

Mostly to catch performance regressions, but it would work to catch these issues too.

I guess that doesn’t say anything about how rare it is, because this is also the first company at which I get the time to go to such lengths.
by manquer | 2025-11-19 00:12:56+00:00
Absolute volume maybe[1], as relative % of global digital communication traffic, the era of early telegraph probably has it beat.

In the pre digital era, East India Company dwarfs every other company in any metric like commerce controlled, global shipping, communication traffic, private army size, %GDP , % of workforce employed by considerable margins.

The default was large consolidated organization throughout history, like say Bell Labs, or Standard Oil before that and so on, only for a brief periods we have enjoyed benefits of true capitalism.

[1] Although I suspect either AWS or MS/Azure recent down-times in the last couple of years are likely higher
by tptacek | 2025-11-19 00:13:51+00:00
Richard Cook #18 (and #10) strikes again!

https://how.complexsystems.fail/#18

It'd be fun to read more about how you all procedurally respond to this (but maybe this is just a fixation of mine lately). Like are you tabletopping this scenario, are teams building out runbooks for how to quickly resolve this, what's the balancing test for "this needs a functional change to how our distributed systems work" vs. "instead of layering additional complexity on, we should just have a process for quickly and maybe even speculatively restoring this part of the system to a known good state in an outage".
by dzonga | 2025-11-19 00:14:23+00:00
> thread fl2_worker_thread panicked: called Result::unwrap() on an Err value

I don't use Rust, but a lot of Rust people say if it compiles it runs.

Well Rust won't save you from the usual programming mistake. Not blaming anyone at cloudflare here. I love Cloudflare and the awesome tools they put out.

end of day - let's pick languages | tech because of what we love to do. if you love Rust - pick it all day. I actually wanna try it for industrial robot stuff or small controllers etc.

there's no bad language - just occassional hiccups from us users who use those tools.
by cpursley | 2025-11-19 00:14:40+00:00
My wife was a Title I teacher high school for a while, there was a LOT of pressure to “pass” kids out of the system for that sweet Federal money and other lets say, “political” reasons (like internal/local level, not left/right stuff). And she absolutely did her best to get them to pass on their own merit, but there’s only so much you can do if students don’t have the prerequisites + culture and motivation.
by fredoralive | 2025-11-19 00:15:10+00:00
STREAMS isn’t a networking protocol, it’s an internal data routing thing some UNIXes use locally, and amongst other things to implement the network stack in it.

You’d still be talking of stuff like IP addresses and the like with it. Probably with the XTI API instead of BSD sockets, which is a bit more complex but you need the flexibility to handle different network stacks than just TCP/IP, like erm…
by xp84 | 2025-11-19 00:15:35+00:00
I feel like you and GP are both right.

A ton of high school graduates can't do basic math (which also explains their economic illiteracy, like believing that just taxing billionaires more would fix everything[1]).

And also at the same time, we demand college degrees for white-collar jobs that anyone who completed the alleged requirements to graduate high school could totally do. I think this stems from an outdated belief that college is difficult and challenging, and therefore getting through it proves you're exceptionally clever. A notion that has been a joke for at least 15 years if not 20.

So everything is fake. The diplomas are fake, the degrees are fake, and the job requirements are fake. All of it is being used to come up with legal and justifiable ways to pick the people with sufficient brain cells to be entrusted with job responsibilities.

[1] Most college graduates would likely get this question orders of magnitude wrong: If you could split the full net worth of the top 10 billionaires equally among every man, woman, and child in America how big would each one's check be? Correct answer: Just over $6,000. (Of course, we'll ignore how to deal with the market crash caused by forcing the sudden liquidation of their 2 trillion dollars in assets.)
by insane_dreamer | 2025-11-19 00:16:10+00:00
This has much to do with the history of Japan and its inhabitants vs the history of the US and the type of people who moved here and occupied / colonized it (don't use "settled", there was no settling, only stealing). The US was largely built on individualism, high risk-high reward, lawlessness, aggression, and a lack of social cohesiveness (don't like it somewhere? there's plenty of other places to go and be on your own). Japan on the other hand, while it had wars/violence too, that happened within a highly structured society built on a form of feudalism.
by wanderingjew | 2025-11-19 00:16:20+00:00
Hey, guy who made this here. This probably deserves a little explanation. First off, I'd like to tell you I'm really, really unemployed, and have the freedom to do some cool stuff. So I came up with a project idea. This is only a small part of a project I'm working on, but you'll see where this is going.

I was inspired by this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRfbQJ6FdF0 from bitluni that's a cluster of $0.10-0.20 RISC-V microcontrollers. For ten or twenty cents, these have a lot of GPIOs compared to other extremely low-cost microcontrollers. 18 GPIOs on the CH32V006F4U6. This got me thinking, what if I built a cluster of these chips. Basically re-doing bitluni's build.

But then I started thinking, at ten cents a chip, you could scale this to thousands. But how do you connect them? That problem was already solved in the 80s, with the Connection Machine. The basic idea here is to get 2^(whatever) chips, and connect them so each chip connects to (whatever) many other chips. The Connection Machine sold this as a hypercube, but it's better described as a hamming-distance-one graph or something.

So I started building that. I did the LEDs first, just to get a handle on thousands of parts: https://x.com/ViolenceWorks/status/1987596162954903808 and started laying out the 'cards' of this thing. With a 'hypecube topology' you can split up the cube into different parts, so this thing is made of sixteen cards (2^4), with 256 chips on each card (2^8), meaning 4096 (2^12) chips in total. This requires a backplane. A huge backplane with 8196 nets. Non-trivial stuff.

So the real stumbling block for this project is the backplane, and this is basically the only way I could figure out how to build it; write an autorouter. It's a fun project that really couldn't have been done before the launch of KiCad 9; the new IPC API was a necessity to make this a reality. After that it's just some CuPy because of sparse matrices and a few blockers trying to adapt PathFinder to circuit boards.

Last week I finished up the 'cloud routing' functionality and was able to run this on an A100 80GB instance on Vast.io; the board wouldn't fit in my 16GB 5080 I used for testing. That instance took 41 hours to route the board, and now I have the result back on my main battlestation ready for the bit of hand routing that's still needed. No, it's not perfect, but it's an autorouter. It's never going to be perfect.

This was a fun project but what I really should have been doing the past three months or so is grinding leetcode. It's hard out there, and given that I've been rejected from every technician job I've applied to, I don't think this project is going to help me. Either way, this project.... is not useful. There's probably a dozen engineers out there in the world that this _could_ help.

So, while it's working for my weird project, this is really not what hiring managers want to see.
by captainkrtek | 2025-11-19 00:16:41+00:00
> So by definition, if a service is large enough to serve a zillion people, it is probably big and bloated and complex.

Totally agree with your take as well.

I think the unfortunate thing is that there can exist a "goldie locks zone" to this, where the service is capable of serving a zillion people AND is well architected. Unfortunately it can't seem to last forever.

I saw this in my career. More product SKUs were developed, new features/services defined by non-technical PMs, MBAs entered the chat, sales became the new focus over availability, and the engineering culture that made this possible eroded day by day.

The years I worked in this "goldie locks zone" I'd attribute to:

- strong technical leadership at the SVP+ level that strongly advocated for security, availability, then features (in that order).

- a strong operational culture. Incidents were exciting internally, post mortems shared at a company wide level, no matter how small.

- recognition for the engineers who chased ambulances and kept things running, beyond their normal job, this inspired others to follow in their footsteps.
by lemoncookiechip | 2025-11-19 00:16:49+00:00
Does the USA even have enough money to rescue the tech giants at this point? We could be talking multiple trillion dollars at worst. And the AI only companies like OpenAI and Anthropic would be the most vulnerable in comparison to say Google or Microsoft, because they have no fallback and no sustainability without investor money.

And Nvidia would be left in a weird place where the vast majority of their profits are coming from AI cards and demand would potentially dry up entirely.
by icedchai | 2025-11-19 00:16:54+00:00
I am essentially in this exact role. The junior developers simply don't have the experience to evaluate the output of the agents. You wind up with a lot of slop in PRs. People can't justify why they did something. I've seen whole PRs closed, work redone, and opened anew because they were 70% garbage. Every other comment was asking "why is this here? it has nothing to do with the ticket."

Sadly, this is not sustainable and I am not sure what I'm going to do.
by mewpmewp2 | 2025-11-19 00:17:07+00:00
But now consider how much extra data Cloudflare at its size would have to have just for staging, doubling or more their costs to have stage exactly as production. They would have to simulate similar amount of requests on top of themselves constantly since presumably they have 100s or 1000s of deployments per day.

In this case it seems the database table in question seemed modest in size (the features for ML) so naively thinking they could have kept stage features always in sync with prod at the very least, but could be they didn't consider that 55 rows vs 60 rows or similar could be a breaking point given a certain specific bug.

It is much easier to test with 20x data if you don't have the amount of data cloudflare probably handles.
by belorn | 2025-11-19 00:18:17+00:00
The rule for the leftmost lane (highway) is that you must not block for other drivers. It is in the rule book (at least in my country). That mean in very clear terms that if you can't do the overtaking in a timely fashion without blocking other drivers, then you should not enter the left lane.

If there is one thing that tend to cause conflict and trigger dangerous situations in traffic, it is when someone driving at 0.001% faster than the next car enter left lane while maintaining the exact same speed, basically matching the speed on the right. That is just as illegal as speeding.
by bgwalter | 2025-11-19 00:18:18+00:00
The first comment on the website says that $120K is a lie.

Then of course, why would you specialize in the F150 if they add new electronic BS every 2 years, the car will perhaps be obsolete in 7 years or all tariffs on BYD are lifted in 8 years.

Maybe keep cars general and don't make them proprietary, then people will learn general skills.
by rramadass | 2025-11-19 00:18:21+00:00
This sort of reductionist approach has long been discarded.

Philosophizing is as old as mankind with even the most primitive tribe developing a "Worldview" within which it placed itself i.e. gave meaning to its existence. "Modern Science" itself was birthed from Philosophy in order to study "Objective Reality" separately from our "Subjective Perception" of it.

But the fact that we "live in our Mind" only via subjective perceptions (i.e. experiences/feelings/emotions/thoughts/memories/etc.) has not gone away and hence the problems engendered by this must be faced.

The need for a study of this through a Philosophy is nicely stated by the opening verse of Samkhya Karika (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samkhyakarika) which is a seminal text from the Samkhya (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samkhya) school of philosophy;

Because of the torment of the three-fold suffering, arises this inquiry to know the means of counteracting it. If it is said that such inquiry is useless because perceptible means of removal exist, we say no because these means are neither lasting nor effective. (See the "Contents" section of Samkhya Karika webpage linked to above for a detailed understanding)

So what Philosophies give us is a way to orient our psychology through a appropriate worldview which promises the removal of all suffering and unhappiness which Biology by itself cannot.
by theideaofcoffee | 2025-11-19 00:18:23+00:00
“We can’t possibly afford to do this. It doesn’t make sense! What if we pay for all of this training and they leave?”

“What if you don’t and they stay?”

These companies think they can just reap all of the rewards without any investment, it’s stupid. I definitely agree with you saying that there needs to be a return to these places taking more care and investing in long-term people. Like you said, invest in them and they’ll invest in you.
by shtzvhdx | 2025-11-19 00:18:46+00:00
The SEC requires companies to disclose the executive pay to median salary.

It 2023 it was 312:1.

Ok, but $500 000/year isnt a median salary. But Ford's CEO is $26.4 million, so 53:1.

Gather up the rest of the C-suit at Ford and you got a couple hundred mechanics.

Do that to Stellantis and GM and you're at about 500 mechanics. 10 per state is not an insignificant number of high paid mechanics.

Add Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed, GE, and all the other once great industrial American jewels run by idiots and you have financed the training of a large portion of the American workforce.
by marcusb | 2025-11-19 00:18:48+00:00
Rust has debug asserts for that. Using expect with a comment about why the condition should not/can't ever happen is idiomatic for cases where you never expect an Err.

This reads to me more like the error type returned by append with names is not (ErrorFlags, i32) and wasn't trivially convertible into that type so someone left an unwrap in place on an "I'll fix it later" basis, but who knows.
by tptacek | 2025-11-19 00:18:48+00:00
Right but also this is a pretty common pattern in distributed systems that publish from databases (really any large central source of truth); it might be like the problem in systems like this. When you're lucky the corner cases are obvious; in the big one we experienced last year, a new row in our database tripped an if-let/mutex deadlock, which our system dutifully (and very quickly) propagated across our entire network.

The solution to that problem wasn't better testing of database permutations or a better staging environment (though in time we did do those things). It was (1) a watchdog system in our proxies to catch arbitrary deadlocks (which caught other stuff later), (2) segmenting our global broadcast domain for changes into regional broadcast domains so prod rollouts are implicitly staged, and (3) a process for operators to quickly restore that system to a known good state in the early stages of an outage.

(Cloudflare's responses will be different than ours, really I'm just sticking up for the idea that the changes you need don't follow obviously from the immediate facts of an outage.)
by xp84 | 2025-11-19 00:19:05+00:00
You'd better duck before the people who "don't test well" come for you. There are millions of people out there who swear they know a ton of things and have great skills in math/science/whatever, but when asked to demonstrate them in any verifiable way (a "test") they freeze up and perform poorly. I don't really think those people are all lying (it's probably an anxiety disorder) but the entire notion of being able to empirically measure knowledge/skills/aptitude is controversial to some people.
by calvinmorrison | 2025-11-19 00:19:07+00:00
Saab also had a battery warning light, like most cars. However, if the battery was not charging, the light would not come on. Also if the bulb burned out, your alternator wouldn't work.

My saabs, of the 5 I own, only have working lights in about 2 of them. One has no tacho (from factory), one no speedo (broken)

Turns out you pretty much dont need any of that stuff anyway.
by insane_dreamer | 2025-11-19 00:19:41+00:00
That's because the business is trying to save on their own manpower costs by shifting some of the burden to their customers -- much like self-checkout.

If by returning my cart I was helping the employees, I'd be inclined to go out of my way to do so. But actually all I'm doing is helping the business, who is trying to cut as many employees as possible (talking about big stores like Walmart, Target, not some small local grocery that might even be employee owned).