MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: My first tool built with AI, accidentally created a Twitter growth loop
by Oryska | 2026-02-04 03:03:30+00:00
Hey HN,

I'm a marketer, not a developer.

This is my first tool ever. I built ScreenshotForX in a weekend using Lovable (AI coding tool).

The problem:
I share my SaaS metrics on X (Twitter). Screenshots with nice frames get 5-10x more engagement than plain ones. But making them in Figma every time sucked.

The solution:
Upload screenshot → auto-frame → share on X (https://screenshotforx.com/)

What happened (48h since launch):
~12 screenshots shared per hour on X
Each screenshot has the tool watermark
People see it → use the tool → follow me to support
A community formed around it (people helping each other get monetized on X)
Automatic Twitter growth for me without doing anything

I basically built my own growth loop by accident.

The build:
Lovable (GPT-4 powered, generates React)
~8 hours over a weekend
I can't explain the code if you asked me to

This was intentionally simple. No payments, no auth, no complexity. Just solving my own problem.

Next one will be harder:
Planning to build something with Stripe integration and actual backend logic. But I wanted to start simple and ship fast.

For the HN crowd:
Is this the right approach? Build something dead simple first, then level up? Or should I have learned proper development before shipping anything?

Honest feedback welcome.
by PostOnce | 2026-02-04 03:03:41+00:00
There is a counterproductive obsession with powers of 10.

Sometimes, other systems just make more sense.

For example, for time, or angles, or bytes. There are properties of certain numbers (or bases) that make everything descending from them easier to deal with.

for angles and time (and feet): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_highly_composite_numb...

For other problems we use base 2, 3, 8, 16, or 10.

Must we treat metric as a hammer, and every possible problem as a nail?
by jerkstate | 2026-02-04 03:03:44+00:00
people are sleeping on openai right now but codex 5.2 xhigh is at least as good as opus and you get a TON more usage out of the OpenAI $20/mo plan than Claude's $20/mo plan. I'm always hitting the 5 hour quota with Opus but never have with Codex. Codex tool itself is not quite as good but close.
by epistasis | 2026-02-04 03:03:48+00:00
ICE being ordered to cause mass lawless havoc inside cities far from the border is a choice. Instituting intentionally cruel policies within ICE is a choice.

The idea of removing all detail so that the average bystander says an apple is the same as an orange is a common partisan political trick these days and it's a crying shame to her to fight this silly illogical pablum day after day.

(That said, I'm not boycotting GitHub because of ICE, despite my firm position that ICE and DHS should be disbanded and replace with enforcement mechanisms similar to the ones we used before these very new and agencies filled with thugs. We also need accountability and prosecution for the criminals that fill the ranks of ICE and CBP. Boycotting GitHub isn't my cup of tea for accomplishing that)
by pton_xd | 2026-02-04 03:03:53+00:00
It's always been this way. According to Google 64% of the voting age population voted in 2024. In 1972 it was 56%, in 1976 it was 55%, in 1980 it was 55%, in 1984 it was 56%... you get the idea [0].

[0] https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/vitalst...
by nabbed | 2026-02-04 03:04:11+00:00
Interestingly, when I was in Taiwan (not China, I understand, but in the general area) in 2012 to visit our Taipei office, the subject of the Apollo moon landings came up during lunch. All the Taiwanese workers at the table (about 3 or 4) said that the moon landing was a hoax.

A few years later, a few people from our Taipei office, whom I did not meet during my trip, transferred to our US office. So I asked them what they thought of the moon landings. They also said the landings were a hoax.

Not a perfect sampling, but still interesting.

I wonder what the average person in China thinks of the Apollo moon landings. Or maybe it's just that many non-Americans in general think that the moon landings are a hoax.
by alexpotato | 2026-02-04 03:04:39+00:00
I'm a big fan of the old Macintosh game Bolo [0]

There used to be a Linux version but apparently it hasn't been updated to be added to or even compiled on modern Linux kernels and distros.

Someone I know tried to resurrect it a few years back but now I'm wondering if couldn't use OpenCode etc to get it up and running again.

(I did find a recent-ish clone [1] so may start with that)

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolo_(1987_video_game)

1 - https://github.com/stephank/orona
In the wake of the Epstein files – will there be an analog resurgence?
by sodokuwizard | 2026-02-04 03:05:00+00:00
It does appear that hollywood/modeling is a major pipeline for these sorts of people - the role tech plays in this ecosystem also can't be understated.

Even with only a fraction of the 50% parsed through and understood - I can't bear the thought anymore that the money made off my back, is ultimately making somebody who strangles children after r*ping them (or his adjacent friends) richer. Even taking one moment to empathize with that level of pain and suffering - it makes ones blood boil.

If no justice is actually taken and people are not made to suffer for the barbarism - people will feel cheated and will want a way to "get back" even within the confines of capitalism via boycott. Old books, IRL activities, etc and trigger somewhat of an analog renaissance and return to local theatre even. It is downright and morally unethical to support the modern system as is.

Do you believe an analog resurgence could take place in the wake of these files?
by wolvoleo | 2026-02-04 03:05:03+00:00
They have. It's called bypass-paywalls-clean . It works pretty ok.

It just keeps getting banned from the addon catalogs because of complaints from media. The Firefox one was taken down by a french newspaper. So you have to sideload it, which is hard to do on Android.

Edit: it looks like even the github was taken down now: https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-firefox

But yes it exists. And it works for most sites. It's just hard to get it now.
by adgjlsfhk1 | 2026-02-04 03:05:31+00:00
> A Starlink satellite uses about 5K Watts of solar power. It needs to dissipate around that amount (+ the sun power on it) just to operate.

This isn't quite true. It's very possible that the majority of that power is going into the antennas/lasers which technically means that the energy is being dissipated, but it never became heat in the first place. Also, 5KW solar power likely only means ~3kw of actual electrical consumption (you will over-provision a bit both for when you're behind the earth and also just for safety margin).
by rksart | 2026-02-04 03:06:02+00:00
Response to this:

> @pillbitsHQ 3 hours ago [dead] [–]

> This pass-by-reference approach is brilliant. I've hit exactly this wall - watching API responses eat up 70% of my context window just so the LLM can decide what to do next.
> One question: how do you handle debugging when the LLM generates invalid code in the plan? With traditional prompting you can at least see the full context that led to a bad decision. With variables, is there a way to inspect what data the agent had access to when it made a mistake?

Thanks! You hit on the exact problem we set out to solve—context limits are the biggest bottleneck for reliability right now.

regarding debugging: We handle this by separating the LLM's plan from the Execution Log.

Invalid Code: If the LLM generates a plan with a hallucinated variable or invalid syntax, our runtime catches the exception and feeds the error specifically back into the context for a "retry" loop, rather than crashing the whole chain.

Inspecting Data: Even though the LLM only sees the references tracing can be added to show the "dereferenced" state at every step. Which will help debug the component.
by some_random | 2026-02-04 03:06:18+00:00
ATF rulemaking can be unintuitive and arbitrary but there really is a level below it occupied by people who have dedicated a significant chunk of their lives to trying to restrict firearm ownership, who genuinely seem to believe that Die Hard, Rambo, and Spaghetti Westerns are real life. Politicians who can't answer basic questions about their legislation, who have to be told live on air that magazines can be repacked, that just make up impossible crime statistics. Yeah it's stupid that the ATF has decided that vertical grips are a rifle feature but angled grips aren't, but it gets worse.
by eis | 2026-02-04 03:07:10+00:00
What's with the pricing of these sandbox offerings recently? I assume just trying to milk the AI trend.

It's about 10x what a normal VM would cost at a more affordable hoster. So you better have it run only 10% of the time or you're just paying more for something more constrained.

A full month of runtime would be about $50 bucks for a 2vCPU 1GB RAM 10GB SSD mini-VM that you can get easily for $5 elsewhere.
by cge | 2026-02-04 03:07:51+00:00
> People will re-flash their printers with an open-source firmware that won't do the checks?

The text of the bill suggests that it would make printers capable of being reflashed with an open source firmware illegal to sell, as the legal requirements for the blocking would include preventing it from being circumvented. The law would also make having a printer sold mail-order into the state illegal entirely. It’s not clear how parts-built machines like Vorons would be handled.

It appears to only cover sales, however. Possession of files for firearm components would be made illegal, but seemingly not a printer without the restrictions.
by stubish | 2026-02-04 03:07:58+00:00
Money comes with strings, such as when forming an ongoing relationship with a company you expect them to not merge with other companies you are actively prosecuting. I suspect the deal is going so fast to avoid some sort of veto being prepared. Once SpaceX and xAI are officially the same, you lose the ability to inflict meaningful penalties on xAI without penalizing yourself as an active business partner with SpaceX.
by oguz-ismail2 | 2026-02-04 03:09:03+00:00
You can. There is a thread-unsafe implementation here <https://gist.github.com/oguz-ismail/72e34550af13e3841ed58e29...>. But the listing needs to be per system call number, so this one only supports system calls 1 (_exit) and 4 (write). It should be fairly easy to automatically generate the complete list but I didn't try it.
by youarentrightjr | 2026-02-04 03:11:35+00:00
> Perhaps learn to look around the world. Europe has nothing, China is working on copying. New Zealand has RocketLab but looks like they've sold out to the states and is only for small payloads yet.

And which of those is also an American institution, with American educated employees and American cultural values, operating in an American legal and business framework?

Pretending NZ is a relevant comparison point is laughable. I bet SpaceX is also doing better than the 5th grade STEM class down the street!

Russia would've been a much better comparison given the history of the world we live in, but still not apples to apples.
by avidiax | 2026-02-04 03:11:42+00:00
So make it allowed that the insurance is tied to the gun. You buy a lifetime policy for that serial number, provide payment, and you're done. Payment can be provided anonymously at a window in cash, if that's your thing.

If you want discounts because you live in a low-crime area, have a gun safe, have many guns, etc. then obviously the storage location for the weapon needs to be declared to the insurance company.
by ziml77 | 2026-02-04 03:12:29+00:00
The Microsoft store would have needed proper vetting and support for normal desktop apps from day 1 for it to actually have been a good option. Also, not requiring the system be set up with an online account would have been helpful for adoption.

I can't say it would have guaranteed people would have liked it, just that those were needed for it to have a chance.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-02-04 03:12:45+00:00
I have been in this industry for a long time since 1996.

The 2000 dot com bust wasn’t because all of the ideas were bad most weren’t. They were too soon and before high speed internet was ubiquitous at home let alone in everyone’s pocket.

Incidentally, back then I was a regular old Windows enterprise developer in Atlanta and there were plenty of jobs available at boring companies.

In 2008 was a general shit show for everone. But for tech, the what we now know as the BigTech companies were hiring like crazy and growing old crazy. Just based on the law of large numbers, they aren’t going to grow over the next decade like they grew over the last decade.

They have proven that they can keep going and keep dominating with less people. AI is already started automating the jobs of mid level ticket takers and it’s only going go get worse. Just like factory jobs aren’t coming back.
by TheNightman | 2026-02-04 03:13:24+00:00
That’s why you should break out all of your code into SPM packages/targets. The workspace code only really needs to be the entry point, lifecycle and maybe target-based dependency injection (if you’re into that) or environment config since your SPM dependencies don’t know about your projects preprocessor macros (I.e. `#if DEV` `#if APP_STORE` etc.).
by Herring | 2026-02-04 03:13:28+00:00
I think there's always going to be people who would rather be "VP marketing" over "parent". When you have an entire nation of DINK (double income no kids), it must age and therefore it must import immigrants to keep the treadmill going. Must keep ahead of China, after all.

The older I get the more I kinda want to retire from that lifestyle and move to Spain or something. It's much easier to move than to try convincing Americans anything about healthcare or parental leave or any of those socialist policies.
by derrida | 2026-02-04 03:14:07+00:00
ok thank you! I did not know that, I'm ashamed to admit! sort of like studying physics at university a decade later forgetting V=IR when I actually needed it for some solar install. I took "technical hiatus" about 5 years and recently coming back.

Anyway cut to the chase, I just checked out Mathew Greens post on the subject, he is on my list of default "trust what he says about cryptography" along with some others like djb, nadia henninger etc

Embarrased to say I did not realise, I should of known! 10+ years ago I used to lurk the IRC dev chans of every relevant cypherpunk project, including of text secure and otr-chat when I saw signal being made and before that was witnessing chats with devs and ian goldberg and stuff, I just assumed Telegram was multiparty OTR,

OOPS!

Long winded post because that is embarrassing (as someone who studied cryptography undergrad in 2009 mathematics, 2010 did postgrad wargames and computer security course and worse - whose word once about 2012-2013 was taken on these matters by activists, journalists, researchers with pretty knarly threat model - like for instance - some guardian stories and former researcher into torture - i'm also the person that wrote the bits of 'how to hold a crypto party' that made it a protocol without an organisation and made clear the threat model was anyone could be there, oops oops oops

Yes thanks for letting me know I hang my head in shame for missing that one or some how believing that one without much investigation, thankfully it was just my own personal use to contact like friend in the states where they aren't already on signal etc.

EVERYONE: DON'T TRUST TELEGRAM AS END TO END ENCRYPTED CHAT https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2024/08/25/telegram...

Anyway as they say "use it or lose it" yeah my assumptions here no longer valid or considered to have educated opinion if I got something that basic wrong.
by youarentrightjr | 2026-02-04 03:15:02+00:00
> This medium page simply quotes people. Feel free to quote your imaginary friends on your own medium page.

Simply quotes people with obvious large financial interest in the success of the company, who are therefore motivated to continue the super genius narrative.

I guess we all have our biases - I believe first hand accounts, you believe social media posts. To each his own.
by Marsymars | 2026-02-04 03:15:06+00:00
> I still don't really know what happened there, the best that I can think of is someone with access to the mechanism to print chequebooks was running off 'replacements' for random accounts and then passing them on to people.

You can order legit cheques online from third party cheque printers to save money vs what banks charge for cheques, you don't need any insider access to get cheques printed.
by shagie | 2026-02-04 03:15:27+00:00
He is very influenced by The Culture of Iain Banks. They're really good sci-fi... and describe a hedonistic world where machines do the hard thinking and bidding of the biologicals.

https://recommentions.com/elon-musk/books/culture-by-iain-ba...

https://www.vox.com/culture/413502/iain-banks-culture-series...

https://fortune.com/2025/12/15/billionaire-elon-musk-say-tha...

> Musk pointed to The Culture series by Iain M. Banks as his best “imagining” of this world. The science fiction novels depict a utopian future where citizens can have virtually anything they want thanks to AI—making money obsolete and leaving citizens free to spend their time doing whatever they love.
by tombert | 2026-02-04 03:15:45+00:00
> We agree to meaning to communicate and progress without endless debate and confusion.

We decidedly do not do that. There's a whole term for new terms that arbitrarily get injected or redefined by new people: "slang". I don't understand a lot of the terms teenagers say now, because there's lots of slang that I don't know because I don't use TikTok and I'm thirty-something without kids so I don't hang out with teenagers.

I'm sure it was the same when I was a teenager, and I suspect this has been going on since antiquity.

New terms are made up all the time, but there's plenty of times existing words get redefined. An easy one, I say "cool" all the time, but generally I'm not talking about temperature when I say it. If I said "cool" to refer to something that I like in 1920's America, they would say that's not the correct use of the word.

SI units are useful, but ultimately colloquialisms exist and will always exist. If I say kilobyte and mean 1024 bytes, and if the person on the other end knows that I mean 1024 bytes, that's fine and I don't think it's "nihilistic".
by anon291 | 2026-02-04 03:15:46+00:00
The issue with these 'international'forums is that it's basically European countries tanking itself.

There's a meme going around online where it says "the world condemns..." On top and then a map of the globe with Europe and America highlighted.

Europe's issue is that it only considers itself.

Lithuania.. guys come on. And the Netherlands is not even in your list showing how ridiculous this entire thing is. As it goes most European lists of self congratulations are just moral rankings by their own standards
by schiffern | 2026-02-04 03:16:05+00:00
>Capital K is for Kelvin.

It should be "kelvin" here. ;)

Unit names are always lower-case[1] (watt, joule, newton, pascal, hertz), except at the start of a sentence. When referring to the scientists the names are capitalized of course, and the unit symbols are also capitalized (W, J, N, Pa, Hz).

[1] SI Brochure, Section 5.3 "Unit Names" https://www.bipm.org/documents/20126/41483022/SI-Brochure-9-...
by otterley | 2026-02-04 03:16:16+00:00
Have you actually priced it, or are you just guessing?

Are you doing regular patching? Automated restarts? Watching for security breaches? Or just praying it stays up forever?

Otherwise, respectfully, I would not classify you as a "serious operator." Your site could live or die, and it would be all the same to you. Or, you've handed it to a third party for management and they don't offer much in the way of resilience or stability.
by zetanor | 2026-02-04 03:16:42+00:00
Since 2019, I SingleFile (https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/SingleFile) potentially ephemeral pages into a folder and pick stuff out when I feel like it, pruning entries that have lost relevance or appeal. Good articles sometimes get moved into my permanent files. Browsers' Print to PDF feature would work too. The "system" is exactly as reliable as its operator. No reminders included, but I don't want my computer beeping at me (and maybe you don't want really want that either).
by abetusk | 2026-02-04 03:16:45+00:00
> I have four reasons ...

> First, for independent programmers, I think it's incredibly simple and straightforward to move your personal open source projects off of GitHub.

> Second, although you likely don't pay GitHub to host your open-source projects, they still make money from them!

> Third, GitHub's web interface has been in a steepening decline since the Microsoft acquisition ...

> Finally, I think open source communities, with roots in hacker culture from the 80s and 90s, form a particularly fertile soil for this sort of action.

I'm a programmer. I've set up Gogs, run various Git repos remotely and locally. I understand how simple it is. Simplicity is not the issue.

I host many open source projects on Github, gratis, care of Microsoft. They make money from them? Excuse me while I clutch my pearls.

The web interface is nice enough so that it sets the standard by which I judge other front end GUI wrappers around Git. Is it in decline? I don't know, maybe, but it's still good enough from my perspective. Using Gitlab or Sourcehut is painful. I'm glad they both exist but the UI, in my opinion, is not as good as Github.

Github is, for me, about sociability. I'll go where the people are. I can host my open projects, repos, blog posts, etc. on a server I control but that's not the point. I want people to see my projects, be able to participate in a meaningful way and be social with other projects. In theory, all these can happen on a private server. In practice, the people is what makes the platform attractive.

There are decentralized suggestions in the post, which I appreciate, and I'd like to see more information on how to use them and build a community around those, as that's the only real alternative to centralized platforms that I can envision.
by Jensson | 2026-02-04 03:16:52+00:00
No, you randomly get cancer since cancerous mutations happens randomly. Environment can just affect chance of getting cancer, it doesn't give you cancer directly and there is no way to completely avoid cancer risk.

For example even if you live the best life possible you will still have an inherent cancer risk based on your genes and that affects the random chance of you getting cancer, it isn't a clock that says exactly when cancer will happen.
by thatwasunusual | 2026-02-04 03:17:07+00:00
> There's a lot that hosted services with extra features can give you.

I totally agree with that, but in my experience 99% of "application developers" don't need all these features. Of those you listed, I only see "backups" as a requirement. Everything else is just - what I said - features for when your application is successful and you want something streamlined.