skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Is a cheap alternative to paid ads for startups on a budget needed?
Hey HN, I am hoping to validate a startup idea for a cheap alternative to paid ads for other start-ups on a low budget. I would really appreciate some constructive criticism and feedback on the idea.

Here is a little backstory on how this idea came about.

So, I was watching a FireShip skit on YouTube the other day, titled "Why did my side-hustle fail? How to validate business ideas".

1 minute and 18 seconds into the video, FireShip highlights there being really only two options to growing your startup/side-hustle business.
1. doing the organic marketing yourself (investing time)
2. paying friendly companies like Google or Meta absurd amounts of money to appear on their platform(investing money).

Further along the video (1 minute and 44 seconds), with classic FireShip humour says, "no one wants to stand in a corner twirling a sign for the side hustle". Which is true.

So, if investing your own time towards organic marketing (twirling a sign yourself for your business) is not option and the alternative is investing large amounts of money for paid ads, what are start-up founders and side-hustle enthusiasts on low budgets supposed to do?

This question is why I am here on HN today. I am hoping to validate an idea I put together to address this problem.

I will not bore you with the specifics, but the basic idea is to have start-up founders on low budgets post bounties for their organic marketing, with whatever funds they have at their disposal. These bounties will have descriptions and set requirements specified by founders, on what type of content they want made to market their business.

With these bounties posted, content creators of all sizes, can participate in these bounties in hopes of getting a share of the bounty prize money for their top performing bounty entries, basically giving someone else the job of twirling a sign for your side-hustle.

There is a large population of aspiring content creators that want to monetize their content, many of whom give up early because of monitization restricts they struggle to reach (subscriber, follower, view counts). With this idea, content creators of all sizes can participate and earn from their top performing content.

Also, with TikTok having recently launched their "creator rewards program" to a select few regions, it isolates creators from other regions that really want to monitize their content without relying on sponsors.

This seems like a bleeding neck problem for these creators - so the market is there, and why I believe now is the right time to launch a service like this.

Well that's enough of me babbling.
I would like to hear your thoughts around this idea, and if it can actually becoming something big if implemented.

Thank you for your time.
Because there are already users with Apple devices and those users might have been locked into using Apple's ecosystem for other reasons (already purchased apps, already owning Apple accessories that don't work with other devices, etc).

As an anecdote myself, the main reason I haven't switched to a Galaxy S24 is because my Airpods work amazingly with my iPhone and Macbook, and my Apple Watch only works with iPhones. But very often I sorely miss having Termux, NewPipe, Tachiyomi, a non-gimped version of GBoard, Syncthing, a sensible launcher, and probably other things that I can't remember off the top of my head. I've decided that I value the Apple system more than the value I get from those apps but this regulation means I get to have my cake and eat it too.
the world will split into 3 factions

One of those factions will be the West. Unfortunately for the West, the West is too small to be a major player and will be a big loser in WW3. Modern warfare is just arithmetic, and the West just doesn't have the numbers that stack up.

The whole of the West is smaller than just China by itself. Also China has far more manufacturing capacity than the whole of the West combined. The West is going to get its ass kicked big time.

If you put Russia and China together, you get something that has the huge raw material and energy resources of Russia plus the advanced technology of Russia plus the huge manufacturing capacity of China plus almost a quarter of the world's total population. A very hard combination to overcome.
You might be gathering this by everyone's responses to every single one of your comments, but you're using this tool fundamentally differently than everyone else and than it's meant to be used, and you're doing it in a way that inconveniences everyone who has to use it to interact with you.

Since it's a communication tool, you'll get better results if you use it like it was designed and like everyone else does.
I'm curious about people who engage in this behavior: what would happen if I do not respond to your non-starter?

What would be the message you eventually receive about my behavior?

And if you bring up my non-response in the future, and I do not verbally respond, what would your impression be of my communication style?
It was quite remarkable how Jan 6 proceeded entirely in the open with people posting selfies of themselves saying "off to overthrow the government today!", but because that kind of thing is entirely normalized from rightwing sources it wasn't important until those arrested eventually made it to court.

Stochastic terror and the stochastic coup work great precisely because there are no clear unambiguous two-way communication trails between the instigator and the accomplices; just a lot of "wouldn't it be great if somebody did something". Fell apart afterwards because there was no further planning.
Please tell me you have at least 10+ people who plussed this remark!? The fact that some reactions don't get what you're saying worries me. Or maybe I don't understand, but explaining your jest is not my style.
re:

you: Hi
co-worker: Hello.
you: I'm working on [something] and I'm trying to do [etc...]
co-worker: Oh, that's [answer...]

It becomes clearer what is going on here when we compare to the robot-robot conversations from Annalee Newitz's book Autonomous:

The mantis beamed Paladin a hail. Hello. Let’s establish a secure session using the AF protocol.
Hello. I can use AF version 7.6, Paladin replied.
Let’s do it. I’m Fang. We’ll call this session 4788923. Here are my identification credentials. Here comes my data. Join us at 2000.

The initial Hi / Hello exchange establishes a session. Once the session is established, it is possible to begin data transfer at the application layer.

This is a technical problem masquerading as a social problem, which can be addressed by a technical solution.

Instead of expecting colleagues that only support establishing sessions by hello-ing to switch to an alternative protocol, it is possible to support both hello-ers and no-hello-ers by using a similar trick as found in launchd and systemd to reduce startup time by decoupling dependencies between services with a socket. Suppose service A says it depends on service B, and wants to send some data to service B. Instead of blocking service A being started until service B is up, the service manager can allocate a socket, give it to service A and say "here is your connection to service B" and then defer starting service B until service A actually starts trying to communicate using the socket.

Here's how a similar trick can hide the latency of colleagues that only support hello-ing: we offload the responsibility of establishing the chat sessions to a session manager, which is integrated into our chat client. When a colleague requests to begin a session by 'hello!'-ing, this message can be recognized by the session manager as an attempt to establish a session, suppressed and hidden from the user, and the session manager can automatically respond with 'Hi.' to establish the session. colleague is comforted by receiving the 'Hi.' and can trust that a session is established. When colleague begins transmitting data at the application layer, the data can be forwarded to the user as normal and surfaced by the chat program.

https://www.torforgeblog.com/2017/11/15/read-the-first-four-...

https://lwn.net/Articles/389149/
If you find yourself fixing the same rebase conflicts over and over again, because you for some reason need to work on conflicting changes simultaneously (which is of course best avoided for other reasons), use "git rerere".
Thanks for hof! Thinking of using it for a project. In what state is the project? I noticed that commits slowed down lately and I was wondering if you consider it stable at the moment and can be used as is.
> But I'm still a bit wary of mains-connected ones.

That is wise. YouTubers like BigClive regularly tear down Chinese products and you can bet on things like unconnected earth wires and poor separation between high/low voltage parts. Anything that plugs into mains should come from a known manufacturer and a reputable dealer (not Amazon, AliExpress etc.)
> Universities aren't institutions of knowledge anymore. They're assets. They're revenue streams. If they're not generating money for the top, then they only pose a threat, and they have to be weakened and destroyed.

That's been like that for a long time. And that's because they have continually pandered to capitalism and industry like weaklings in exchange for shiny toys and money.
That’s what I thought when I saw this: smithy without the need to bring Gradle into your project
No. I need to prioritize every task I do. If you just say "hi", I am unable to determine whether your inquiry is high or low priority for me. State immediately what you want from me. Then explain afterwards.
I wonder what other existing programs Will Systemd attempt to replace in the future.

My bet is /bin/sh, maybe they went further to replace the entire POSIX utilities.
It's telling that they are even going after iPadOS. Really messages to Apple strongly that they have no hope of dodging this on iOS if even a relatively niche product by comparison is also qualifying them for gatekeeper status.
> My guess is that sooner or later we'll see EEE.

They're using every open repository to train CoPilot and sell your code and derivations of it $10/pop. Do you need any more steps?
> there's protests happening all over that seek to PROTECT the people who do this

The protests are about protecting Gazan civilians, not Iranian security forces, which are different sets of people existing independently of one another. But of course you know that.
WHO overturned dogma on how airborne diseases spread. Will the CDC act on it?
It’s a screen. Add a regular Bluetooth keyboard mouse and you have a PC. There’s no compromise here from hardware perspective, it’s just software that’s in the way.
By that reasoning advertising companies should be held responsible for the products they advertise.
I also prefer C# to Java, but there are reasonable arguments for Java. While the language is inferior, the Java ecosystem is superior to .net, and this might be more important.
So if I don't respond, then the conversation never starts?

Are you ok with not having the conversation?
It depends on the nature of your work.

In some types of work, individuals are supposed to do their own time management, and carve out chunks of time for activities that require sustained concentration, and respond appropriately to occasional requests, which are a mixture of low- and high-urgency. For example, someone who needs to read complex academic papers, but occasionally might be interrupted for an urgent production incident. For them, time management is all about avoiding distractions - like synchronous conversations about trivial matters when they're supposed to be working.

Other areas of work have far less need for uninterrupted blocks of time. A manager doesn't just change tasks every hour, they often also respond to e-mails and chat messages during meetings. For them, time management is all about choosing between overlapping meetings, and managing the length of their queue of work by rejecting and delegating tasks. And of course talking to people is the core of their job.

For the former, sending a 'hi' message without the context needed for them to triage it into urgent or non-urgent means they're interrupted twice instead of once - which is pretty inconvenient.

For the latter, though? A dozen interruptions per hour is completely normal, what's the problem?
can we use gpt to convert say, a Xamarin Android app code into React-Native? has anyone tried similar conversion successfully?
Thanks for sharing, very interesting read!
What’s the benefit to you of a VM on your iPhone when you can simply ssh to a vm somewhere else? Not saying there isn’t a benefit, but curious about what you want to do. Other than people who are in the middle of nowhere, which at that point I’d recommend a raspberry pi and a battery bank or a laptop or something.

I use the pi and battery for running various ham radio stuff while out in a park or whatever and connect from an iPad, and that works very well in my use case.
I think LLMs are not the right tool for this. They will never have a "life of their own" because of how they function. Imo, a better approach (although much more difficult) would be to create some sort of a game (simulated world), use RL to create intelligent agents in that game, and then perhaps have LLMs translate agents' actions into words. Different agents could have drastically different personalities based on their learning algorithms and reward functions. I'm surprised something like this doesn't exist already.
It's a shared responsibility.
> At the least, its a communication that you are about to ask them something, i.e. check back here in the next minute or so while I type out my question.

This is part of what makes it such poor etiquette. You've created this ambiguous, open-ended distraction for the other person. You expect them to divert focus away from what they're doing so they can poll the chat channel waiting for you to get your thoughts in order.

At least include some context so they have a better idea of what you're about to ask.
The git repo, sure. It's all the workflow stuff around it that is harder to migrate -- issue reporting, what workflow you use for code review and merging changes, CI, etc. Those too can be moved, but I wouldn't use the word "trivial" -- there's potentially a lot of work there with migrating old issue data across, figuring out what changes to everybody's dev workflow the new platform will require versus what can stay the same, adjusting or rewriting CI configs, and so on.
Adlink Launches Innovative A380E Graphics Card Featuring Intel Arc GPU
As long as the majority of the target group keeps buying MacBooks AND iPads, I doubt that Apple has an incentive to cannibalize its own product line.

They are well-aware of this, visible from the fact that they never bothered to add a touch panel or Pen-support to any MacBook, or make the Watch a standalone device: Customers wanting this either buy the devices individually anyway, or wouldn't be willing to hand over the sum of all combined devices for a single "superset" device.

Just imagine that Apple's view of the "iPad Pro with MacOS" demographic are customers who purchased a 1600 USD MacBook and a 1000 USD iPad. Is the "iPad with MacOS" able to replace either of those? Would they be able to charge 2600 USD for that device and sell comparable volumes?
That's something only a villain would say.
All this technology has the effect of pushing up the cost of vehicles, often for questionable minor safety improvements. Is there a good analysis of why the road safety trend has gone the wrong way in the US lately?
Of course they were recycled, there are valuable minerals in these devices.
I’m directing my inlaws to ask for help here when they install bullshit on their iPad or iPhone that breaks something. I refuse to help with that! :)
> you don't really need […] since the brain

I'ma stop you there: more than one brain exists, and they don't all behave the same.

> using `less` is always painful for me

`less -R` preserves colours.
Same, I wish once device stops being supported it should give easy option to be jailbroken and unlock bootloader. Such devices could be retrofitted for many other roles e.g robotics toy with arduino/raspberrypi, smart home, smart router etc.
That's not banning, that's a security measure working. In Google the stories are of specifically getting banned for violating T&C or something https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34016389, not getting locked out. And if you are locked out you can go to Apple Store or call support, tried that with Google?
> There are very few ways to use Task.Result and Task.Wait correctly so the general advice is to completely avoid using them in your code.

The article would have been interesting if it had proposed a solution to this problem, but instead they just brushed it away as if it was pointless.
This is the myth that everyone is going to be screwed by. Nobody is going to be legally responsible for malware that ends up on your device.

The only difference is Apple has the $$ and incentives to remove it as soon as it's brought to their attention (assuming it's actual malware that may cause large financial loss not just copyright infringement).

Alt-stores will be ridden with malware and nobody is going to be legally responsible for it. We can just hope the alt-stores that end up existing have incentives to keep them "clean".
That's even worse. You're sending out rounds of "Hi's" to multiple people, distracting them to prepare them for a question you might not even ask?

Candidly, you sound like an incredibly selfish communicator.
By an insincere "how are you" they are extracting information on your current mood to engineer a proper communication protocol that is required to extract as much value for their personal objective as possible. I'm not disagreeing with you, just explaining their motivations to do it.
I wonder if, as a thought experiment, someone could create an App store with a completely transparent self-signing mechanism that allowed you to install apps yourself (but only to your device).

If so, one would think that unless Apple gets to dictate terms strongly to the App stores, that this would only be a matter of time.
This utilitarian point of view quickly crumbles once it stops naïvely looking at profit-driven organisations as anything but what they actually are: money-making machines. The first and foremost goal is the money, not the software, certainly not the end this POV claims the means maximise for. It is not a possibility, it is a certainty, especially given that $MSFT is a publicly-traded organisations with legally financial obligations to its shareholders.

Framing actual long-term sustainble practices and policies as "ideological purity" is misleading at best and a textbook example of a strawman at worst.
Does it not get exhausting to swim against the current all the time? Don't you ever wish you could let you go and let your inner little mind take control, if not just for a moment? What you describe as being genuine and authentic and open minded sounds like a cross you have decided you must bear. It's okay. You are not Jesus. You don't have to do this.
While that is true, nevertheless it’s nice to consider that people are human and make mistakes.

It can be quite difficult to ‘correct’ that mistake once made, as in order to disable notifications, you often need to open up the chat app itself, which makes all of your conversations flash up on the screen.

Yes, of course you can always just stop sharing, disable notifications, and re-enable, but nevertheless, I always try to actually do the opposite, and send ‘hi’ and then the a follow up message for exactly this reason if I’m sending anything that is confidential or contentious. The difference is that I write the full message first (ctrl + a, ctrl + x, ‘hi’, enter, ctrl + v, enter), so that there’s essentially no delay between ‘hi’ and the content of my message.

You never know.
I mean, it's true, but it is a classic lead-up to a superficially convincing-sounding, yet incorrect, just-so explanation of _why_ that is. Which they then go on to make.
This to me is the biggest drawback.

The language is truly lovely to work in, moreso than I think it gets credit for unless you've a lot of experience with it. It's just very thoughtfully designed, and MS support their own components really well and for a very long time.

The problem is that NuGet never became npm, gem or pip. The open-source community never really embraced C# (for understandable reasons) and it meant that the void there was filled largely by projects that couldn't get much traction and enterprise component vendors like Telerik.

I'm not in any way knocking companies that make their money selling these components by the way, I just think the message that people looking from the outside are seeing (rightly or wrongly) is that there's a tax payable to third parties on absolutely every level of this stack so why build with it? What's my incentive to start learning it when I can pick up node / React / Next / Python / etc. for free and start working right away with free tools? And that all shows in the ecosystem.
Local co-op games are wonderful I have played them alot. I would love to have a tournament like this with Unrailed. Or some rounds of Lovers in a dangerous spacetime. Maybe a https://generals.io 2v2 tournament. Sadly there are not many 4+ player co-op games. I thought NucleusCoOp would be easy to port but looking at the supported game list is daunting.
Wasn't this the initial promise of Smalltalk, to give end users the ability to easily modify and create their own software to fit their needs for personal computing?
Fully agree. But the insensible default on most programs is “all notifications on all the time” and there are users who don’t know how to change it.

Just had my message barge into an important presentation last week because the presenter got a new computer with the defaults on.
I've always considered the Supercharger network as their most valuable asset, besides arguably their mindshare, so I cannot see how losing the entire team could be a rational decision in the long term.

Also, after work on the Model 2 was canceled and reopened, I can't see Daniel Ho and his teams departure as a long-considered choice, to put it mildly.

Feels all like emotionally driven decisions...
The difference is in the name. Stack allocation is strictly FIFO [1], so it can be implemented very efficiently with just incrementing and decrementing a stack pointer, even on architectures that don't directly have an hardware stack. In principle that stack for local variables doesn't even need to be the same stack as the callstack. It is also strictly thread local.

On the other hand an heap (which has nothing to do with the heap data structure) is much more complex.

[1] At least across activation frames, of course a compiler can statically generate code that reuses frame slots in a non-FIFO way.
It's great I love it and I link it regularly. Some people feel offended by it and that's a good thing.
Ask HN: Does animated macOS Sonoma wallpapers impact system performance?
They are gorgeous, but I'm always thinking if running a high-res video in background takes up meaningful resources from my 8 GB, M1 MacBook Air…