MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by eezing | 2025-12-15 00:45:14+00:00
Aside from the following, JSDoc is absolutely TypeScript.

Discriminated unions, conditional types, mapped types, template literal types, recursive type aliases, higher-kinded type patterns, generic constraints with conditional inference, the infer keyword, never type exhaustiveness checking, const assertions, readonly tuple and array inference, exact object types, key remapping in mapped types, indexed access types, variance annotations, assertion signatures, strict null checking with flow-sensitive narrowing, definite assignment assertions, the satisfies operator, declaration merging, module augmentation, symbol-typed properties, type-safe enums

…and not written via comments
by derbOac | 2025-12-15 00:45:14+00:00
Although I think the phenomenon they write about is real, I have difficulty sympathizing with these types of essay because I see them as causing more harm than good.

Gatekeeping trauma with a broad brush is never good in my mind. Calling out specific performative or attention-seeking episodes? Sure. But it doesn't need to go beyond that, in my opinion.

I also think life is generally hard, and I don't begrudge anyone trying to get help in whatever form for whatever thing they might need. If you have a headache, maybe you reach for an analgesic. You don't shame people for reaching for analgesics because some others are in truly need of global anesthetic.
by weitendorf | 2025-12-15 00:45:35+00:00
This is why I started working on an open source, generic protobuf sqlite ORM + CRUD server (with search/filtering) + type/service registry + grpc mesh, recently: https://github.com/accretional/collector Note: collector's docs are mostly from LLMs, partially because it's more of a framework for tool-calling LLMs than humans

Then this project lets you generate static sites from svelte components (matches protobuf structures) and markdown (documentation) and global template variables: https://github.com/accretional/statue

A lot of the SaaS ecosystem actually has rather simple domain logic and oftentimes doesn't even model data very well, or at least not in a way that matches their clients/users mental models or application logic. A lot of the value is in integrations, or the data/scaling, or the marketing and developer experience, or some kind of expertise in actually properly providing a simple interface to a complex solution.

So why not just create a compact universal representation of that? Because it's not so big a leap to go beyond eating SaaS to eating integrations, migration costs/bad moats, and the marketing/documentation/wrapper.
by IgorPartola | 2025-12-15 00:45:35+00:00
Do those oils polymerize at that temperature and are those polymers food safe? Also how stable are they since spatulas routinely come into contact with high temperatures?

I honestly do not know because while I have read that specifically boiled linseed oil does cure to be safe it was not clear to me whether it was safe for skin contact or fully food safe and food safe isn’t the same thing as safe for e.g. stirring pasta as it boils or stirring food that is frying in oil.
by danpalmer | 2025-12-15 00:45:42+00:00
It's worth being very clear about the reasons for it. You say you're not trying to build a media business, and want to build a "public notebook", but you imply you're looking for career/networking opportunities. You're also not clear if the "learning" is for you as the author, or for the reader.

If you want to have your content discovered online, I'd say you might be in for some trouble, although I don't think AI is the cause, only an accelerator on that. Blogs for readers learning are probably in decline, you're unlikely to get any outreach based on your posts for networking.

However if, like me, the writing process is the point – you're trying to clarify your thoughts, learn something new yourself, or have a document you can share with colleagues when they ask you to explain your opinions, I think blogging is valuable. While you won't get direct outreach, you can share it on your CV or send it to recruiters and you might get noticed when applying for jobs.
by _pdp_ | 2025-12-15 00:45:54+00:00
I often give the follow analogy which I think is a good proxy to what is going on.

Spreadsheets! They are everywhere. In fact, they are so abundant these days that that many are spawned for a quick job and immediately discarded. In fact, the cost of having these spreadsheets is practically zero so in many cases one may find themselves having hundreds if not thousands of them sitting around with no indication to ever being deleted. Spreadsheets are also personal and annoying especially when forced upon you (since you did not make it yourself). Spreadsheets are also programming for non-programmers.

These new vibe-coded tools are essentially the new spreadsheets. They are useful,... for 5 minutes. They are also easily forgettable. They are also personal (for the person who made them) and hated (by everyone else). I have no doubt in my mind that organisation will start using more and more of these new types of software to automate repetitive tasks, improve existing processes and so on but ultimately, apart from perhaps just a few, none will replace existing, purpose-built systems.

Ultimately you can make your own pretty dashboard that nobody else will see or use because when the cost of production is so low your users will want to create their own version because they would think they could do better.

After all, how hard is to prompt harder then the previous person?

Also, do you really think that SaaS companies are not deploying AI themselves? It is practically an arms race: the non-expert plus some AI vs 10 specialist developers plus their AIs doing this all day long.

Who is going to have the upper-hand?
by pedrozieg | 2025-12-15 00:46:06+00:00
I’m working on 2zuz, a product search engine that optimizes for the users rather than the advertizers.

The goal is simple: if you search for something specific, you shouldn’t have to scroll through ads, “inspired by your search”, or completely-irrelevant junk. You should just only see products that actually match exactly what you’re looking for.

Right now it searches across a few large stores and I’m iterating on the ranking and filtering. If you buy a lot of stuff online, I’d love feedback on where the results feel clearly better, and where they still fail compared to Amazon/etc.

Link: https://2zuz.com
by yunyu | 2025-12-15 00:46:46+00:00
You are talking about consumer marketing. I am talking about B2B marketing for prescription medications, enterprise SaaS, etc. These are separate markets and the analogies don't quite hold here - the scam problem etc is practically nonexistent for high-LTV goods with high bid costs, and newcomers are typically well funded enough to periodically outbid incumbents (or implement better targeting). The big-ticket B2B products that one hears of from word-of-mouth are usually the worse ones, since there is rarely any "going viral" to speak of.

> That the engine's website puts a different thing that whatever the search algorithm thought was the best thing at the top because an advertiser paid for it to be so, is strictly worse.

This is not clearly worse than the result being selected by the whims of some arbitrary Google engineer, or being easily gamed by SEO blogspam bots. At least the advertiser stands to lose something if they bid incorrectly.

>How long had ChatGPT been out before OpenAI's first ad for it?

Just because some products were able to grow organically doesn't imply that paid marketing never benefits startups. This is a false equivalence.

I also find it funny that the vast majority of your example products (everything except Huel or Aeropress?) make a lot of money from advertising. Maybe consider why they still exist.
by NikolaNovak | 2025-12-15 00:47:11+00:00
I get and agree with a lot of skepticism (and I get where ad-hominem attacks come from:). I have AI shoved my throat at work and at home 24x7 and most of it not for my benefit, and the writer doesn't out as much rigor into writing as might be beneficial.

At the same time, to the core theme of the article - do any of us think a small sassy SaaS like Bingo card creator could take off now? :-)

https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/selling_s...
by dnw | 2025-12-15 00:47:17+00:00
If you are on macOS it is not a bad idea to use sandbox-exec to wrap your claude or other coding agents around. All the agents already use sandbox-exec, however they can disable the sandbox. Agents execute a lot of untrusted coded in the form of MCP, skills, plugins etc.

One can go crazy with it a bit, using zsh chpwd, so a sandbox is created upon entry into a project directory and disposed of upon exit. That way one doesn't have to _think_ about sandboxing something.
by alwillis | 2025-12-15 00:47:18+00:00
> It seems clear to me that they use OS updates as a way to eventually slow your device down

This sounds like an exaggeration of what happens after an upgrade: iOS has to re-index your entire phone for Spotlight, etc. Same thing for Photos if there have been changes.

Depending on which phone and the amount of storage, your phone can feel kind of sluggish for a while until the background indexing is done.

If you update before you go to sleep, your device will be fine in the morning.
by lzy | 2025-12-15 00:47:34+00:00
Working on a low cost email service. Ditched Gmail for my custom domains to avoid lock-in risks, and I believe devs really need stupid-cheap ($10/yr 5GB, unlimited mailboxes/domains/aliases/SMTP/IMAP/webmail) high-quality hosting that nails deliverability with zero spam tolerance. Bootstrapped this instead of pricier options like FastMail. Thoughts?

https://www.lowcostmail.com
by blazespin | 2025-12-15 00:47:39+00:00
There is a significant risk of uncertainty in all of this, the most damaging aspect really. If AI improves, and it is threatening to, then growth in SaaS may decline to a point where investing in it needs to be reconsidered.

The problem is, nobody knows how much and how fast AI will improve or how much it will cost if it does.

That uncertainty alone is very problematic and I think is being underestimated in terms of its impact on everything it can potentially touch.

For now though, I've seen a wall form in benchmarks like swe-rebench and swebench pro. Greenfield is expanding, but maintenance is still a problem.

I think AI needs to get much better at maintenance before serious companies can choose build over buy for anything but the most trivial apps.
by mmooss | 2025-12-15 00:48:28+00:00
I don't doubt what you're saying. I didn't know about Reagan's sanctions; that is very interesting. I do know well Clinton's move in the Taiwan Strait and its consequences.

> This became a US policy under the Clinton administration

What about Carter's Taiwan Relations Act? Or was that not really implemented by Reagan?

And how did Taiwan remain independent for 20 years from Nixon to Clinton? I assumed it had to be our support. I understand the PLA was weak and inward-focused and couldn't mount a cross-Strait invasion, but someone had to trade with and arm Taiwan. Japan seems implausible for historical reasons and for their pacificism; South Korea wasn't powerful enough then, probably very focused north, and wouldn't want to antagonize the Communists; I doubt Europeans were involved so far afield ...
by octoberfranklin | 2025-12-15 00:48:30+00:00
The Linux kernel has well-defined internal interfaces for character streams, block devices, block-erase devices (mtd), and extent devices (LVM).

Has it been considered to have an official (but not exposed to userspace) "btree device" interface?

The idea being that you could write composable wrappers for btree devices the way you can write composable wrappers for block devices (dmsetup, etc). And have a common interface for these kinds of devices -- the kernel has at least two large and well-developed btree-on-a-block-device implementations (bcache/bcachefs and btrfs). Both of these implementations have been criticized as being quite monolithic and not as unixy ("many small sharp tools") as LVM/dmsetup are.
by firecall | 2025-12-15 00:48:43+00:00
100% with you there!

Having location data is very desirable, and searching my library without it would be painful!

I'm also a huge fan of how iCloud and Google Photos can search my photos just by a description. (not sure if One Drive can, never tried).

I'm horrified when I talk to people who only have their photos on their phones, with no additional iCloud storage. They have no additional backup at all.
by Retric | 2025-12-15 00:48:59+00:00
Companies have already shifting from not using customer data to giving them an option to opt out ex:

“How can I control whether my data is used for model training?

If you are logged into Copilot with a Microsoft Account or other third-party authentication, you can control whether your conversations are used for training the generative AI models used in Copilot. Opting out will exclude your past, present, and future conversations from being used for training these AI models, unless you choose to opt back in. If you opt out, that change will be reflected throughout our systems within 30 days.” https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/privacy-faq-for-mi...

At this point suggesting it has never and will her happen is wildly optimistic.
by VariousPrograms | 2025-12-15 00:49:07+00:00
Last I used Visidata, it didn't play nice with fields like %sort (they'd disappear if you re-saved the file) and if you had two fields with the same name in one record they'd get combined into a single field like "Name[2]:" when you re-saved. It might've also killed comments? I'm certainly not surprised it only has basic recfile support, because who use recfiles, but I'd be careful using VD with them for anything but viewing.
by falcor84 | 2025-12-15 00:50:05+00:00
Ok, well, rereading TFA again, it does seem to say that, but I took it as hyperbole. I'm not familiar with any of even the staunchest GenAI visionaries claiming:

> Why buy a CRM solution or a ERM system when “AI” can generate one for you in hours or even minutes?

Obviously that's a strawman argument that shouldn't be taken at face-value. AI-generated software is rapidly improving, but it will take some time until it can do that sort of work without human intervention. Extrapolating from METR's chart[0], we should expect a SotA AI to one-shot a modern commercial CRM in around the early 2030s. It's then up to anyone here to decide if that's something we should actively prepare for already (I personally think we should).

[0] https://metr.org/blog/2025-03-19-measuring-ai-ability-to-com...
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-12-15 00:50:07+00:00
> that older iOS and macOS versions end up unable to install any software that hasn't had an older version archived somewhere

iOS, sure. After a certain point, you need to be fine with simple functionality (but, I’ll add, more than adequate for most users, which means someone else could find use and value for what you treat as junk).

But macOS? What software? Everything I’m thinking of is graphics adjacent and significantly benefits from faster hardware. For almost everything else, a browser suffices.
by RichardChu | 2025-12-15 00:50:43+00:00
https://fluxmail.ai

It's an AI-native email client. Launching soon!

My goal is to help people get done with email faster, so that they can get back to doing other stuff. A lot of the features are designed around this goal: unified inbox, AI summarization, AI email drafting, etc.

Some of these are table stakes but I think there's also an opportunity to significantly revamp how email is done in the AI age. Imagine having your own personal assistant that goes through your email and surfaces the highest priority things that you need to know automatically.
by andy_ppp | 2025-12-15 00:50:47+00:00
I’m currently working on an in house ERP and inventory system for a specific kind of business. With very few people you can now instead of paying loads of money for some off the shelf solution to your software needs get something completely bespoke to your business. I think AI enables the age of boutique software that works fantastically for businesses, agencies will need to dramatically reduce their price to compete with in house teams.

I’m pretty certain AI quadruples my output at least and facilitates fixing, improving and upgrading poor quality inherited software much better than in the past. Why pay for SaaS when you can build something “good enough” in a week or two? You also get exactly what you want rather than some £300k per year CRM that will double or treble in price and never quite be what you wanted.
by C6JEsQeQa5fCjE | 2025-12-15 00:51:00+00:00
Nothing's invented, what I listed are real events with extensive documentation and evidence behind them.

You are stating some questions which are supposedly going to lead to IDF's innocence in the matter if they are truthfully answered. The burden of that additional proof is now on you. Mere questions being enough to dispel a case against the IDF is a thing of the past. They worked very hard to earn such a reputation, and now there are consequences for it.
by BeetleB | 2025-12-15 00:51:06+00:00
> I am a professional problem solver, you described a problem, yet you do not want it solved?

This will be hard for you to believe, but I will easily wager good money that at times you yourself behave this way. You only become aware of it after both below are satisfied:

1. You've encountered someone as annoying as yourself :-)

2. You learn a bit more about the dynamics of conversations.

If there's any time someone got mad at you and said "You just want to complain and not fix the problem!" chances are this dynamic was in play. Or "I've given you so many suggestions but you don't want to fix the problem and just complain!"

Everyone acts that way to some extent. Some more than others.

Here's a typical scenario (common amongst spouses, but even amongst friends). You're annoyed/down due to problem X. Your friend sees you that way and inquires why you're down. You tell them, and they spend all their time giving you suggestions. But you never asked for suggestions!

It's not a big leap to go from there to someone simply telling you their problem because they want to get it out of their system.

Some books I've read that made it easier to understand all of this:

- Difficult Conversations

- Nonviolent Communication[1]

- Crucial Conversations

All of these will emphasize the role emotions play in dialogue. And when you read them, chances are very high you'll find yourself in them (i.e. they will give examples that you can relate to - on both sides of the conversation).

Once I read these, many, many "poor" conversations from my life earlier suddenly made sense to me. One nice outcome was learning that even though at times people were upset at me, it wasn't always "my fault". I had always taken for granted that because I didn't spend much time playing social games, that my social skills were poor and likely I did something wrong. Reading these made it clear how often the dysfunction was on the other side, and having good/poor conversations is not well correlated with "social skills".

[1] HN has as strong knee jerk reaction when this book is mentioned, but in my experience, everyone who complained had not read the book, and almost all the complaints were semi-strawmen.
by andrewflnr | 2025-12-15 00:51:18+00:00
Between easy overview and serious research, probably just a bit shy of university intro course (depending on the university I guess). Some of the really fun stuff for me is organizational issues like procurement failures, corruption, etc. He also has does some pretty up-to-the-week analysis of major events (i.e. pretty recent, but late enough that the dust has settled and meaningful analysis is actually possible).
by henning | 2025-12-15 00:51:51+00:00
Ah, yes. If the thing that is false is true, all kinds of interesting things happen! For example, if I became the queen of France, I could make people do silly dances! That is an interesting hypothesis that could play out in my imaginary world!

SaaS maintenance isn't about upgrading packages, it's about accountability and a point of contact when something breaks along with SLAs and contractual obligations. It isn't because building a kanban board app is hard. Someone else deals with provisioning, alerts, compliance, etc. and they are a real human who cannot hallucinate that the issue has been fixed when it hasn't. Depending on the contract and how it is breached, you can potentially take them to court and sue them to recover money lost as a result of their malpractice. None of that applies to a neural network that misreads the alert, does something completely wrong, then concludes the issue is fixed the way the latest models constantly do when I use them.
by rtpg | 2025-12-15 00:52:02+00:00
Church ends up defining zero as the identity function, and N as "apply a function to a zero-unit N times"

While defining numbers in terms of their successors is decently doable, this logical jump (that works super well all things considered!) to making numbers take _both_ the successor _and_ the zero just feels like a great idea, and it's a shame to me that the papers I read from Church didn't intuit how to get there.

After the fact, with all the CS reflexes we have, it might be ... easier to reach this definition if you start off "knowing" you could implement everything using just functions and with some idea of not having access to a zero, but even then I think most people would expect these objects to be some sort of structure rather than a process.

There is, of course, the other possibility which is just that I, personally, lack imagination and am not as smart as Alonzo Church. That's why I want to know the thought process!
by derbOac | 2025-12-15 00:52:14+00:00
The timing of this is sort of uncanny as it's been on my mind a lot lately.

Generally I use a beeswax and mineral oil finish, sometimes this other product I can't remember the name of made from flax oil.

I've been wondering why jojoba oil doesn't get mentioned more in these discussions, either in combination with something else or on its own? It's a wax but liquid at room temperature, and seems to be stable for a long long time, long enough at least that it would probably need some refinishing before it might go bad.
by klempner | 2025-12-15 00:52:46+00:00
Speaking of Slashdot, some fairly frequent poster had a signature back around 2001/2002 had a signature that was something like

mv /bin/laden /dev/null

and then someone explained how that was broken: even if that succeeds, what you've done is to replace the device file /dev/null with the regular file that was previously at /bin/laden, and then whenever other things redirect their output to /dev/null they'll be overwriting this random file than having output be discarded immediately, which is moderately bad.

Your version will just fail (even assuming root) because mv won't let you replace a file with a directory.
by panphora | 2025-12-15 00:52:49+00:00
Hyperclay: a way to package up HTML files as portable, editable apps that contain their own editable UI. I'm using these simple apps to plan, edit emails, write blog posts, and a lot more. I edit them on my mac and they sync to the web live.

It feels like being able to design my own document format on the fly and display it however I want. It's making it painfully obvious how many editable primitives the web is missing, however.

https://hyperclay.com/
by mmooss | 2025-12-15 00:52:59+00:00
Ouch. Rereading my source above (Gladman 2006), they say hyposensitization (desensitization, if I understand correctly) generally doesn't work, but ...

"Lasting natural hyposensitization has been reported, however, among Japanese woodworkers who use lacquer derived from Toxicodendron verniciflua, the Japanese lacquer tree. In a 1991 survey, 81% of craftsmen developed dermatitis from the lacquer but 83% of these reactions resolved with continued exposure."