skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: I have a platform but no product (which idea/direction is better?)
Hi

Recently, in my spare time, I've completed a small platform for developing and deploying SaaS solutions.

What I have done is basically I wrote and deployed stuff that is required in pretty much any SaaS.

- Authentication: both email/password and Google login. Tech: cognito.

- Database: where user info is stored (e.g. subscriptions). Tech: dynamodb.

- Frontend: standard pages and flows: landing, pricing, account and workflows like login/register, change password, Google login, delete user + translation into several languages (besides English). It is connected to backend. Tech: vue3 js.

- Backend: with auth and stripe integration and some other stuff (e.g. sending emails, domain integration in prod account, counting jobs done to bill the customer etc.). Tech: aws python lambda (with aws powertools) and api gateway.

- Payments: stripe with three plans, all already working with frontend and backend, with functionality to change/cancel etc. (I use stripe customer portal). Tech: stripe.

- CI/CD: with email notification on failure. Push to dev -> rollout to dev account, main -> prod account. Tech: cdk pipeline and sns.

- Some E2E testing. Tech: cypress

Additionally:

- there are 3 AWS accounts with SSO (main, dev, prod). Tech: AWS Organizations/AWS Identity Center.

- IaC. I tried to minimise the manual steps as much as possible. Tech: CDK in python.

- Billing alert: when AWS charges exceed $10 per month.

- Everything is serverless and I pay almost nothing for hosting and developer use (because there is no traffic). I pay $2-5 per month now, and that is mostly for CI/CD (AWS Codepipeline, CodeBuild) as I am actively developing.

What is NOT there is THE PRODUCT ITSELF.

I started researching some problems I could potentially solve with a SaaS, but I am not very good at it.

Eventually I compiled a list of directions:

- LLM with OpenAI api calls (and vector database): since everyone is doing it, I thought this would at least be a good experience.

- Platform: I've posted similar questions before (about 9 months ago) and some people suggested to sell a platform of what I've built. The thing is, it is a code-first platform, and you need to be a developer to extend the platform for your needs. And as far as I know, no-code/low-code tools are what sell.

- Some other stuff: things like document parsing, employee time management, post-quantum encryption.

I could not come up with anything better for now.

Question:

Any ideas on how to go about it? I've read books like "moms test" and "zero to sold", but I'm not quite sure how to start correctly here. As far as I understand the most important thing is to find a painful problem, which I have no idea on how to do.

Current idea:

My current idea is to start with LLM OpenAI MVP, if that fails then go for the platform (I will also use the experience I got from the LLM project to make the platform better). And if that fails too, I will create educational courses on those.

PS:

I am based in Germany, that's why I translated frontend to several languages (i18n library).

Thank you for your input
> These two statements are contradictory. If it was indeed so "poor", people would notice :)

Would they? The history of programming is full of great ideas that took a very long time to reach mainstream adoption. We also did some things that in hindsight were bad ideas, but for a time were very popular.

This is because the programming language "market" is not rational. It moves at the speed of education, not the speed of innovation. People learn a language and they make useful things with it. Why would they stray into niche languages and PL research?
I’m taking it, and it’s still trivial to overeat with calorie-dense food. It’s just easier to control impulse to do so.
It's also wildly hypocritical regarding cannabis, which is just as much a drug and could provide huge tax windfalls besides cutting out the gang profits and enforcing safety/quality standards, but nooooo, just can't do that, simply impossible.

(Also New Zealander here, weird how many of us suddenly appear to post!)
I wonder if this is how student behavior has always been. The retrospective view makes the past look better. Ah the good old days when everything was better. See rosy retrospection [1] for more examples.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosy_retrospection
Rush fans will know this, but part of the HN crowd won’t and likely find it interesting: there’s a musical connection between Rush’s YYZ song and the Morse code identifier transmitted from a nav beacon at the Pearson Airport (IATA code YYZ)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/YYZ_(song)
This is awesome!

I was looking for software, where I could input notes of Hindi songs. And then replay them in a loop to practice singing the song. I will try your application.
I am hopeful for its development but it’s not a daily driver for me. Too many bugs, not a large enough team to support it. When I have looked at the support forum the developer is sometimes a little hostile about bugs/issues, enough so that I don’t care to report my own issues. This is a subjective statement your experience may differ.
I agree with your "deeper claim", which is why I think the inverted pyramid is good for technical content. It tells you up front what the text is about and lets you know if you should invest more time reading it. (It's the structure used in all academic publications for this reason.)

If I was writing this post my intro would be something like (I'm writing this quickly so it won't be elegant, but the structure is in place):

Yosh Wuyt recently posted an argument in favour of moving away from poll_next in the async next project. I disagree with this position. In this post I'm going to argue in favour of keeping poll_next and finalizing AsyncIterator. Specifically, I argue that poll_next has a simpler conceptual model requiring only a single state machine, better supports pinning, and works better with cancellation.

This introduction gives the structure up-front so the reader can quickly decide if they want to continue. This actually makes me more excited to read the post because I like technical details, and this introduction is promising them. In the actual post the introduction doesn't tell me any specifics about what is to come and so does not motivate me to read further.
Not just wanting people to smoke, but wanting to get young people addicted. It's awful.
Show HN: Auto-Suggest LLM Prompts, with Graphlit and Azure OpenAI
When creating a chatbot or AI copilot, which supports Q&A across ingested content, a common user problem can be knowing where to start asking questions.
Unpopular theory: largely the cause is that kids in 2023 can see right through the bullshit:

* course content has no relationship to success in life

* the vast majority of teachers are losers given a modicum of authority: the unpopular kid who grew up and wanted to rule the classroom and now does

* course content is either too slow or too fast or too boring. Kids today are used to controlling information flow, not accepting bland lessons geared toward the lowest common denominator

But mainly it’s the teachers: kids can tell their teachers are faking it. The jig is up.
On a scale of 0 to 10, how difficult do you think this coding assignment is?
Let's say 0 is for printing "Hello World" in the console.
Yet many expect that everything always stay the same, and flock like sheeps to the next one that sells themselves as otherwise.
Even Elon's strongest defenders must admit he explicitly says all sorts of things that turn out not to be true. His statements aren't strong evidence either way.

There's no clear evidence when the geoblock went into place, we only know the date the Ukrainians first tried to use it.

The geoblock included Ukrainian waters, so the sanctions argument can't be true
You may not be a current, hopefully that sparked some lively discussions in the classroom.

Humans also contain air, are we also air currents?

Some people hate getting stuck on such semantics, but I find them fascinating.
That's exactly what it is; the money they plan to acquire through this will be used to pay for the flagship taxcut policy of the largest of the three parties in the new coalition government (the National Party).

I have my share of issues from a personal liberty standpoint, but I know what selling us out to the tobacco companies looks like. (3rd rank National Party member is a former Philip Morris employee, and the second largest party, the ACT Party has a cutout org called 'NZ Taxpayers' Union' has been exposed in the past for taking tobacco industry money, which would be bad enough, but doing so while simultaneously running campaigns related to e-cigarettes)
So are you saying that if I have completely disconnected commit trees in the same repo, git will refuse to cherry-pick between each other?
> I would really like to layer an abstraction ontop of the memory model to formulate a protocol for interprocess/interthread communication. In other words, the cache coherency protocol IS the protocol for message passing. No locks!

that would be just a queue, right?
That's the bit I don't understand. That money they spent on developing the film will get written off against tax whether the film is launched or not. How is it different if they scrap the film?
At least among castes. Can you imagine a world where an epsilon-minus semi-moron has a learning rate equal to an alpha-plus?
Interesting! Do you have a link to that research?
It is WebKit based.
>None of the interventions in western countries has made any impact globally, they literally don't matter and are a rounding error when compared to China and India.

I think we knew all along. Those policies aren't meant to make an impact on climate change as much as they are meant to make a political, hopefully influential, push towards such policies.

It's one thing to ask China to do something we are not doing, it's a whole different thing to ask them to do something we are.
Yeah, let’s congratulate him on coming up with yet another way for men drown out women in tech.
It’s not enough that they get harassed everyday by scumbags?
No, let’s make everyone start second guessing anyone in tech social media circles that dares to let it be known that they’re a woman.
They are great books about some combinatorial mathematics inspired by programming problems. Not the best investment of time if you want to learn programming itself, because:

1. Most of the time you are not implementing foundational algorithms like sorting or SAT solving. You use mature implementation in libraries.

2. If you are in fact implementing foundational algorithms, then the existing volumes of Knuth cover only a very limited set of problem areas.

3. If you are implementing something in an area covered by Knuth, the books are worth looking into as a reference, but often writing performant and robust code requires considerations not in Knuth. This is because Knuth works with an idealised machine ignoring things like parallelism, memory hierarchy etc. and understandably does not get into software design issues.
The data in that report is somewhat outdated because healthcare costs grew considerably faster in Germany since 2016 compared to Switzerland.

Also looking at PPP disposable income per capita and PPP healthcare spending the gap is much narrower (Germany still has lower costs but only by ~10% or so).

IMHO using per capita consumption seems a bit disingenuous because household savings rate in Switzerland is considerably higher than in Germany (19.3% vs 11.1%). So yeah while it’s accurate that the Swiss spend more on healthcare relative to the other goods and services they consume that largely makes sense because almost all healthcare services have to be ‘produced’ locally and can’t be imported.

Even with social transfers nominal disposable income is about 50% higher in Switzerland. So of course the Swiss will spend a smaller share of their income than the Germans to maintain comparable levels consumption just because a lot of the goods they buy cost more or less the same. The Swiss could consume more and save as little as the Germans and if they did so that would somehow decrease relative healthcare costs according to that report. That seems somewhat flawed?
Still find it out as I thought you had to offer the same functionality/content whether they accept extra cookies or not
Would the equivalent c++ code run through LLVM generate a different output?
If you have to ask yourself this question. No, It is not.

I read TAOCP out of curiosity long time ago. Has it been useful for me? Very much. But the usefulness came from abstract connections that clicked later in my life almost randomly. I am not a common individual.

If you expect a direct practical application of what you read, I believe you better choose other material that suits your needs better.
This isn’t true, unless you’re doing something weird like booking the most expensive Acela the day before and comparing it to the least-expensive flight booked in advance. And even when you do this: taxi fare from NYC airports to downtown Manhattan is around $60, so I don’t know how you’ve worked this out.
N64 had some good games. It's still not even a contest compared to the PS1 which is almost unbelievable as it is a first gen console. Imagine Dell releasing a game console now and that it's game offering would be much better then ps5 and Xbox. It just truly insane to even think about it.
It's a guided study, but because doing the guided study is daunting and would take years, in practice many people (among those who read it at all) tend to use it as a reference, dipping in to specific topics here and there.
This is certainly a matter of taste. I saw many prominent people everywhere praising TAOCP, but I was disappointed when I finally read the first three books some 10+ years ago. So much disappointed that I regret taking all the time to read it - not because they're bad books, but because I think that time would have been better spent learning things a different way.
What bothered me most is MIX. I think using a very low-level language to teach algorithms is a pretty bad choice. Algorithms are high-level concepts, and using an assembly-like language just distracts from those concepts; it requires you to solve so many micro-problems orthogonal to the real problem, and forces you to repeat yourself over and over. I prefer to implement abstract ideas in abstract code. Using MIX just causes suffering for no point.
I learned a lot about math from TAOCP (but I've never needed it for anything).
Honestly the problem isn't the money. Corporations even offering that choice is an indignity unto itself. Personal information is not currency to pay for services with. There should be no tracking whatsoever whether they pay for the service or not. If they can't run a free service, then they should charge everyone money and compete on a fair marketplace without taking advantage of the scale and reach of a "free" service.
I've read most of Volumes 1-3 of TAOCP.

I think you can read at various levels though.

When I say I've read most of Volumes 1-3, I mean literally that, I read the text through. At that level it isn't too difficult to read, and you'll learn a lot like that.

However some bits I've studied in much greater detail, like for instance the multi-precision arithmetic algorithms which I had to implement. For that I read it multiple times, implemented the algorithms, did some of the exercises. That takes much much longer than just reading it through.

It is rather like reading a research paper which you do roughly like this, stopping after any step where you think it is no longer providing value to you.

1. Read the title
2. Read the abstract
3. Read the paper through quickly.
4. Read the paper through slowly being more critical, making notes.
5. Read the paper through again working through the maths, implementing the algorithms, making sure you understand everything.

To get the most out of it, you'll need to go to level 5, but you can get a great deal out of it at the earlier levels.

So I've read most of TAOCP at level 3, half a volume at level 4 and only 50 pages at level 5.

If nothing else I've loaded the index in my head!

PS the examples are notorious in TAOCP. The easy ones will take a few minutes and the hard ones are unsolved research problems!
You must be new here - "unwarranted outrage bait" describes at least 50% of HN homepage.
I think the first time I actually heard a SPAC be mentioned was when the MariaDB situation happened: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34070451

It was quite unfortunate to hear, because having a company related to the RDBMS project seemed like a nice thing and it lent credibility to MariaDB appearing like a stable and viable supported alternative to MySQL.

I mean, PostgreSQL exists, sure, but it's always nice to have to have other options and alternatives (modern MySQL/MariaDB are both passable for many use cases).
Many games, including Portal and Portal 2, have subtitles. I like having them on because I often find it difficult to understand spoken text in games (and movies).
I understand this, but let's be more concrete: when you use CSS to design for print (that is, in general, to produce a PDF), you are using a specific implementation (e.g., Firefox will be used to produce the final PDF from your HTML and CSS, or Inkscape will be from your SVG and CSS). Given an implementation, you get a determined rendering, and it is this specific one that you need to be able to tweak to your needs. Same goes for application UI design: a given GUI framework comes with its own implementation of CSS rendering and it is its specific output that developers (or rather, theme designers) need to be able to have precise control over. In both cases, even if the standard does not precisely states what property values must give what rendering, you get something using the tools you have and you may want to tweak details to your taste using those same tools (even if only by trial and "error", but for that you need the option to fine tune the properties you want to play with).

Again, I'm not saying CSS is coherent nor that this is a good thing in the absolute sense, as I already said, I agree with your feeling, I'm just saying that I understand where the need of more precise control/tweaking over details that is sometime in the standard comes from.
One could use generators to produce a modified iterable without copying e.g. here's genexpr is used to define generator:

squared = (x*x for x in iterable)

In general, a generator function can be used if necessary:

def squared(iterable):
for x in iterable:
yield x*x
Of course, the actual solution to this minor problem turned out to be the web search engines.
This is not even approximately true. j is not “defined in terms of E”. It occurs as a source term in one of the inhomogeneous Maxwell equations, and consistency with the other inhomogeneous one (div D=rho) requires that div j = dot rho, which means that j is the flow of charge density. So, I guess if electron movement shouldn’t be referred to as current, we shouldn’t refer to electrons as charges, either…
On the other hand I can’t wait for PST files to disappear, along with their syncing, backup and migration problems. Would have been nice if they had one version of Outlook in between though that didn’t automatically create these deprecated files (looking at you, autoarchive).

Also good riddance: Word, the shitty html editor/viewer.
Yes. I say he is wrong. My previous argument was aimed at what appears to be his core argument.
it was very difficult to make money in the early days of internet (90s, 2000s), so ads* (via tracking) were a quick-and-easy way to make some money. then came social networking, and magnified that* through network-effects ... they got way too comfortable and didn't see it become a major political issue - hence gov regulations and enforcement.

that business model has long gone in my view - new businesses will move in and innovate in that vacuum.
I’m pretty sure it’s a forgery (though to what extent, I wot not), in part because of the mentioning of 766 third parties, but more because the entire thing seems significantly legally incoherent. It mixes elements of GDPR and ePD in technically nonsensical ways (e.g. “We […] process data to: store and/or access information on your device”).
> how would you run a platform

Maybe you wouldn't. Maybe you'd go bankrupt. Can't say I'm sad about that outcome. Businesses that are only viable if they can violate people's rights don't deserve to exist.
Show HN: Transform Notes into Visual Mind Maps
Hey, HN Community!

I'm a Brazilian software engineer, and my educational journey led to a significant discovery.
During my master's degree, I often struggled to recall foundational concepts studied years earlier, which were crucial for my current studies. This challenge sparked a reevaluation of traditional note-taking and inspired the creation of cmaps.io.

Human thinking is inherently associative, not linear. We often draw connections between learned concepts unconsciously. To leverage this natural process, making these connections explicit is essential – and that's precisely what cmaps.io offers.

I can personally vouch for the impact of cmaps.io on my learning and retention. It's become an invaluable tool for me, and I'm confident it can be for you as well!

You can find more details on the ProductHunt post:
https://www.producthunt.com/posts/cmaps-io

Discover cmaps.io and enjoy a revolutionary note-taking experience!

I eagerly await your feedback and thoughts
One of NOYB's arguments is that cost is too high and thus excludes lower classes unable to pay for the subscription.

I don't see how making the user's only choice be to pay this subscription is a solution to that problem?
I got one of the Brother laser types a couple years ago, hooked it up to a single PC using the USB cable, then shared that PC's printer with the rest of the network.

Since Wifi on the printer was not in use at this point, it was then possible to simultaneously connect an additional wireless PC when needed, directly to the printer using the printer's Wifi-Direct alternative.

Interestingly, the printer was connected to the USB socket of a Windows XP client, but I had also ended up adding some Windows 8, 10, & 11 PC's to the network through time.

IT was not optimistic since the new printers have no drivers for Windows XP, plus this was a discontinued model havng no drivers newer than Windows 8 either.

Windows 7 drivers worked fine for XP, Windows 8 drivers worked for Windows 10, so everything was good.

When Windows 11 came out, there was a notice on the Brother website advising that you would need to wait over 30 days before they would be posting compatible drivers.

When they did post the W11 drivers, they were the exact same files that had already been released for W10 years earlier. Apparently the factory only needed to confirm there were no show-stoppers when installed in W11, with no modification of the drivers needed.
13b versions of models are running on 8-core CPU fast enough to have a fluid conversation.