MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
What Selling on Facebook Marketplace Taught Me About Bad Credit and False Demand
by mvelez234 | 2026-01-05 15:53:34+00:00
A few years ago I thought Facebook Marketplace was a goldmine.

The messages never stopped.
“Is this still available?”
“Can I pick it up today?”
“Very interested.”

On paper, demand looked insane.

In reality, most of it was fake.

I was selling higher ticket items and services to everyday people. Many of them had bad credit, unstable income, or financial stress. Facebook Marketplace put me directly in front of that audience, but it did not filter for ability to buy.

I confused attention with intent.

I spent hours responding, explaining, following up, and holding items. Deals would feel close, then fall apart at the last moment. Financing applications would fail. Cash buyers would disappear. People would ghost after long conversations.

At first I blamed the platform. Then I blamed the buyers.

Eventually I realized the problem was me.

I had built a system optimized for volume instead of qualification. Facebook Marketplace is incredible at creating conversations, but terrible at signaling seriousness. Bad credit was not the real issue. Unclear expectations were.

Many people reached out because it was easy, free, and low commitment. Not because they were ready or able to buy.

The failure taught me something important.
You cannot scale sales on hope.

I had to change everything.

I tightened qualification early. I stopped treating every message as a lead. I asked uncomfortable questions sooner. I stopped chasing people who wanted possibilities instead of decisions.

That reduced my message count but increased my close rate.

The biggest lesson was this.
Bad credit customers are not bad customers.
But unqualified demand will burn you out faster than no demand at all.

Facebook Marketplace still works, but only if you respect what it is. It is a conversation engine, not a closing engine.

Once I stopped expecting it to be something it was not, my results improved and my stress dropped.

That failure probably saved me years of wasted effort.
by xvxvx | 2026-01-05 15:53:47+00:00
'In May, SaaStr had just one AI agent in production that it used for various digital tasks, Lemkin said. That month, though, during the SaaStr Annual — its yearly gathering of over 10,000 founders, executives, and VCs — two of its high-paid sales representatives abruptly quit.

Lemkin's calculus was that it just wasn't worth the cost of hiring another junior sales representative for a $150,000 a year position who would eventually quit, when he could use a loyal AI agent instead.'

Already had one AI agent in place. I'm gonna guess that the 2 sales reps quit because they saw the writing on the wall. Or they were being threatened with replacement. This is happening to sales, support, and engineering staff in companies worldwide. The fact that this smiling ghoul needs to spin this as him being left in the lurch, and AI agents solving a problem, shows he knows he's in the wrong.

Hopefully these agents fail dramtically and he loses his own job and reputation.
by dack | 2026-01-05 15:54:43+00:00
what are your goals? it's usually tough to sell things to developers because they are very particular about how they want their software to work, and also would rather build their own tools much of the time (which is increasingly true with AI now).

if you really want to sell it, you should probably make sure that you have customers willing to pay, which means talking to potential customers and getting them on a waitlist. i think it's usually more likely that other people don't care about your software like you do (because you built it to be exactly what you want and know how it works) and even then, aren't willing to pay to use it (or pay very much)

if you're not very concerned about making money and mostly just want something nice for yourself that other people _might_ care about, then sure, go for it! i build software like that all the time
by fenwick67 | 2026-01-05 15:55:14+00:00
I'm skeptical of this. Users are not going to want to sacrifice on the quality or performance of the model for a warm fuzzy feeling about it running locally on their phone. Outside of hobbyists I can't imagine this really taking off for the same reason secure scuttlebutt never had a chance of beating Facebook.

The only exception I can imagine is very sensitive topics, AI girlfriends or maybe image processing
by jollyllama | 2026-01-05 15:55:16+00:00
> One CNC laser cutter replaces the 40 humans in a factory. I don't know how many people the automated paint system replaced.

In any new, expanding, or relocating factory, nobody is getting replaced by these things, because they are already priced in.

> factories are not near as labor dense these days as you would guess.

That's a bit presumptuous of you.
by Cthulhu_ | 2026-01-05 15:55:26+00:00
That's what it looks like. I kind of get it, as there's no guarantee that a game they make available again will sell enough to cover the costs - it's as much a preservation effort as a commercial one.

For a lot of games it's just a matter of configuring dosbox and packaging it, I can't see how that would be very expensive. But for others it's a lot more involved.
by gn4d | 2026-01-05 15:55:31+00:00
Fellow OG! And it's been happening on HN since the mid-2010s, too. Moderation went out of control everywhere, but at least this site isn't branded as some strictly technical site. Can't believe I'm even saying this, but moderation on a site that encompasses a cornucopia of topics is their prerogative. The mind-boggling thing to me about SO was that the moderation used non-technical criteria (such as failing to recognize why certain problems were asked and were not dupes, and later to shoehorn in political and sexual ideologies) to shape a technical site.
by SOLAR_FIELDS | 2026-01-05 15:55:42+00:00
This happens a ton when bootstrapping, but in my experience doesn’t really happen that much when modifying existing infrastructure which is typically when you care about it being purely GitOps a bit more. Argo has all sorts of flaws around bootstrapping things that isn’t necessarily Argo’s fault but they manifest themselves (har har) in weird ways. For instance I do a lot of crossplane these days and the fact that Argo doesn’t sync CRD’s and force them to exist before future sync waves is a huge pain point, especially when you start to get to more complex applications that have lots of resources. You find yourself having to manually sync CRD’s because the default ordering logic doesn’t wait for the CRD to exist before creating the downstream resource - even if you’ve specified sync waves!
by possible25 | 2026-01-05 15:55:55+00:00
Location: Bangalore, India
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: Yes
Technologies: Python, Django, AWS/Azure/GCP, Kubernetes, Distributed Systems
Résumé/CV: https://go.prashants.in/resume_hn
Email: aoccaogu7@mozmail.com

Product‑minded software engineer with 4+ years architecting terabyte‑scale SaaS. Joined as the 8th engineer, now leading a 7‑person
pod. Specialized in high‑throughput backend architecture and complex business logic (credit‑based billing, multi‑tenancy).

Looking for SDE 3 / Lead / Senior / Founding Engineer roles
by phkahler | 2026-01-05 15:56:10+00:00
>> We have jobs, we have just decided that the people working those jobs are not deserving of prosperity.

I read an article years ago talking about a man that worked as a janitor for a US public school. He was just getting by on whatever that job paid. Someone (school board, business person, IDK) said if he wanted to make more money he should get more education himself, or learn some new skills so he'd be worth more and could get a "better" job. And hey, I'm all for some amount of meritocracy and all that but... If he did improve himself and get a better job the school would presumably find someone else to be the janitor for similar pay. The bottom line is that they expect an able-bodied adult to work a job that most people look down on for barely a living wage. At some point it's not about him needing to upskill it's about expectations about who gets paid how much, and America expects a lot of people to "make a living" at just above poverty wages.

I'm not sure how you change that, to some extent employers can't pay more because it's become structural and they don't actually have the money to pay those jobs more. So I have to agree with parent poster:

>> There are so many underlying changes to the established relationship between Labor and Capital in the US that would be a necessary part of keeping jobs here that it would effectively make us a completely different country.
by superkuh | 2026-01-05 15:56:11+00:00
>It's almost impossible to seize and you control the keys. YOU ARE THE OWNER, not some for-profit registrar.

You may own the keys but The Tor Project owns the network. And when they decide to shut it down your "ownership" of the domain keys doesn't matter in the slightest. You might think this is a silly scenario but actually it happened in 2021/2022 when the tor project unilaterally decided to kill the entire Torv2 network and all domains were made inoperable. All links between sites, everything that made .onion a web, was lost.

The Tor Project does this whenever they feel that there's a security issue. It will happen again.

As someone that spent 10+ years building completely legal community sites on the .onion network with the delusion of ownship it really hurt me. I'm never using .onion again. It is not a place to try to build communities. It is only for people that need 'security' as a highest priority and don't care if everything gets wiped out.
by smileysteve | 2026-01-05 15:56:17+00:00
A post about mis-generalization seems to make a huge mis-generalization, seemingly from a lack of diversity.

The author recognizes that laundromats exist, but doesn't believe that washing machines are a luxury good (his yacht example of 60% owned by the top 1% likely applies somewhere around 60% to the top 30%). This indicates the author generalizes that high density living with shared appliances don't exist or apply to a large part of the population (that density doesn't shift statistics).

A few thoughts, instead of taking 340m people, you need to account for 2% homelessness, another 8% as housing insecure, 30%+ as high density possibly sharing at the apartment/condo building or laundromat level. A small upper 1% that outsource to services.

The infamous Mitt Romney, 47% of Americans don't pay income tax quote can be really shocking when you start thinking about the average American, and the wages that they earn compared to a higher income segment you might be in.
by dietr1ch | 2026-01-05 15:56:39+00:00
Analytics is done in "batches" (daily, weekly) anyways, right?

We know you can't get both, row and column orders at the same time, and that continuously maintaining both means duplication and ensuring you get the worst case from both worlds.

Local, row-wise writing is the way to go for write performance. Column-oriented reads are the way to do analytics at scale. It seems alright to have a sync process that does the order re-arrangement (maybe with extra precomputed statistics, and sharding to allow many workers if necessary) to let queries of now historical data run fast.
by nobleach | 2026-01-05 15:57:02+00:00
I can give an anecdote if that's helpful. Imagine you're wanting to download an object from S3. You start to type out the command in your CLI. You hit enter, only to realize, see that the object is not found. You have a typo somewhere... but where? The bucket is huge so, you resort to listing the contents and passing the results through grep. Then you copy the object to the clipboard so that you can edit your original command.

I see one of the other comments mentions K9s. The exact same use cases manifest with that tool. YES, if it's just a one-shot, nothing beats the CLI. Many things where you need to investigate the resources a bit more, lend themselves to a TUI (or GUI if that's your thing).

I come from an era where folks could fly through tasks on dumb terminals. (AS/400 apps). The moment we gave them "better" gui tools, they slowed way down. No matter how many times we told them, "you can still use your TAB and ENTER keys!" TUIs were just a sweet spot.
Show HN: I built a pay-per-use AI API using Lightning payments
by LightProx | 2026-01-05 15:57:08+00:00
I built LightningProx - access Claude/GPT-4 without API keys or accounts.

How it works:

1. Send request, get Lightning invoice (~5 sats)
2. Pay with any Lightning wallet
3. Get AI response

Payment = authentication. No keys to leak.

Python: pip install langchain-lightningprox

Site: https://lightningprox.com
Docs: https://lightningprox.com/docs
GitHub: https://github.com/unixlamadev-spec/langchain-lightningprox
Full writeup: https://medium.com/@unixlamadev/i-built-the-payment-layer-fo...
Show HN: Catelingo – Constraint-Based Semantic Validity Checker for LLM Outputs
by shinobu_miya | 2026-01-05 15:57:20+00:00
I built Catelingo, a small constraint-based checker that flags semantically impossible LLM outputs, independent of likelihood, retrieval, or chain-of-thought.
Many failures (temporal inconsistencies, numeric impossibilities, semantic type clashes) are fluent and high-likelihood. Catelingo reframes “semantic validity” as constraint satisfiability, not plausibility.
Intentionally minimal & deterministic:
- small sense-level lexicon
- explicit constraint propagation (dependency-local)
- verdict: SAT / UNSAT / UNKNOWN
- optional degeneration rules for metaphor / domain adaptation

Paper (Zenodo): https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18148498
by UncleMeat | 2026-01-05 15:57:43+00:00
> The idea has merits. Take it as a PoC.

Does it? There have been a gazillion such static analyzers. They all do one of two things: ignore the hard parts of tackle the hard parts. If you ignore the hard parts then your tool is useless. If you tackle the hard parts then your tool is orders of magnitude more complex and it still struggles to work well for real world projects. This is in the former category.

The article says "And since the static analysis is mostly statically scoped, it doesn’t require heavy cross-file analysis."

Oops. Suddenly you either handle aliasing soundly and your tool is plagued with zillions of false positives or you handle aliasing unsoundly and... you aren't getting what makes rust different. Separate compilation has been a problem for C++ analyzers for ages. Just declaring it to not actually be a big deal is a huge red flag.

Heck, even just approaching this as an AST-level analysis is going to struggle when you encounter basic things like templates.

The article says this: "Everybody tries to fix the language, but nobody tries to just analyze it." This is just flagrantly false.
by potato3732842 | 2026-01-05 15:57:59+00:00
What growth?

A bunch of assholes in offices got rich on RSUs at the expense of the entire rest of the economy. The factory shut down and all those workers are getting screwed driving for some gig service or order picking for ecommerce or whatever.

Number go up only matters if the number going up is strongly associated with things getting better.

And it didn't even necessarily get better for the asshole in the office. A few of them won but most of them can't afford to live within an hour of where he works, have a family, etc, etc.

Whole lot of good it did us.
by AareyBaba | 2026-01-05 15:58:14+00:00
"Lord Emsworth, peering out over the sun-kissed pastures of Blandings where his beloved Empress of Blandings—a vast Berkshire sow of such majestic proportions that she could eclipse a lesser pig with a single glance (and had once, during the Shropshire Show judging, caused a rival entry to slink away in shame)—was even now rooting contentedly in her trough, suddenly drew in a deep breath and emitted his famous call of 'Pig-hoo-o-o-o-ey!', a sound which, though effective on porcine ears tuned to its peculiar melody, tended to make the human retainers of the castle leap like startled frogs and wonder if their employer had finally lost what remained of his grip on reality"
by hbn | 2026-01-05 15:58:20+00:00
> constantly tweaking with their UI so thoroughly every couple years

Between any of the big 3 companies putting out major OSes (Apple, Microsoft, Google), Apple is the best for sticking to tried and true designs. It's certainly gotten worse the past couple of years (like the Photos app redesign they immediately changed again in iOS 26) and I hope with their new design lead he can pull things back to somewhere sensible, but compared to Android or Windows it's not even close. I used Android for the better part of a decade and every year they'd completely redesign the notification shade, the settings app, they'd switch the SMS app out for Hangouts, then put you back on Messages, then rename it, then change the logo/branding, then redesign it again, etc. Everything was endless changes for no reason, felt like a constant beta.

If you look at the basic iPhone apps - Messages, Settings, Notes - prior to Liquid Glass it's been pretty much exactly as it was when Jobs showed it off at the iPhone reveal 19 years ago.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-05 15:58:41+00:00
Labour is still going to be cheaper in offshore countries simply because of purchasing power parity.

Even good conditions and everything in country like India paying them around 10-30k$ is seriously really really good (source: I live there) and its english speaking and well integrated etc.

I saw another comment which mentioned that just merely healthcare in america can cost around 10k$/year

So Labour should be empowered in a good way but this idea still won't help america simply because of power purchasing parity.

Not to forget that America is going through some really tough economic crisis right now which it needs to figure out on. The deficit is still high and everything and companies are favoured completely capitalistic and so combined with all of these factors, we really come to the situation where it is.

I appreciate your optimism but I have my doubts. Especially when one reads the tense atmosphere of America right now
by chris_va | 2026-01-05 15:58:45+00:00
The high level question of wealth concentration from new technology is an interesting question (and probably could have been just 3 sentences, since it is unanswered).

The rest of the article has some easy to read anecdotes, but it's hard to know if they are at relevant/accurate. E.g. common mistake (arguably) that I see a lot:

> In 1990, America enacted a tax on luxury consumption of goods such as expensive cars, yachts, furs and jewelry. A few years later, the tax was repealed by a coalition that included Democratic politicians worried about job loss in the yacht building industry. It’s hard to think of a more perfect example of muddled thinking about distribution. Any tax reform that fails to reduce luxury consumption by the rich will completely fail to reduce economic inequality.

Mega-yachts are money pits. A rich person purchasing a mega-yacht is probably the fastest way to redistribute a monetary supply. Taxing it has some benefit, but reduces the incentive to buy mega-yacht... Now, monetary supply and productivity/wealth are not exactly the same thing, but this seems like a basic error.
by DetroitThrow | 2026-01-05 15:59:10+00:00
Wow, this is really great. These vignettes could make a good, short book that doesn't get into weird diatribes and instead actual experiences with engineering orgs. This is basically what I want to show to senior/staff engineers about how to do this back and forth.

I wanted to pre-order, but the link doesn't let me.
by psunavy03 | 2026-01-05 15:59:12+00:00
"We" have not "decided" anything other than collectively making decisions about what we are willing to pay for a given service. That ultimately is what sets wages. The only reason software development pays so well is because the market will bear it, and the market isn't some cabal of fat cats in top hats, monocles, and tails (or hoodies and Patagonia for that matter). It's the collective decisions of 330 million people.
by nailer | 2026-01-05 15:59:16+00:00
You can prove that most people don't learn CSS using most LLMs: they're trained on github code.

A card with a top image, some text and a button - which should be...

- A card

- A top image

- Some text

- A button

ie 4 HTML elements, ends up being about 10 HTML elements with various strange hacks in the div-soup HTML the models have scraped from Github.

Then someone else comes along and uses tailwind, because naming 10 arbitrary HTML elements (rather than .card, .card img, .card p, .card button or similar) is hard. They're right, but the problem is they didn't need that many elements in the first place and wouldn't if they'd just learnt CSS.
by nlitened | 2026-01-05 15:59:21+00:00
> because government will have more money now

Ah, so your idea is the good old “only the emperor who controls the violence apparatus should have a lot of money and power”?

It’s not a very original idea, and it has been tried many times, and it failed many times.

> but then we should be even more careful who gets to the top

Right, so “for some reason only the greedy power hungry psychopaths get to the top in the current system — let’s fix it so that there can’t be many of them, only one government who has power to take away other people’s wealth and concentrate it immensely, surely we will figure out how to make sure it’s not filled with greedy power hungry psychopaths as we go”
by gruez | 2026-01-05 15:59:23+00:00
> Riveting is a job that produces goods that can be exported for incoming cash, elderly care isn't.

Where's the distinction between "moving money around inside your country" and "goods that can be exported for incoming cash"? If you go to mcdonalds to buy a burger instead of making it yourself, is that also "moving money around inside your country"? What about paying some carpenter to make a chair rather than making it yourself? Should we just cancel all jobs that can't plausibly produce stuff that can exported?
by williamdclt | 2026-01-05 15:59:26+00:00
> already barely usable (imo) finder

been using a Mac for years, and to this day I don't know how it's possible to navigate directories using Finder. It only has shortcuts for a few folders by default (photos, documents...) and doesn't have a button to navigate to the parent folder. I have literally no idea how to get to my home directory, I need to use the CLI
by throw0101d | 2026-01-05 15:59:28+00:00
Regarding distributed(-ish) Postgres, does anyone know if something like My/MariaSQL's multi-master Galera† is around for Pg:

> MariaDB Galera Cluster provides a synchronous replication system that uses an approach often called eager replication. In this model, nodes in a cluster synchronize with all other nodes by applying replicated updates as a single transaction. This means that when a transaction COMMITs, all nodes in the cluster have the same value. This process is accomplished using write-set replication through a group communication framework.

* https://mariadb.com/docs/galera-cluster/galera-architecture/...

This isn't necessarily about being "web scale", but having a first-party, fairly-automated replication solution would make HA easier for a number internal-only stuff much simpler.

† Yes, I am aware: https://aphyr.com/posts/327-jepsen-mariadb-galera-cluster
by bluecalm | 2026-01-05 16:00:04+00:00
I love it. I have 40 files open in it right now - most of them .c source files with LSP and Treesitter running and it uses 250MB of RAM. Everything works instantly, Telescope is imo new standard for file navigation (and navigation in general: grep, symbols even neovim shortcuts). Git integration is fantastic as well.

I have spent some time configuring it and probably will spend more when I start including more languages but imo it's worth it. You can configure everything but you can also find very nice defaults by running Kickstarter (or some heavier neovim "distro").

One thing I haven't integrated yet is a debugger (gdb from the terminal is good enough for me), maybe that's something people are missing in neovim?