MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by squeaky-clean | 2026-02-10 21:19:30+00:00
I would still usually prefer email as just a string and validation as a separate property, and they both belong to some other object. Unless you really only want to know if XYZ email exists, it's usually something more like "has it been validated that ABC user can receive email at XYZ address".

Is the user account validated? Send an email to their email string. Is it not validated? Then why are we even at a point in the code where we're considering emailing the user, except to validate the email.

You can use similar logic to what you described, but instead with something like User and ValidatedUser. I just don't think there's much benefit to doing it with specifically the email field and turning email into an object. Because in those examples you can have a User whose email property is a ParseError and you still end up having to check "is the email property result for this user type Email or type ParseError?" and it's very similar to just checking a validation bool except it's hiding what's actually going on.
by Animats | 2026-02-10 21:19:31+00:00
Not sure if this is an "oh, no" event.

So this goes into Vulkan. Then it has to ship with the OS. Then it has to go into intermediate layers such as WGPU. Which will probably have to support both old and new mode. Then it has to go into renderers. Which will probably have to support both old and new mode. Maybe at the top of the renderer you can't tell if you're in old or new mode, but it will probably leak through. In that case game engines have to know about this. Which will cause churn in game code.

And Apple will do something different, in Metal.

Unreal Engine and Unity have the staffs to handle this, but few others do.
The Vulkan-based renderers which use Vulkan concurrency to get performance OpenGL can't deliver are few. Probably only Unreal Engine and Unity really exploit Vulkan properly.

Here's the top level of the Vulkan changes.[1] It doesn't look simple.

(I'm mostly grumbling because the difficulty and churn in Vulkan/WGPU has resulted in three abandoned renderers in Rust land through developer burnout. I'm a user of renderers, and would like them to Just Work.)

[1] https://docs.vulkan.org/refpages/latest/refpages/source/VK_E...
by XorNot | 2026-02-10 21:19:38+00:00
We really need a rule in politics which bans you (if you're an elected representative) from stating anything about the beliefs of the electorate without reference to a poll of the population of adequate size and quality.

Yes we'd have a lot of lawsuits about it, but it would hardly be a bad use of time to litigate whether a politicians statements about the electorate's beliefs are accurate.
by sharklasers123 | 2026-02-10 21:19:47+00:00
The use of a phone number rather than a username seems like a BIG downside.
I’ve moved countries several times and as a result been forced to change my number several times.
This causes a huge headache with any service that relies on phone numbers, especially two-factor etc. Phone numbers should be thought of as ephemeral while usernames can persist.
by mtlynch | 2026-02-10 21:19:55+00:00
> How do you see the solo bootstrapping landscape going forward? In what ways do you see agentic coding changing things?

It's hard to say. I think it could go either way.

My optimistic take is that it has a similar effect to cloud computing on solo bootstrapping. If you tried to start a SaaS company in 2005, you'd have a hard time because in addition to knowing software, you'd also have to know how to provision servers in a data center, so you didn't see a lot of one-person software success stories from that era. But then with cloud computing, it radically lowered the barrier to entry, and there were lots of one-person SaaS businesses making $1M+/yr.

So, the best case for me is if that AI increases the power of solo bootstrappers even more so if you're great at software but terrible at website design / running ads, you don't have to hire people to help you anymore, and you can achieve more by yourself.

The pessimistic outcome is that it becomes less profitable to be a bootstrapped founder because the reduced barrier to entry means you're competing with 10-100x as many people and that companies are more comfortable building in-house tools with AI rather than purchasing B2B SaaS products.[0]

I actually have a hard time imagining B2B SaaS dying because AI makes it easy to roll your own tools. I feel like even if you reduced dev cost to nearly zero, there's still headache of maintaining an app. Like, for my last business, we were paying $200/mo for HelpScout to manage support emails. If one of the devs said they spun up a reimplementation of HelpScout over the weekend that we could run for $2/mo, I'd still say no because the cost of managing it internally is at least $200/mo of people's focus.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46888441
by ActorNightly | 2026-02-10 21:20:48+00:00
Sure, you can define any field to make your math work out. None of the interpretations are wrong per say, the question is whether or not they are useful.

The point of contention that leads to 3 interpretations is whether you assume i acts like a number. My argument is that people generally answer yes, because of Eulers identity (which is often stated as example of mathematical beauty).

My argument is that i does not act like a number, it acts more like an operator. And with i being an operator, C is not really a thing.
by aspenmartin | 2026-02-10 21:20:53+00:00
Your point about the overwhelming proliferation of AI tools and not knowing which are worth any attention and which are trash is very true I feel that a lot today (my solution is basically to just lean into one or two and ask for recommendations on other tools with mixed success).

The “I’m so tired of being told we’re in another paradigm shift” comments are widely heard and upvoted on HN and are just so hard to comprehend today. They are not seeing the writing on the wall and following where the ball is going to be even in 6-12 months. We have scaling laws, multiple METR benchmarks, internal and external evals of a variety of flavors.

“Tools like codex can be useful in small doses” the best and most prestigious engineers I know inside and outside my company do not code virtually at all. I’m not one of them but I also do not code at all whatsoever. Agents are sufficiently powerful to justify and explain themselves and walk you through as much of the code as you want them to.
by switz | 2026-02-10 21:21:07+00:00
Thanks for being so transparent. As a fellow solo bootstrapper, I think the thing people most often misunderstand is the relative inconsistency (income, "wins", the camaraderie, etc.) so it's nice for you to bare all.

That being said, you do get the consistency of independence and autonomy. As I watch my peers deal with crappy work environments, losing their jobs, and other bullshit, I just keep chugging along: self-directed and happy to not have to answer to anyone.

I've found it tough to talk about being a solo bootstrapper though. People don't seem all that interested in it until you catch them in the right light or perspective. Mostly they just care to know how much money you make (which to me ends up being rather shallow), or they can't relate to the process since it's so divorced from the traditional path. I mostly just keep my head down and keep working, since that's what I enjoy the most.
by gethly | 2026-02-10 21:21:29+00:00
Thanks for the reply. I used KDE. And sure, Gnome's Nautilus might have worked but I have huge distaste for it(it's pretty, but omg what a pain to set up to be an actual DE, let alone out of the box).

Anyhow.. "You can open a terminal and type".. yeah, no. This is exactly what I or any other Windows/desktop user does not want to be doing on a desktop computer. Linux always promised to get rid of this "just use terminal bro", which is what being a desktop OS is all about, but it never got there..it seems.

The premise of my test was to see whether the OS is ready out of the box(the main point of a linux distribution, after all). But neither was. Again, I am not saying it is not usable. I am just saying it requires more work to be put into it from the get-go than I am willing to put in, despite having the skill and knowledge to do so.
by CuriouslyC | 2026-02-10 21:21:31+00:00
We're all hustling to stay relevant because we're caught in a cutthroat game of musical chairs as our industry gets automated, and there's little incentive to polish anything before releasing since 90% of the time you'll just get ignored regardless, so you might as well see if your project/landing page hooks before burning a bunch of time.

I polish stuff before promoting because I'm averse to reputation damage, but every day that I see people not doing that and getting upvotes anyhow makes the practice harder to justify.
by mebassett | 2026-02-10 21:22:14+00:00
the title is a bit clickbait - mathematicians don't disagree, all the "conceptions" the article proposes agree with each other. It also seems to conflate the algebraic closure of Q (which would contain the sqrt of -1) and all of the complex numbers by insisting that the former has "size continuum". Once you have "size continuum" then you need some completion to the reals.

anyhow. I'm a bit of an odd one in that I have no problems with imaginary numbers but the reals always seemed a bit unreal to me. that's the real controversy, actually. you can start looking up definable numbers and constructivist mathematics, but that gets to be more philosophy than maths imho.
by throw0101a | 2026-02-10 21:22:31+00:00
> That's not allowed.

According to Google. Why do they get to dictate this?

Per the current (2.2.2) CAB requirements [1], §7.1.2.10.6, "CA Certificate Extended Key Usage": id-kp-clientAuth is a MAY.

If I was (say) Let's Encrypt I would (optionally?) allow it and dare Google/Chrome to remove my root certificate. Letting bullies get away with this kind of non-sense only encourages them.

[1] https://cabforum.org/working-groups/server/baseline-requirem...
by mtlynch | 2026-02-10 21:22:42+00:00
Yep, the place where I've talked about it the most has been The Software Misadventures Podcast.[0, 1]

[0] https://softwaremisadventures.com/p/michael-lynch-on-quittin... (2022, two years into the business)

[1] https://softwaremisadventures.com/p/michael-lynch-indie-hack... (2024, just after I sold)
by verelo | 2026-02-10 21:22:49+00:00
Thanks for the reply. Just to clarify the picture for me, was the 2024 jump in profit attributing the sale or was that just a solid year?

Agreed on the 2x every year or two being a weird failure state. I've done both, and I'm at a junction point right now, but I really think a huge part of going all in on the VC route is finding the right money to work with. I've been mostly technical, hidden in dark places all my life. I love having the chance to be customer facing, i love the business side of my work, but doing that with the wrong backers is so unappealing i'd rather not have their money.

Edit: just skimmed your prior post (https://mtlynch.io/i-sold-tinypilot/). Great stuff, love the transparency!
by henok | 2026-02-10 21:22:57+00:00
We’ve spent way too many years on-call, and it’s always the same cycle: The "fix" takes 5 minutes, but the "why did this happen?" takes 8 hours of digging through CloudTrail logs, Terraform files, and five different Slack threads asking for an ETA.

We got tired of playing detective while half-asleep, so we built WeWatch.

WeWatch speeds up your RCAs. It hooks into CloudWatch and PagerDuty to handle the heavy lifting—instantly digging through logs and infra paths so you don't have to. You get deep, fast investigations without losing control of the fix.

- The Grunt Work: It scans logs and traces network paths for you.
- The "Human in the Loop": It’ll actually ask you for context. "Hey, I found an IAM change—want me to prioritize permissions or topology?" You're still the pilot.

Get from alert to RCA Report in minutes, not hours.

If you’re tired of losing half your life to RCA reports, we'd love to hear from you.

Book a demo here:
wewatchai.com
by ttoinou | 2026-02-10 21:23:18+00:00
i is a complex number, complex numbers are of the form real + i*real... Don't you see the recursive definition ? Same with 0 and 1 they are not numbers until you can actually define numbers, using 0 and 1

i*i=-1 makes perfect sense

This is one definition of i. Or you could geometrically say i is the orthogonal unit vector in the (real,real) plane where you define multiplication as multiplying length and adding angles
by ToucanLoucan | 2026-02-10 21:23:33+00:00
This is the exact class of problems that pushed me into Apple's waiting arms. All (well, most. all of what I care about) of the flexibility and ease-of-use and efficiency of linux, stuffed into a gorgeous, well engineered product.

I wish I could fix the things, I'll fully cosign the beef the hacker community has for Apple on that front. That being said, I don't see myself buying a Windows laptop anytime soon.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-02-10 21:23:59+00:00
If not the technical person, then who? It’s a lot easier for a technical person to learn how to talk the language of the business than a business person to have a deep understanding of technology.

On the enterprise dev side of the industry where most developers work, I saw a decade ago that if I were just a ticket taker who turned well defined requirements into for loop and if statements, that was an undifferentiated commodity.

You’re seeing now that even on the BigTech side knowing how to reverse a binary tree on the whiteboard is not enough.

Also if you look at the leveling guidelines of any major tech company, their leveling guidelines above mid level are based on scope, impact and dealing with ambiguity - not “I codez real gud”
by tourmalinetaco | 2026-02-10 21:24:20+00:00
I use MiroTalk for it. Within Element you can set up widgets (basically PWAs) and so you can call via Element’s built in Jitsi widget (or a more reliable dedicated Jitsi link) and then use MiroTalk to share screens. It is a LOT better, especially for streaming video.

In terms of ease of use, it’s like three clicks. Technically more than Discord, but it’s p2p streaming so it’s far nicer quality.
by Joel_Mckay | 2026-02-10 21:24:37+00:00
Linux Mint or Ubuntu cinnamon Desktop is less specialized, and has a GUI very similar to legacy Windows.

https://ubuntucinnamon.org/ (recommended for new players)

https://linuxmint.com/ (recommended for students)

Ubuntu Desktop 24 LTS: Kernel 6.0.8 will work on older GPU/Laptop hardware, but OS will be deprecated in 2029

Ubuntu Desktop 26 LTS will be out in a few months: Will be supported till 2038, but note old GPU drivers may not work on more modern Linux Kernels above >6.0.15

The normal Ubuntu Desktop requires a few days to make it usable, and a lot of customization to make it enjoyable. However, network printer and webcam access is usually trivial to install. google equipment installs before you buy... ymmv

Dual boot from two SSD if you need to work on the machine. You will swear less when (not if) you break something, and not everything windows works in Wine or kvm. =3
by onlyrealcuzzo | 2026-02-10 21:24:59+00:00
Well, that's self-selective?

At 29-35, aren't >70% of women already in relationships?

Presumably, the majority of ones that want kids, already have them or are in the process.

Additionally, the apps tend to attract more people in hookup culture. So even from the remaining pool, 33% could be misleading.

Also, whether or not you're in a city / high-cost-of-living area makes a difference. That's less than 50% of the total population (in the US at least).

33% for that age group honestly seems high to me. I'd assume it would be lower.
by leonletto | 2026-02-10 21:25:06+00:00
Sorry, developer here. The link seems to be off.

Thrum - Persistent messaging for AI agents. Across sessions. Across worktrees. Across machines.
v0.1.0 :
https://github.com/leonletto/thrum

Documentation:
https://leonletto.github.io/thrum/index.html
by einpoklum | 2026-02-10 21:25:42+00:00
> Creating a viable alternative to Visa and Mastercard requires “several billion euros” in investment

Just the transaction processing fees going to VISA and Mastercard now would probably pay that back within a few years. Also, we're talking about all or almost-all European countries. So it doesn't sound like that much.

> Low interchange fees under EU regulation make profitability difficult.

Mandating that businesses which accept US credit cards must accept the European payment card would take care of that. Actually, maybe that's not necessary, it's probably enough to mandate that companies making card processing tech which supports US credit cards must also include support for this card; and businesses would just get it with their next system upgrade / terminal replacement or something.

> Consumer habits are deeply entrenched

I 'like' how people are described as "consumers", as though every payment is for consumption.

Anyway, habits are not that deeply entrenched. Didn't people adopt those country-level payment cards? Don't people occasionally change credit cards? It's not even a change of tech, it's just yet another card.

> and neither Visa nor Mastercard will sit idle while Europe tries to dismantle their most profitable market.

Now this may be a significant factor... they could influence politicians, tech solutions makers (with sweetheart deals if they don't support the new payment tech, or whatever), they can get the US government to make some kind of threat (we've already seen the threat to invade Greenland). So, yeah, there's that.
by ncruces | 2026-02-10 21:25:55+00:00
What's being discussed isn't Google or Apple Pay.

It's an app that uses NFC or, if needed, reads a QR code and does a web request (i.e. needs internet).

Neither Google nor Apple will block that, or take a cut; and it's already available in multiple markets.

This is about taking stuff that already works in one or two countries, design a similar system that works across countries, and mandate that all banks under ECB supervision implement it.
by upboundspiral | 2026-02-10 21:26:15+00:00
The problem with CAD is that mechanical engineering is still deeply proprietary, especially up and including the software stacks.

There is basically no "open source" in mechanical engineering. So you are relegated to super heavy legacy applications that coast by through their integrations with other proprietary tools. Solidworks is much heavier then FreeCAD but FreeCAD didn't have integrations with simulation tools, with CAM software, used a different geometry engine than industry standard, etc, so when a company tried to turn FreeCAD into a product they failed.

The only open source one sees in mechanical engineering comes out of academia, which while interesting, faces the problem that once the research funds dry up or the project finishes the software is dumped into the open in hard to find places, and is not further developed.

I remain hopeful in the potential for open source, I believe that to have a truly accessible and innovative industry a greater level of openness is needed, but it is yet coming.

I think CAD is a good place to start, as it is not a space where lots of hidden and closely guarded tricks are needed like in Finite Element Analysis. For personal uses FreeCAD is getting there. Snappier than Solidworks, but the workflow layout needs some work.

I am also looking at projects such as https://zoo.dev. In mapping the design 1to1 to code (while keeping gui workflow as well) I think they have a real chance of offering enough value that new companies will be interested in trying out their approach. It opens the doors to automation analysis, and generation that while possible with something like Solidworks is cumbersome and not well documented.
by digiown | 2026-02-10 21:26:39+00:00
Needing to run games on the same machine as your server is IMO not the most common use case. It tends to be expensive if power bills are a concern and using a VM as your main machine is tricky IMO.

Most games using anticheat won't run on VMs without a fight too. Your Proxmox supports taking a memory snapshot and restore, which would allow most cheats to work if they are convenient enough.

For every person like your brother we have many more half-serious people who need some type of reward before committing more mental effort. Wtf is a storage pool? What do I do with all these clusters, high availability thing it keeps asking about? Flattening out the learning curve is a nice benefit on its own.
by philipallstar | 2026-02-10 21:26:43+00:00
If you've had a 100%-tolerance policy to illegal immigration for years then that's the government not being powerful enough, or not using its power to the correct level for its citizens. If there's a better, gentler fix for illegal immigration then everyone would absolutely love that, but it's such a huge thing to tackle due to the previous years' encouraging of illegal migration.
by xyzzy123 | 2026-02-10 21:27:03+00:00
If you work on mobile apps you will notice that full attestation is too slow to put in the login path. [This might be better than it used to be, now in 2026].

I don't think a good security engineer would rely on atty as "front line" anti brute force control since bypasses are not that rare. But yeah you might incorporate it into the flow. Just like captchas, rate limiting, fingerprints etc and all the other controls you need for web, anyway.

I know I'm quibbling. My concern is that future where banks can "trust the client" is a future of total big tech capture of computing platforms, and I know banks and government don't really care, but I do.
by uv-depression | 2026-02-10 21:27:26+00:00
> I think that when the singularity occurs all of the problems in physics will solve, like in a vacuum, and physics will advance centuries if not millennia in a few pico-seconds

It doesn't matter how smart you are, you still need to run experiments to do physics. Experiments take nontrivial amounts of time to both run and set up (you can't tunnel a new CERN in picoseconds, again no matter how smart you are). Similarly, the speed of light (= the speed limit of information) and thermodynamics place fundamental limits on computation; I don't think there's any reason at all to believe that intelligence is unbounded.
by snohobro | 2026-02-10 21:27:29+00:00
Eh, he actually says “…sometime in the early Twenty-First Century, all of mankind was united in celebration. Through the blinding inebriation of hubris, we marveled at our magnificence as we gave birth to A.I.”

Doesn’t specify the 2020’s.

Either way, I do feel we are fast approaching something of significance as a species.
by wyclif | 2026-02-10 21:27:53+00:00
I know they were. But when Obama and Clinton were doing it, one of the big differences was that there were not all these Karens blowing whistles and interfering with those operations. The difference is that now there are far more deranged people who want to take the law into their own hands, and often these people are violently attacking law enforcement.

I don't like having these conversations, and I don't consider myself a defender of the current ICE. It's far from a perfect organisation and it has a lot of problems.

But it seems clear to me that the concept of law and an ordered society has taken a big hit. Trump Derangement Syndrome is not an excuse to allow that to evaporate in Minneapolis and all the other cities with extremely violent protests and attacks on law enforcement.