MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Investor relations platform lets investors bid on meeting the founders
by eggspurt | 2026-02-02 15:10:33+00:00
I used Replit to build an investor relations platform to test a simple hypothesis:

> Pricing access to founder time improves signal quality in investor conversations.

Background:

In early fundraising, founders spend a lot of time on low-signal meetings. The scheduling cost is asymmetric: founders prepare, investors explore cheaply. There is no native commitment mechanism beyond social norms.

This project implements a minimal market for founder time.

How it works:
1. Investors place a bid for a 1:1 meeting
2. A minimum bid is enforced
3. Agenda, availability, and time zone are required at bid time
4. If the meeting doesn’t happen, the bid is refunded

Bidders can opt in or out of public attribution on a map of AI/data investors

The bid is not payment for capital access. It’s a commitment signal. The refund rule prevents extraction.

Implementation notes:
* Built quickly on Replit
* Stripe for payments and receipts
* No CRM, no automated follow-ups
* Admin actions handled manually via the database
* Intentionally small surface area

What this is not:
* Not a scheduling app
* Not a marketplace for advisors
* Not “pay to pitch”
* Not optimized for scale or revenue

You can try it here:
https://investor.data.flowers/

Viewing requires no login. Bidding requires payment.

Questions I’m interested in discussing:
* Does this produce better signaling than social heuristics?
* Does refundable pricing dominate non-refundable fees?
* What strategic behavior does this enable (or discourage)?
* Where does this fail under adversarial or repeated interaction?

This is an experiment, not a thesis. Curious to hear critiques from people who’ve built marketplaces or thought about incentive design.
by crazyloglad | 2026-02-02 15:10:33+00:00
There's been a closed version of https://arcan-fe.com/2021/04/12/introducing-pipeworld/ that was VR centric as well as wilder 'layouters' to https://arcan-fe.com/2018/03/29/safespaces-an-open-source-vr... that is still around in my piles here somewhere.

For a handful of reasons (abusive and hostile actors being at the top) we focus elsewhere (https://www.divergent-desktop.org/blog/2026/01/26/a12web/ and https://arcan-fe.com/2025/01/27/sunsetting-cursed-terminal-e...).

AR/VR development in this space is a massive timesink for all the wrong reasons.
Hardware vendors absolutely suck here. Everyone is openly or quietly dreaming of the vertically integrated 'app-store tax' being their real source of revenue rather than selling devices.

This means that if you don't want to fuzz around with half-baked proprietary SDKs that break more often than they do what they're supposed to, you get to sit around reverse engineering. As fun as that can be, it's much less so when that is not what you set out to be doing. Half my electronics 'donation boards bin' is discarded HMDs and input devices by now.

Even in the quirky missed opportunities like Tilt5 you have this situation.
by spacedcowboy | 2026-02-02 15:10:45+00:00
Three days is, agreed, too short. A week is just about possible, though...

I've seen a blog-post, authored a bug in Radar, assigned it to myself, and fixed it the same day. Whether it goes out in the next release is more a decision for the bug-review-board, but since the engineering manager (that would have been me) sits on that too, it's just a matter of timing and seeing if I can argue the case.

To be fair, the closer we are to a release, the less likely a change is to be accepted unless you can really sweet-talk the rest of the BRB, and there's usually a week of baking before the actual release goes out, but that has sometimes been shrunk for developer-preview releases...
by jodrellblank | 2026-02-02 15:10:46+00:00
You suppose that there are no highly-paid researchers on the planet working on AGI? Because there are, and that's less proven than "porting one codebase to another language" is. What about Quantum Computers, what about power-producing nuclear fusion? Both less proven than porting code. What about all other blue-sky research labs?

Why would you continue supposing such a thing when both the employee, and the employer, have said that your suppositions are wrong?
by camgunz | 2026-02-02 15:11:00+00:00
> Because most people when they hear about laws have certain assumptions about what those are and how they work.

I disagree; I would guess most people assume rich/powerful/etc people aren't subject to laws, no matter the jurisdiction.

> In this case this assumption is completely disconnected from reality.

How many people think the US is bound by international law? I looked for polling but I couldn't dig anything up

> ["international law"] just a word salad to manipulate the masses.

How are people manipulated by this?
by ghtbircshotbe | 2026-02-02 15:11:00+00:00
My advice is to use paracord for shoelaces. It's cheap, lasts forever, can be cut to any length, ties well, etc. It lasts so long you can take it off your old worn shoes and put it on your new shoes. I find that the shoelaces that come with shoes typically don't last very long, are too short, etc.
by giancarlostoro | 2026-02-02 15:11:11+00:00
> The marketing guys who made that decision urgently need to find another line of work, because literally a Labrador licking his balls all day would have resulted in a better outcome.

Marketing Driven Development is terrible. If the CEO of Microsoft keeps pulling off these terrible moves time and time again, I would suggest he has overstayed his welcome, bring in fresh blood. Windows should be an OS not an ad platform. If Office doesn't want to be replaced and remain profitable maybe its time to trim your marketing department, clearly they are overstaffed if they can affect the entire OS itself.

I refuse to use Windows. I only use Mac and Linux now, unless an employer gives me a Windows device, that's the only exception, but given the choice I'll ask for Mac or Linux any day.
by LoveMortuus | 2026-02-02 15:11:12+00:00
I wouldn't say I'm enslaved, would be unfair.

That being said, I live in a room rented to me by the company that hires me, I work for a customer service center, so it's not a construction situation. The reason the company rents us rooms is because we're not paid enough to afford normal rent.

All this means that if there's ever a ramp down, I'd be immediately jobless and homeless, which does not feel good at all...
by wolvoleo | 2026-02-02 15:11:20+00:00
Indeed it's not: https://www.windowslatest.com/2026/01/09/is-microsoft-losing...
And: https://www.perspectives.plus/p/microsoft-365-copilot-commer...

Tldr: Copilot has 1% marketshare among web chatbots and 1.85% of paid M365 users bought a subscription to it.

As much as I think AI is overrated already, Copilot is pretty much the worst performing one out there from the big tech companies. Despite all the Copilot buttons in office, windows, on keyboards and even on the physical front of computers now.

We have to use it at work but it just feels like if they spent half the effort they spend on marketing on actually trying to make it do its job people might actually want to use it.

Half the time it's not even doing anything. "Please try again later" or the standard error message Microsoft uses for every possible error now: "Something went wrong". Another pet peeve of mine, those useless error messages.
by rkozik1989 | 2026-02-02 15:11:31+00:00
That's still writing new code. Also, its kind of an extremely bad idea to do that because how are you going to test it? If you have to rewrite anything (hint: you probably don't) its best to do it incrementally over time because of the QA and stakeholder alignment overhead. You cannot push things into production unless it works as its users are expecting and it does exactly what stakeholders expect as well.
by river_otter | 2026-02-02 15:11:35+00:00
Great idea and name the danger here which I'll be interested to track is how do you keep this "nano"? Since it's built for you, you'll continue adding features i assume which over time will make this not very nano. I guess I'm wondering if there could be some small design tweaks of the repo that make this usable as a long term "fork the base and make it your own" concept
by commandersaki | 2026-02-02 15:11:43+00:00
You understand the front line of the pig butchering scam don't have agency, yet you call them thieves and burglars. They're not the ones doing it, it is those who control them. Having said that, I neither agree or disagree whether youtube videos should gloat about how they've wasted their time or whatever.

I think we need to make it practically impossible to run the scam by having social media / messaging operators shutdown fraudulent accounts, especially if reported.
by noughtnaut | 2026-02-02 15:12:27+00:00
...which is when you set up a browser bookmark with a keyword, so you can just type "http 411" and it will redirect you! :-)

Eg.:
"https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Reference/..."
would then go to:
"https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Reference/..."
by Larrikin | 2026-02-02 15:12:28+00:00
You're all over this thread spreading misinformation. AdNauseam has been around since 2014. It is specifically banned in the Chrome store so Google knows of it's existence. If you check the wikipedia page you'll see that they have landed in the press and taken multiple actions against the extension.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdNauseam

Usually when it's brought up people say it doesn't work or try to spread fear that it is illegal. Google banning them but taking no action otherwise indicates to me and the thousands who use it that it is in fact effective and Google has no other recourse other than their control over the most popular browser.
by irl_zebra | 2026-02-02 15:12:46+00:00
A device manufacturer/company that makes people who have iphones seriously consider swapping to the new company's offering. It is such a small tail of people who have an iphone and seriously consider moving to Android, with maybe Samsung being the highest quality and most attractive with Pixel also being pretty cool. I don't know what HarmonyOS is and I am pretty tech savvy. I think any company can make an ultra low spec phone and ship Android on it and get people to buy it on the basis of cost alone, but those people aren't cross-shopping iphones, so they're not a notable comparison. Arguably, with the exception of maybe high end Samsung and Pixel phones, Android phones and others are basically a whole different product category.
by zzzeek | 2026-02-02 15:13:00+00:00
my story of this is Atari Macro Assembler. The floppy had a specific sector that was damaged, and the loader would test this sector to ensure it was in fact damaged. this was obvious becuase whenever loading the floppy, you had to wait for one of those big "BZZT....BZZT" things where the 810 drive was trying to access a bad sector and giving up. I was able to disassemble maybe the first 30 bytes of the boot to see it checking this and doing the jmp. I just overwrote it with a single jmp and got not just a copy but much faster loading without the BZZTBZZT part.
by giancarlostoro | 2026-02-02 15:13:05+00:00
If they want AI hype they should be building up .NET to be completely versatile for AI, not just ONNX, but the full pipeline. Make your strengths a key indicator that Windows is the place for AI, stop using up 50% of my RAM for no reason, I need it for real work. Till then Linux has been my new permanent home for about 5 years now or so.
by ecshafer | 2026-02-02 15:13:20+00:00
I don't really get how VSCode got so popular. You can use a language server perfectly easily with Vim, Emacs, Helix, Sublime, etc. You can customize basically everything in those editors, syntax, etc. You can just alias console commands for all of your build tools with some custom scripts if you need more complex build commands routinely. The git terminal tool works better than any VScode option. And VSCode is slower than all of those.

We already have so many good fast secure polygot customizable text editors. Why run one through Chrome and fill it with extensions for everything that will have arbitrary access to everything?
by alexfoo | 2026-02-02 15:13:33+00:00
There seems to be a progression of Wordle strategies.

Playing with a set start word (or words, e.g. "SIREN OCTAL DUMPY" or people who go the "AUDIO ADIEU" route).

(Many people also go down the rabbit hole of looking for "optimal" starting words or choices based on the original word lists.)

Then, once you've played that for a while, you find it's not that much of a challenge unless you end up in one of the forms of madness like _A_E_, and you'll switch to playing in "hard code" (e.g. correct/green must be played again in the same place in all subsequent tries, yellow letters must also be reused each time).

The hard mode starting with the same word gets a bit boring, so people move on to varying the start word each day, either pulling them from a list or just using the answer for the day before.

There's no "correct" approach obviously, people can play the game however they want and extract the fun/anger however they want.
by idopmstuff | 2026-02-02 15:13:55+00:00
As a product manager, this feels like they're in the pretty typical B2B SaaS trap of building the stuff that the people who pay for the product insist they need but the people using the product don't necessarily want, so they've gotta invest a bunch of time and effort getting usage/feedback.

Could be for good reasons (e.g. they're security features that are important to the business but add friction for the user) or just because management is disconnected from the reality of their employees. Either way, not necessarily the wrong decision by the PM - sometimes you've gotta build features fast because the buyer demands them in a certain timeframe in order to get the contract signed. Even if they never get used, the revenue still pays the bills.
by orochimaaru | 2026-02-02 15:14:11+00:00
You shouldn’t name and shame for following corporate policy. Your suggestion is ridiculous. If the decision has come down from the product leadership you are expected to follow it.

Knowing who the windows product leadership is should be easy. Find them on linked in. But even they may not be responsible if the direction came from the ceo or the cto. We know who those are.

Quit calling for naming and shaming of individuals just trying to make a living.
by billy99k | 2026-02-02 15:14:31+00:00
On Facebook, I've seen some artists/graphic designers railing against AI. Companies don't care if you created it or if they can use AI for 90% less money and time an create something that works.

When software piracy destroyed my brother's small software company a decade ago, and music piracy forced all of my indy music friends out of the business, nobody cared.

Do you care now? When you are forced out of your profession and can't make a living?

In a way, I'm happy. I can now give you reasons why you should be sharing your hard-work (for free) with the world through AI training data and give you a horse-and-buggy analogy.
by pxc | 2026-02-02 15:14:42+00:00
Since no one makes Android devices with hardware keyboards anymore, I almost never use this kind of software anymore. After getting burned by a couple of Kickstarter phones hampered by half-baked software and total lack of updates, the only thing I could rationally conclude is that Android as a productivity platform is a lost cause.

When Android was new, I very frequently used Termux and ConnectBot with my first few Motorola Droid phones. For a brief moment, I had a working phone with a great physical design only held back by an outdated chipset and being locked to Planet Computers' abandonware. I could touch-type at 80 WPM on an easily pocketable device! Termux shone there.

So many things about Android were not just more exciting in terms of potential when it was new, but actively better: wider variety of hardware, widely unlocked bootloaders, no remote attestation, etc. Termux sadly feels like a painful reminder of that to me.
by Eddy_Viscosity2 | 2026-02-02 15:14:46+00:00
Any new software developers entering the field from this point on will have to know how to use and be expected to use AI code-gen tools to get employment. Moving forward, eventually all developers use these tools routinely. There will be a point in the future where there is no one left working that has ever coded anything complex thing from scratch without AI tools. Therefore, all* code will have AI code-gen as all* developers will be using them.

* all mean 'nearly all' as of course there will be exceptions.
by anal_reactor | 2026-02-02 15:15:23+00:00
Something I've noticed is that companies don't really promote intelligent people up the chain of command. Socialism failed because it was a less effective economic system than capitalism, and lots of its issues are neatly replicated within capitalist companies:

- having friends is more important than making output, which means that people above certain level just play politics instead of actually managing the company

- managers who miss targets get more people assigned which makes them climb the hierarchy, which means all levels below top level have the incentive to be inefficient

- saying "no" to the ruling party, no matter how stupid the idea is, is the second-easiest way to get replaced. The easiest is to offend the wrong person

- planning periods misaligned with the economic reality

An intelligent person will either be optimized out of the system, or will learn how to game it to their own advantage.
by teon | 2026-02-02 15:15:35+00:00
Hi, Robert from Defguard here.

Defguard is a *Secure by Design* solution, which means security is important (if not more) then functionality.
Lower latency or peer-to-peer communication does not automatically mean better security often it means a larger attack surface.

Defguard is also *the only solution that enforces MFA on every connection*, aligning with true Zero Trust principles never trust a user or device by default.

Why Peer-to-Peer Is Not Safer?

Peer-to-peer and mesh solutions can be faster because traffic flows directly between peers, but they almost always expose all components publicly and make it easier to hijack the network or inject unauthorized peers.

So what does Defguard’s Secure-by-Design Architecture mean?

1. Minimal gateway exposure

The Defguard gateway exposes only a WireGuard port. Compromising it would require a Linux kernel or WireGuard zero-day at that point, no solution is safe.

2. Isolated, stateless proxy

The only Internet-facing "application" component is a stateless proxy, deployed in a separate network segment. It has no access to the gateway, core, or internal resources.

3. Protected control plane

The core (control plane) runs strictly inside the intranet (local network that should not be exposed anywhere). No user data are exposed to the Internet or DMZ/other network segments. Also the MFA validation process is done in secure network segments (for example when doing MFA with Desktop + Mobile client biometry/faceID combined).

Why This Is Different from Mesh Solutions?

Most mesh VPN solutions expose their control and peer-discovery components publicly by design. This significantly increases the risk of compromise and peer injection.

So that's about it.
by coldpie | 2026-02-02 15:15:39+00:00
Agreed. I signed up for a paid subscription last month after I was linked to this article[1] which correctly, clearly, and accurately labeled the administration's claims about that incident as lies. This is journalism, and it is worth money. The half-assed "videos give the appearance of possibly contradicting..." decide-for-yourself garbage printed by places like the NYT isn't worth the cost of sending the bits over the wire.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/policy/859055/minneapolis-renee-goo...
Show HN: A different approach to intonation training
by ogig | 2026-02-02 15:16:00+00:00
Hi guys;
Over the weekend I've created this using Claude Code. It's an ear training app destined to teach intonation and intervals to not so talented musicians like me. I spend many year playing guitar without a clear feeling on what intonation really was. It was after some string tuning exercises that it clicked for me. The freq sliding into the right place and feeling the correctness. I hope this app can helps other to feel that for the first time, or to increase the recognition of less common intervals. Any feedback is appreciated.
by eoskx | 2026-02-02 15:16:30+00:00
From the article:

Weeks before Elon Musk officially left his perch in government last spring, employees on the human data team of his artificial intelligence start-up xAI received a startling waiver from their employer, asking them to pledge to work with profane content, including sexual material.
Their jobs would require being exposed to “sensitive, violent, sexual and/or other offensive or disturbing content,” the waiver said, emphasizing that some such content “may be disturbing, traumatizing, and/or cause you psychological stress.”
The waiver, which two former employees confirmed receiving and a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post — was alarming to some members on the team, who had been hired to help shape how xAI’s chatbot Grok responds to users. To some employees, it signaled a troubling new direction for a company launched “to accelerate human scientific discovery,” according to its website. Maybe now, they said they thought, it was willing to produce whatever content might attract and keep users.
Their concerns proved prescient, the employees said. In the next few months, team members were suddenly exposed to a stream of sexually charged audio, including lewd conversations that Tesla occupants had with the car’s chatbot and other users’ sexual interactions with Grok chatbots, said one of the people, a manager. The material surfaced as the team worked to train Grok to engage in such interactions.
by palmotea | 2026-02-02 15:16:34+00:00
> While the company values haven’t technically changed, the actions taken in the past 5 years have eroded my trust so much I barely recognize the place. When you no longer have a sense of pride working somewhere, it’s time to move on. At least that is what I believe to be true.

The problem, as I see it, is the changes that bug me [1] seem systemic throughout the economy, "best practices" promulgated by consultants and other influencers. I'm actually under the impression my workplace was a bit behind the curve, at a lot of other places are worse.

[1] Not sure if they're the "actions" you're talking about. I'm talking about offshoring & AI (IHMO part of the same thrust), and a general increase in pressure/decrease in autonomy.
by GrinningFool | 2026-02-02 15:16:39+00:00
I can buy that if we stipulate that one person can belong to both groups, depending on the task and goals of the user.

Sometimes I just want the thing and really don't care about any details. Sometimes I want a very specific thing built in a very specific way. Sometimes I care about some details and not others.

How I use the tools at my disposal depends on what I want to get out of the effort.
by oefrha | 2026-02-02 15:16:48+00:00
What, 5.2 Codex isn’t a good model? Claude 4.5 and Gemini 3 Pro with Copilot aren’t any better, I don’t have enough of a sample of Opus 4.5 usage with Copilot to say with confidence how it fairs since they charge 3x for Opus 4.5 compared to everything else.

If Copilot is stupid uniquely with 5.2 Codex then they should disable that instead of blaming the user (I know they aren’t, you are). But that’s not the case, it’s noticeably worse with everything. Compared to both Cursor and Claude Code.