MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
I need advice for this AI Assistant Im Building
by DylanWain | 2025-12-07 20:46:06+00:00
Hey guys!

For the past month Ive been building this SaaS product that combines superhuman and notion into one platform.

The idea is an AI assistant that handles email, calendar, invoices, and tasks in one dashboard. It triages your inbox, drafts replies, schedules meetings, sends payment reminders, and gives you a daily briefing.

Can you give me some feedback about the features you'd like or if this is something you'd like to try? I want to build this hand in hand with my users

Here is the landing page I made for it

https://boopydoop.com/
by c_shu | 2025-12-07 20:46:44+00:00
Location: BC, Canada

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: NO

Technologies: Rust, Golang, C#, Java, C, C++, JS, PHP, Postgres, SQLite, SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, Flutter, Bash, AWK, Linux, Windows

Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1eDvIfxc6tgSPAV_psg4aPJptOYz...

Email: cshu32@gmail.com

Versatile programmer with 10+ years of expertise in software development. Automation enthusiast, rustacean, and gopher. Proven experience in web technologies, DB engines, information security, network programming, performance tuning, and cross-platform abstraction.

GitHub: https://github.com/cshu | LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cshu/
Show HN: I built a quantitative analysis tool to retail traders
by indian_mafia | 2025-12-07 20:47:33+00:00
Hi HN,

I’ve been trading for 10+ years, mostly focusing on quantitative techniques like mean reversion and statistical arbitrage (pair trading). Over time, I’ve felt that many of the tools for these strategies are either too expensive, too slow, or simply not built with retail traders in mind.

So we decided to build QuantLens, a web-based tool that provides quantitative insights for the US stock market. Our goal is to make powerful quant tools accessible to everyone, not just institutions.

Key features:

Pair Trading: Find cointegrated stock pairs and analyze spread, z-score, divergence, and correlation.

Mean Reversion: Identify stocks deviating significantly from their historical mean.

Sector Analysis: Get a top-down view using sector-wide trends and relative performance.

Clean, fast UI: Designed to be lightweight and simple to explore.

This is still very much a work in progress, and we are actively building more features.

We would love to hear your feedback on: The concept The UI/UX Features you think would be useful for serious traders

You can try it here: https://quantlens.app

Thanks for reading, happy to answer any questions!
by camel_gopher | 2025-12-07 20:48:08+00:00
A rule that has suited me well is to take an estimate, double it, and increase by an order of magnitude for inexperienced developers. So a task the say would take two weeks ends up being 4 months. For experienced developers, halve the estimate and increase by an order of magnitude. So your 10 days estimate would be 5 weeks.
by dang | 2025-12-07 20:48:19+00:00
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
by mccoyb | 2025-12-07 20:48:20+00:00
That's only part of the reason that this type of content is used in academic papers. The other part is that you never know what PhD student / postdoc / researcher will be reviewing your paper, which means you are incentivized to be liberal with citations (however tangential) just in case someone is reading your paper, and has the reaction "why didn't they cite this work, of which I had some role in?"

Papers with a fake air of authority of easily dispatched with. What is not so easily dispatched with is the politics of the submission process.

This type of content is fundamentally about emotions (in the reviewer of your paper), and emotions is undeniably a large factor in acceptance / rejection.
by ricksunny | 2025-12-07 20:48:22+00:00
I think that executives requiring estimates of time from product owners (PMs, Engineering Managers) is an instrument for putting them into de-facto 'debt' servitude, and provides a constant stream of justification for dismissal with cause. As others have commented, if the ability to time perfectly was there, it would no longer have been an innovative product. Same with requiring sales forecasts from salespeople. There's no way for the salesperson to know, so they are constantly on the chopping block for falling short of forecasts they are forced to generate. I imagine above is more or less tacitly acknowledged in tip-sharing conversations between & among execs & their investors.
by swatcoder | 2025-12-07 20:48:32+00:00
Do you think there might be an approval process to navigate when experiments costs might run seven or eight digits and months of reserved resources?

While they do have lots of money and many people, they don't have infinite money and specifically only have so much hot infrastructure to spread around. You'd expect they have to gradually build up the case that a large scale experiment is likely enough to yield a big enough advantage over what's already claiming those resources.
by gruez | 2025-12-07 20:48:43+00:00
>If it says $4 on the shelf and you pay $4 at the register and walk out with the goods, that's a 100% legal sale and not theft.

Source? What happens if somebody stuck a $1 sticker on a ps5? Does that mean you can walk out paying $1 for it, even if the cashier corrects you? What if it's not something absurd but a plausible good deal, like $50 off?
by Spivak | 2025-12-07 20:48:58+00:00
I don't think you would reasonably expect it to be close to 50/50. Most price changes are increases and the mistake theory basically boils down to the employees never updating the shelf tags. Which I think is an extremely plausible theory since the one employee at the store isn't paid enough to bother. And who's even going to check that they updated the tags? Dollar General isn't shelling out money for that.

There's another kind of store that's in a similar situation: thrift stores and nearly all of them have also decided this problem is too hard. Lots of items are marked with just colors based roughly around their estimated value and the store changes the price/color mapping occasionally.
by dvfjsdhgfv | 2025-12-07 20:49:43+00:00
> The next cycle, driven by social and mobile, burned again in 2008–2009, clearing the underbrush for Facebook, Airbnb, Uber, and the offspring of Y Combinator.

This list of companies made me wonder a bit. Technical progress has been huge, no question about that. But as for the actual quality or experience for the user/customer - I have the impression everything got worse, starting from Google from the first wave.
by cgearhart | 2025-12-07 20:49:57+00:00
In 2013-2016 Udacity was very actively collaborating with GT and had in-house content production. The projects were designed by highly experienced instructors in direct partnerships with real companies to make them realistic and relevant, and there was a small army of hand-picked mentors and graders to review and provide feedback.

Unemployment was _relatively_ high at that time, so individual consumers were eager to invest their own time & money to upskill and differentiate themselves. By 2018 unemployment hit record lows and suddenly it was _employers_ who were struggling to attract talent and wanted to differentiate themselves by offering upskill training as a benefit along with highly intentional training programs to organically grow the hard-to-hire talent from their existing workforce. This precipitated a shift from huge growth in the consumer side to growth in the enterprise business.

Contemporaneously, platforms like Udemy and Pluralsight commoditized content creation. Pluralsight bragged that it cost them $15k to launch a new course—orders of magnitude less than it cost us in house. Udacity pivoted away from high quality in house production to more partnerships with external content creators and identified the project grading and mentorship services as the largest cost drivers of ongoing course support costs.

As growth wasn’t tracking fast enough, Udacity closed most of the international offices—except India—then had two rounds of layoffs where the remaining content production was practically eliminated, and the mentorship and grading were commoditized by transferring the programs to the Udacity India office to administrate. All the hand-picked and trained graders and mentors were eliminated.

Then COVID hit. (I was gone by then.) I heard Udacity raised a debt round, but I think they were stuck against headwinds from the past few years. Eventually they were acquired for an “undisclosed sum”.

So what could have brought in more business? IMO, focusing on what was working for us, not trying to pivot into what worked for someone else. The problem I think is that we weren’t on track to make a reasonable return on all the money raised. We were trying to swing for the fences, even if it meant eventually striking out.
by wakawaka28 | 2025-12-07 20:50:33+00:00
I have never used jj, nor met anyone who used it in person. Given how new it is, you just won't find enough people who used it at all. I think git is like the vim of VCS systems and like vim there are some people who just don't think that way. I think jj might be more like emacs in that it has the initial appearance of being simple, but when you get into it more deeply you realize that it is not so simple after all.

I have used other VCS systems that made similar claims about being simpler, such as Mercurial. I think I got to be fairly expert at Mercurial before becoming expert at git, and even used it to interact with SVN repositories. (I've also used git for SVN. This is another thing git does better.) After actually learning git past the first few commands, I would never go back to Mercurial. I don't want to mix and match systems either. There are things I want git to do better, but I would not call these simple feature requests... They are more along the lines of advanced features that need to be extended or polished.
by shrubble | 2025-12-07 20:51:08+00:00
From the article:

"Lisp/Clojure macros derive from the uniformity of the language to enable composing the language back on itself. Logic can be run at compile-time no differently than at runtime using all the same functions and techniques. The syntax tree of the language can be manipulated and transformed at will, enabling control over the semantics of code itself. "

If you are a smaller consultancy solving hard problems, then you might need this.

The problem sometimes is: "I don't want this level of complication, especially when I am going to hand it off to other people to maintain it."

In the business world, you are not gated by your intelligence, but by the average IQ of the people who are going to maintain it over the years.
by DanHulton | 2025-12-07 20:51:29+00:00
From both the developer and manager side of things, I've found that the most important attribute of estimates is frequently the least paid attention to: that they be kept up to date.

When you discover more work hidden under that "simple" pile of code, you absolutely HAVE to update your estimate. Add more points, add more tickets, whatever. But then your various managers have the ammunition to decide what to do next - allocate more resources to the project, descope the project, push back the release date, etc.

Far too frequently, the estimate is set in stone at the start of the project and used as a deadline that is blown past, with everyone going into crisis mode at that point. The earlier the estimate is updated, the calmer and more comprehensive action everyone responsible can take.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-12-07 20:52:04+00:00
I somewhat agree, with the caveat being when your citizens do it, you're stuck with the poor behavior because they have rights to be on the soil. You get another chance to do better when their kids become adults (and either choose to be childfree [1], or become parents, but hopefully engaged and active in the effort). When immigrants do it, you have options, because depending on your residency model, you can ask them to leave if they are not adhering to your systems designed to lead to desired outcomes. You can treat people well and they still don't perform to expectations. Broadly speaking, you don't want an endless obligation of having to provide material amounts of support and services (which comes out of the pocket of taxpayer citizens) to people who don't give AF, but we should be accepting of inevitable drag when people did try and still fail (such is life). It's a poor outcome for everyone involved imho, but accountability is very important in the context of child rearing.

[1] https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/Slides_London.pdf
by jstummbillig | 2025-12-07 20:52:06+00:00
That is a beautiful anecdote, but I don't see what we could reasonably generalize from that. It's fairly well established that access to good medical care and a certain degree of wealth make us happier.

Could a life radically and willfully different in many ways turn out to be better for most of us (which is critically what you claimed before)? It's certainly possible, given how few people take this route, but an appeal to nature is just not super convincing, unless you can back it up with data.

I can't help but notice you did not engage with how 40% of kids dieing and another 20% of us getting killed by some member of the cherished tribe could possible lead to high levels of life satisfaction. As far I can tell, on the whole, the good old days were cruel and rosy retrospection is just that.
by andersmurphy | 2025-12-07 20:52:06+00:00
>Does Clojure have a package manager as simple and straightforward as npm/cargo? Does it have a type system as well-maintained as TypeScript? Does it have a UI library as good as (choose your favorite web UI library)? These are all ecosystem problems.

The irony is Clojure(script) has all those things. By virtue of being hosted on the JVM and Javacript and having first class interop with both. ClojureCLR even gives you access to all of C# etc.

Being hosted was a great play in terms of ecosystem.

What it doesn't have is ALGOL style syntax.
by AbstractH24 | 2025-12-07 20:52:25+00:00
If you spend any time in it, you know it is.

They’ve never forced folks to verify email addresses, but the last 6 months or so you see tons of accounts commenting on very on discussions, writing bland ai-like, making posts that are just riling things up, and/or hiding their post and comment history.

What was once the last bastion of interesting social media is quickly becoming useless.
by libraryofbabel | 2025-12-07 20:53:22+00:00
That's a bit of an ad feminam attack, isn't it? Just because I used the phrase "business concepts", somehow money is the only thing I care about when it comes to language choice? And yet, in my top-level post I said I went and learned lisp and clojure and read SCIP, and I will add that I did both of those things for fun. So no, I don't only think of programming languages as a way to make money. Elegance and expressiveness are interesting for their own sake. I trained as a mathematician; of course I think that.

But TFA was riffing on Paul Graham's old essay Beating the Averages, which argued precisely that the expressiveness of Lisp gave his startup a business edge. That was the context of my comment. I'd add that most of what most of us do in our day jobs is to use programming languages to make money, and there's no shame in that at all. And if you want to talk about why certain languages get widespread adoption and others not, you have to talk about the corporate context: there is no way around it.

But I'll rephrase my question, just for you: "what abstract problems can you solve or thoughts can you express in Clojure that you can’t express in Python or Rust?"
by logicprog | 2025-12-07 20:53:23+00:00
"It might surprise the author to learn that there are many people who:

1) Have tried lisp and clojure

2) Liked their elegance and expressiveness

3) Have read through SICP and done most of the exercises

4) Would still choose plain old boring easy-to-read always-second-best Python for 90% of use-cases (and probably Rust for the last 10%) when building a real business in the real world."

This is me to a T — even when I'm building hobby projects. The point of writing any code, for me, is most of all to see a certain idea to fruition, so I choose what will make me most productive getting where I want to go. And while I still worship at the altar of Common Lisp as an incredibly good language, the language matters much less than the libraries, ecosystem, and documentation for productivity (or even effective DSL style abstraction level!), so eventually I have had to make my peace with Python, TypeScript, and Rust.
by topspin | 2025-12-07 20:53:34+00:00
"Perl6/Raku killed Perl."

Perl was effectively "dead" before Perl 6 existed. I was there. I bought the books, wrote the code, hung out in #perl and followed the progress. I remember when Perl 6 was announced. I remember barely caring by that time, and I perceived that I was hardly alone. Everyone had moved on by then. At best, Perl 6 was seen as maybe Perl making a "come back."

Java, and (by extension) Windows, killed Perl.

Java promised portability. Java had a workable cross-platform GUI story (Swing). Java had a web story with JSP, Tomcat, Java applets, etc. Java had a plausible embedded and mobile story. Java wasn't wedded to the UNIX model, and at the time, Java's Windows implementation was as least as good as its non-Windows implementations, if not better. Java also had a development budget, a marketing budget, and the explicit blessing of several big tech giants of the time.

In the late 90's and early 2000's, Java just sucked the life out of almost everything else that wasn't a "systems" or legacy big-iron language. Perl was just another casualty of Java. Many of the things that mattered back then either seem silly today or have been solved with things other than Java, but at the time they were very compelling.

Could Perl have been saved? Maybe. The claims that Perl is difficult to learn or "write only" aren't true: Perl isn't the least bit difficult. Nearly every Perl programmer on Earth is self-taught, the documentation is excellent and Google has been able to answer any basic Perl question one might have for decades now. If Perl had somehow bent itself enough to make Windows a first-class platform, it would have helped a lot. If Perl had provided a low friction, batteries-included de facto standard web template and server integration solution, it would have helped a lot as well. If Perl had a serious cross-platform GUI story, that would helped a lot.

To the extent that the Perl "community" was somehow incapable of these things, we can call the death of Perl a phenomena of "culture." I, however, attribute the fall of Perl to the more mundane reason that Perl had no business model and no business advocates.
by altairprime | 2025-12-07 20:53:40+00:00
It was primarily the exhaustion of experts at tireless waves of newbies who hadn’t studied the available materials.

IRC being async if the client is run locally, modem delays made no difference (just as with QWKmail and forum posts). And for remote host IRC, I don’t remember what the IRC line length limit was but at 300bps you could get an entire message and the buffer scroll updates accompanying it in 1 second, which was well-sufficient enough to support peak volume with no relevant latency. And, I can still type a paragraph at clock seconds of input latency and remember where I’m at when backspacing. So, I would definitely not ascribe a desire for brevity as an outcome of modems.
by webdevver | 2025-12-07 20:53:42+00:00
it is also interesting that places where you would expect to have quite 'switched-on' software development practices tend to be the opposite - and the much-maligned 'codemonkeys' at 'big tech' infact tend to be pretty damn good.

it was painful for me to accept that the most elite programmers i have ever encountered were the ones working in high frequency trading, finance, and mass-producers of 'slop' (adtech, etc.)

i still ache to work in embedded fields, in 8kB constrained environment to write perfectly correct code without a cycle wasted, but i know from (others) experience that embedded software tends to have the worst software developers and software development practices of them all.
by sllabres | 2025-12-07 20:54:01+00:00
The sensitivity When I play with phypbox [1] there is a sensitivity in the µT range. From the web page [2] the device build has a 0.1 nT resolution and 50 ppm absolute accuracy.

[1] https://phyphox.org/download/

[2] https://alexmumm.de/pgProtonMagnetometer_en.htm
by cgearhart | 2025-12-07 20:54:27+00:00
Nah. There was some of that as the tools available to unis improved alongside Udacity, but it was a very intentional choice. The business with GT made $X/year while the consumer & enterprise businesses brought in $20X/year. It seemed like we could maybe double the OMSCS or scale linearly with effort by making more partnerships, meanwhile the other lines scaled faster with much less effort. Terminating this partnership was just one of the business lines that got cut off to focus everything on the lines that were growing much faster.
by phantasmish | 2025-12-07 20:54:43+00:00
> are often selling lower-quality versions of the products they sell

Clothes brands do this too.

Clothes at the outlet store aren't the same as clothes at Dillards, what's stocked at a struggling Macy's in a relatively poor area may be different from what's available for the same brand at Macy's in Manhattan, and all that may not be the same as what's in their flagship stores.

Sometimes they make it semi-obvious provided you learn their secret label language (Polo by Ralph Lauren, Chaps by Ralph Lauren, Ralph Lauren Purple Label, and about a half-dozen other major variants, for example). They do this so they can sell shit to unsophisticated consumers at a large mark-up for the name, riding on the reputation and clout of the good versions of what they sell (elsewhere, at even higher prices).
by exe34 | 2025-12-07 20:55:33+00:00
$ ./Downloads/tmp/xpack-riscv-none-elf-gcc-15.2.0-1/bin/riscv-none-elf-cpp Could not start dynamically linked executable: ./Downloads/tmp/xpack-riscv-none-elf-gcc-15.2.0-1/bin/riscv-none-elf-cpp NixOS cannot run dynamically linked executables intended for generic linux environments out of the box. For more information, see: https://nix.dev/permalink/stub-ld

You have to go out of your way to make something like that run in an fhs env. By that point, you've had enough time to think, even with ADHD.
by horizion2025 | 2025-12-07 20:55:47+00:00
It is often not just about the difficulty of estimation the time for specific tasks but also what the assumptions put in were. Sometimes these assumptions werent written out explicitly or other times they were (deliberately?) removed. Just one example of a broken example: a project can be run in many ways. You can have an estimate done based on A-team resources and high priority but the moment the contract or whatever is done, it is decided to outside the whole work to a new team who never worked on the code before and sit thousands of miles away. To compensate 2-3x as many people are assigned. Add in a non technical project manager and scrum master and all kinds of resources that were never envisaged but who will report time in on the project etc. You get the idea. And this was just done type of assumption that could broken!