MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: 10-year dev, tried earning on the side for a year – lost $2,200
by jianwei-x | 2026-03-07 11:27:19+00:00
I'm a full-stack developer (Python backend + Flutter mobile/web) working in the AI/LLM space. I'm working at Beijing China, And my day job pays about $2,500/month. I've built AI systems for companies in finance and healthcare — RAG pipelines, knowledge bases, AI agents, the whole stack. I can ship a complete product solo, from backend to deployment.

Last year I decided to seriously try making money on the side. Here's what happened:

*Attempt 1: Built a product (Telegram subscription bot)*
Built a content subscription platform on Telegram — paid tiers, built-in shop, automated operations. At first it kinda worked: ~$70/month on ads, ~$110-140/month revenue. Tiny margin, but hey, it's positive. So I tried to scale — pushed ad spend to ~$280/month. Revenue? Only ~$220. Scaling literally made it worse. Turns out the small profit was just a lucky pocket of cheap traffic, not a real business. Shut it down.

*Attempt 2: Partnered with someone to build a product*
Found a partner — I build, they sell. Built the whole thing. They tried promoting it for about two weeks, didn't see quick money, and just... stopped. Product died on the vine.

*Attempt 3: Another partnership*
Different person, different project. I did all the dev work, delivered the finished product. Partner ghosted. Never heard from them again.

*Attempt 4: "Trust me, it's easy money"*
Someone convinced me their business model was printing money. I invested ~$800 to get in. Lost all of it. Classic lesson, expensive tuition.

*Attempt 5: Freelancing*
Started looking at freelance projects. Reality check: a $7,000 project takes one person roughly 2 months of full-time work. As a side gig on top of a day job, that's brutal. The per-hour math is honestly depressing once you factor in communication, revisions, and scope creep.

*Attempt 6: Small gigs*
Just did a simple website for a friend — $300 for 2 days of work. Fine as a favor, but obviously not a path to meaningful income.

*Net result after one year: -$2,200 and mass of time gone.*

Here's what I think I've learned (but I'm not sure I've learned the right lessons):

- I can build things, but building ≠ earning
- I keep falling into the "trade time for small money" trap
- Partnerships have burned me every single time — I do the work, the other side flakes
- I don't know how to find clients who actually pay well
- My product attempt failed because I had no real distribution strategy — just threw ads at it and hoped
- I'm apparently an easy target for "easy money" pitches

I'm not looking for "learn to code" advice — I can code fine. What I can't figure out is the business/money side.

For those who've broken out of the "skilled but broke" cycle:

- What actually changed things for you?
- Did you find a specific niche? Change how you find clients? Build a different kind of product?
- Is there something obvious I'm missing?

Genuinely asking. I'm not trying to promote anything — I just want to understand what I'm doing wrong.
by mtlynch | 2026-03-07 11:27:33+00:00
Cool! This is something I've been thinking about and wanted to build too.

I don't want it to be like I'm a valuable person and lower people pay for the privilege of my attention, but I do like the idea of making it so that senders have skin in the game and can't just infinitely generate emails that waste other people's time.

What I'd like to see is different costs based on how I classify the email.

So, everyone except trusted contacts pays $5 per email to me. If I think your email was pure spam, I keep the $5. If I reply, you get your money back. If I do nothing and never classify the email, you get back $4 after 30 days. And I can manually override like reply and keep the money, but those are the defaults.
by guitarlimeo | 2026-03-07 11:27:46+00:00
I'm reading The Compassionate Mind by Paul Gilbert and I find it shares many similar ideas. Also I've been interested by Buddhist concepts like impermanency for a while.

While I think rationally what you said is good and makes sense, at the same time it feels like it says you should forget your roots and be this impermanent being existing in the present and only the present. I value everything about my life, the past, my role models when I was a kid, my past and current skills, all friends from all ages, my whole path essentially. When considering current choices I have to make, I feel more drawn to think "What has been my path and values previously, and what makes sense now?" instead of forgetting the past and my ego and just hustling with the $CURRENT technology.

At least that's how I have thought about my ego when I have tried to approach it with topics like these. It might allow me to make more money in the present if I just disidentified with it, but that thought legitimately feels horrifying because it would mean devaluing my roots.

Interested to hear your take on this.
Show HN: I built an AI social media summarizer to stop doomscrolling anxiety
by danielkrajka | 2026-03-07 11:27:57+00:00
I was wasting a lot of time on X and after uninstalling it from my phone, I noticed how anxious it was making me. But I still missed knowing what’s going on with AI, news, and the people I follow.
So I built Somree. It summarizes Twitter/X accounts and YouTube playlists into a clean daily email digest. You pick who and what you want to follow, and it does the rest — no feed, no algorithm, no rabbit holes.
How it works:
∙ Add Twitter accounts and YouTube playlists you care about
∙ Somree fetches and summarizes the content using AI
∙ You get a daily email with the highlights
Tech stack: SvelteKit, Convex, Gemini 2.5 Flash for summarization, Resend for email delivery.
It’s $6/month. Would love feedback from anyone who tries it.
by garte | 2026-03-07 11:28:05+00:00
Maybe it's like that. But they're drunk. Which means they are very supportive but quite unreliable and have a short memory.

I've caught Claude making the gravest anti pattern mistakes using Elixir and trying to get it to correct them makes the whole thing worse.

It's ok for smaller scoped stuff but actual architectural changes come out worse than before more often than not.
Show HN: Open Code Review – AI reviewers debate each other before feedback
by spencermarx | 2026-03-07 11:28:12+00:00
I got tired of AI code review tools that just run a single LLM pass over a diff and call it a review. So I built something different.

Open Code Review spins up multiple AI reviewers from your CLI, each with a different focus. They review independently, then debate each other’s findings, then synthesize into a single review. You get a local dashboard that spins up out of your repo to navigate everything.

The debate step is what makes it work. A single-pass reviewer hallucinates issues and misses real ones. When agents argue with each other, the false positives get killed and the real problems get surfaced with better reasoning. My team’s senior engineers have been consistently surprised by what it catches.

Latest release adds GitHub integration — post the synthesized review directly to PRs. You can post the raw synthesis or have it ghostwritten in your voice. Your call on whether that’s ethical lol.

Runs locally from your CLI, not a SaaS. No catch, pure open source. Works on any repo, any language. Fully open source. The dashboard serves from your project directory, not a separate app.

We’ve been using this daily on our own team for months. It’s the only AI review tool that actually stuck in our workflow.

Repo: https://github.com/spencermarx/open-code-review

Would love feedback from anyone who tries it, especially on the multi-agent synthesis quality. That’s the part I’m most interested in improving.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-03-07 11:29:15+00:00
I think it was yours or someone else's idea in a thread which had somewhat of the same idea and I had even thought of making something like this but just in general. So it is pretty interesting to see this project as well when I had read comments like yours sometime ago.

Though I don't quite remember if it was your comment exactly or if it was someone's elses comment which had the same idea as this.
Show HN: Nirvana – A TUI YouTube Music Player with a Physics-Based Visualizer
by ekabir | 2026-03-07 11:29:23+00:00
Most CLI players have very rudimentary visualizations, so I focused on creating a "Quantum Spectrum Analyzer"—a high-frame-rate, physics-driven rainbow visualizer that uses gravity-based peak falling and mirrored symmetry.

Under the hood, it manages a pool of ffplay instances and uses OS-level process suspension (via ctypes on Windows and signal on POSIX) to provide an "instant-off" pause experience without cutting the audio buffer mid-stream.

Check it out here: https://github.com/iamekabir-web/Nirvana
by aDyslecticCrow | 2026-03-07 11:29:33+00:00
Satellites, industrial machines, automatic windows blinds, battery management systems.

I still suspect those industrial battery management systems have a separate embedded systems that is actually running the communication.

The risk of a linux system freezing and rebooting is faar greater than a 500 row c state machine that is passing application state back and forth.

I Really dont think its common for linux to directly manage can traffic outside of logging and diagnostics. (atleast from those i've seen)
by reactordev | 2026-03-07 11:31:15+00:00
Incorrect and not even close.

Maintaining and expanding is optimizing for throughput or reducing headroom so you can pack more compute.

Developing a greenfield solution requires innovation beyond a simple scaling issue. Often times, once a project like this is done, it lives in maintenance mode for the rest of its life and my skills would be better applied elsewhere.

Don’t get it twisted, I’ve scaled 0-1 to 10M and maintaining and expanding is a different skill set than innovating and invention.
by pjmlp | 2026-03-07 11:31:21+00:00
From the surviving documentation it appears it was based on Java 1.1.3, and called j2d, which ironically it is similar to what Java to Dex ended up being on Android.

https://scispace.com/pdf/using-inferno-to-execute-java-on-sm...

I also assume it wasn't something they cared that much about, as I could not find the original source code on the Inferno open source repo.
by MarekKnapek | 2026-03-07 11:31:50+00:00
Is there a way to have benefits of both? Version 7 for better database clustering. And version 4 for complete randomness? So users can not inference nothing from the id? I have an idea: Use version 7 internally, then scramble it before sending to the user. Scrambling could be done by the database or by the server application. It could be as simple as XOR with some 128bit constant, or as resilient as AES encryption. Of course you also need to do unscrambling of IDs coming from users.
by remus | 2026-03-07 11:31:57+00:00
To lay it out, Im pretty firmly pro-AI.

Putting it succinctly, these kind of conversations feel weird because it's like asking whether carpenters are faster using power tools or hand tools. If you've used power tools it's obvious they make work a lot faster. Maybe there were some studies around the time power tools were introduced looking at the productivity of carpenters, if those studies had results saying the productivity gains weren't obvious in the data that means you have a problem with your study and the data you have collected (which is totally understandable, measuring imprecise things like productivity accurately is really hard). You have to look at the evidence in front of you though, try telling the guy with a chainsaw that he's actually no more productive than he was when he was using an axe and he'll laugh at you.
by benfosterdev | 2026-03-07 11:32:03+00:00
Recording and editing podcasts the human way is a time consuming task. I'd not have the time, nor the reach to make anything that people would listen to.

The idea is that this is your own personal podcast. Of course there's nothing stopping you sharing the link so others can enjoy it.

It could be worth Unread generating a few daily podcasts on common topics like AI, for example.
by OneMorePerson | 2026-03-07 11:32:21+00:00
Most places/countries/companies that value hard work tend to produce a lot, but I also wonder what goes on when it tilts too far and hard work becomes what you are measuring for. In the US for example there's still the vague idea that working hard is a virtue of sorts, but there's also an equivalent desire to produce something, be efficient, etc.

I haven't directly experienced Japanese work culture (just language and traveling) but it seems like they value hard work above all else, which makes innovation almost a threat. You might take away someone's opportunity to show "hard work" if you removed a difficult task.
by founditerating | 2026-03-07 11:32:58+00:00
Who the hell talks like this in the first place?

I've worked in Japan for 7 years and majority of the time you will not be working with native English speakers, usually people who speak multiple languages at all times, if you're only language you know is English you are the minority and people will have to work with you to understand.

I couldnt even finish the article after that insane ramble of gibberish I'm genuinely confused who in the hell would ever talk like that.
by andrepd | 2026-03-07 11:34:39+00:00
UO and Star Wars Galaxies were both MMOs with that experience you describe, and I really can't think of any others. For my money the only ones to truly live to the promise of a virtual persistent alternate world.

WoW in 2004 truly scorched the field; after that MMO became synonymous with WoW clone. The same action bar, the same pov, the same control, the same short "kill 10 kobolds" quests with an exclamation mark, the same progression...

I was big into MMOs a long time ago. But I never imagined that 22 years after WoW the field still wouldn't have produced another gem in the level of UO or SWG.
by marginalia_nu | 2026-03-07 11:34:51+00:00
So in my experience with Opus 4.6 evaluating it in an existing code base has gone like this.

You say "Do this thing".

- It does the thing (takes 15 min). Looks incredibly fast. I couldn't code that fast. It's inhuman. So far all the fantastical claims hold up.

But still. You ask "Did you do the thing?"

- it says oops I forgot to do that sub-thing. (+5m)

- it fixes the sub-thing (+10m)

You say is the change well integrated with the system?

- It says not really, let me rehash this a bit. (+5m)

- It irons out the wrinkles (+10m)

You say does this follow best engineering practices, is it good code, something we can be proud of?

- It says not really, here are some improvements. (+5m)

- It implements the best practices (+15m)

You say to look carefully at the change set and see if it can spot any potential bugs or issues.

- It says oh, I've introduced a race condition at line 35 in file foo and an null correctness bug at line 180 of file bar. Fixing. (+15m)

You ask if there's test coverage for these latest fixes?

- It says "i forgor" and adds them. (+15m)

Now the change set has shrunk a bit and is superficially looking good. Still, you must read the code line by line, and with an experienced eye will still find weird stuff happening in several of the functions, there's redundant operations, resources aren't always freed up. (60m)

You ask why it's implemented in such a roundabout way and how it intends for the resources to be freed up?

- It says "you're absolutely right" and rewrites the functions. (+15m)

You ask if there's test coverage for these latest fixes?

- It says "i forgor" and adds them. (+15m)

Now the 15 minutes of amazingly fast AI code gen has ballooned into taking most of the afternoon.

Telling Claude to be diligent, not write bugs, or to write high quality code flat out does not work. And even if such prompting can reduce the odds of omissions or lapses, you still always always always have to check the output. It can not find all the bugs and mistakes on its own. If there are bugs in its training data, you can assume there will be bugs in its output.

(You can make it run through much of this Socratic checklist on its own, but this doesn't really save wall clock time, and doesn't remove the need for manual checking.)
by Applejinx | 2026-03-07 11:35:13+00:00
The amusing part was when Grok would constantly go on rants about the Boer. It was a perfect example of making an LLM present as mentally unwell by giving it obsessions and compulsion through specifying axioms rather than trying to observe axioms out of what it settles on. But then their problem was when they did that, the axioms were observably woke, so it was frankensteining time.
by onion2k | 2026-03-07 11:35:22+00:00
There are a few things.

- They didn't make assumptions about what the person reading would already know. Everything simple was explained, and was there were link to prior docs where complicated concepts were needed (e.g end of day cash consolidation in a store, because Japanese stores worked differently to US and Europe.) That made it really easy to read any document in isolation. We had a really good wiki that covered everything.

- The team insisted on keeping docs up to date, and deprecating old docs for things that weren't relevant any more. They kept things tidy. They didn't drop writing documentation when things got busy.

- They seemed to have spent quite a lot of effort organising things - tickets were always labelled and complete.

- They were dedicated to using consistent terminology everywhere. They had a glossary and they stuck to it, and that extended to the code that they wrote. Product docs, tech docs, and code all used the same language for the same thing. I think they avoided using similar terms for things too, especially where things could be ambiguous in translation from Japanese to English and vice versa.

To be honest, and with a decent amount of hindsight, I don't think anything was especially clever. It was just clear that the team put the effort in to doing the things most teams know they should be doing. I haven't worked there for a few years now but I bet they're having a lot of success with AI because that documentation would be a great source of context.
by _0ffh | 2026-03-07 11:35:55+00:00
Huh, that explains a lot about the F500, and their buzzword slogans like "culture of excellence".

LLM code is still mostly absurdly bad, unless you tell it in painstaking detail what to do and what to avoid, and never ask it to do a bigger job at a time than a single function or very small class.

Edit: I'll admit though that the detailed explanation is often still much less work than typing everything yourself. But it is a showstopper for autonomous "agentic coding".
Show HN: Shadow, your AI Wingman for smarter conversations online
by shubham16180 | 2026-03-07 11:36:11+00:00
Hi HN,

We built Shadow, a real-time meeting assistant that listens to your call and surfaces useful prompts while you’re speaking.

The idea came from a simple observation: during important conversations (sales calls, founder meetings, interviews) you often realize the best question or insight 5 minutes too late.

Shadow tries to solve that by acting like a quiet wingman during the call.

What it does right now:
• Tracks agenda topics so conversations don’t drift
• Suggests follow-up questions based on what’s being said
• Surfaces useful facts or angles in real time

This is still an early MVP and we’re trying to figure out:
1. What type of conversations this helps most with
2. Whether prompts should be more proactive or subtle
3. How much assistance is actually useful without becoming distracting

Would love feedback from the community.
Product: https://shadowlabs.ai
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-03-07 11:36:24+00:00
I'd recommend you to take a look into nano cryptocurrency as well which supports zero gas fees or sei cryptocurrency which can actually allow Stablecoins like USDC to be used.

BTC lightning can have some flaws too IIRC and I am curious how you handle it.

I have worked somewhat with nano just out of curiosity and it was a decent experience.

It's a shame that nothing like nano has been built for stablecoin itself properly. There is a exchange provider (nanswap) which has nanusd idea and I have even talked to the creator of that project but they are a sole proprietor and the business even after talking to them doesn't feel sadly trustworthy enough that I can recommend it at any scale given that it essentially boils down to that I have to trust them with my money.

Polygon chain with USDC can come close.
by idiotsecant | 2026-03-07 11:36:49+00:00
UO only had this experience because there was nothing else like it, exactly. PVE and PVP players and casual and sweaty tryhard and everyone was in one world, and the game actually forced interaction between those players, often to the detriment of one party. People say they want experiences like that, but they don't. They want a walled garden that isn't too hard and will give them new shoulder pads for spending 2.5 hours grinding after work.

UO was the last MMO that made the mistake of trying to be a world for everyone to live in.
by ghm2199 | 2026-03-07 11:36:55+00:00
Asked[1] in the-ken.com:

---

So, ultimately, to the question, what exactly is Sarvam AI?
Is it a company that builds LLMs cheaply and open-sources them? Is it India’s Deepseek?
Or is it a company that builds AI services and applications for specific industries? Like, say, Scale AI?
Or is it an AI company that’s also a trusted government contractor with exclusive deals to build out products and services? Like India’s Palantir? Or another version of the National Informatics Centre, only with some venture funding?

---

[1] https://archive.ph/kXhuQ#selection-2643.59-2655.105
by latexr | 2026-03-07 11:37:01+00:00
> I don't see any fundamental problem with democratization of abilities and removal of gatekeeping.

This parroted argument is getting really tired. It signals either astroturfing or someone who just accepts what they are sold without thinking.

LLMs aren’t “democratising” anything. There’s no democracy in being mostly beholden to a few companies which own the largest and most powerful models, who can cut you off at any time, jack up the prices to inaccessibility, or unilaterally change the terms of the deal.

You know what’s truly “democratic” and without “gatekeeping”? Exactly what we had before, an internet run by collaboration filled with free resources for anyone keen enough to learn.
by mitjam | 2026-03-07 11:37:07+00:00
I like that you've started keeping your prompts in the repo [1]. Why have you deleted them, later on? What I find curious is how can something AI generated can be licensed AGPL?

[1]: https://github.com/c0m4r/kula/commit/ae3f8a8483c91fe8bd4ea2c...
by kees99 | 2026-03-07 11:37:55+00:00
That helps a bit, true.

But not that much, unfortunately. Those same "cYbeRseCUrITy" orgs also ingest SSL transparency logs, resolve A and AAAA for all the names in the cert, then turn around and start scanning those addresses.

In my experience, it only takes a few hours from getting an SSL certificate to junk traffic to start rolling in, even for IPv6-only servers.

Small percentage of that could be attributed directly, based on "BitSightBot", "CMS-Checker", "Netcraft Web Server Survey", "Cortex-Xpans" and similar keywords in user-agent and referer headers. And purely based on timing, there's a lot more of that stuff where scanners try and blend in.
by pjmlp | 2026-03-07 11:40:10+00:00
Including how to build a full workstation with memory safe systems languages, besides Smalltalk,

Interlisp-D, now recovered and playable in the browser,

https://interlisp.org/

Mesa with XDE (think the safety Zig is selling today, but in 1985)

http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf//xerox/xde/...

Cedar, a full graphics workstation in the evolution of Mesa, now with proper mix of reference counting + cycle collector, as full GC implementation,

Here the demo done by Eric Bier for the Computer History Museum,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_dt7NG38V4