skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Competitor keeps copying our features
I run a knowledge base software company (Helpjuice). For years, our main competitor has been copying our features with remarkable precision. At first, we thought it was normal competition, but it's gotten... interesting.

The pattern:
- They sign up to our platform / or see ongoing developemtn
- Study our feature changes
- Launch identical copies 2-6 months later
- Even inherit our exact bugs
- Copy our marketing copy word-for-word

Some examples:
- They copy our feature names exactly
- Used our headline as their email subject
- When we have a bug, they get it too (6 months later)
- Their UI/UX is identical (but purple)

The fascinating part? They've done this to multiple companies in our space. Other CEOs (KnowledgeOwl, Slite, Bloomfire) have similar stories except with malicious marketing practices from them.
Even better: They write comparison pages with false information about competitors, get caught, apologize, then "accidentally restore" the same false claims months later.

When we launched our latest feature (Wizardshot - got 6,000 users in 2 months), their team immediately signed up. Our engineers are running a betting pool on when - not if - they'll copy it.

Questions:
- How would you handle this?
- Has anyone experienced something similar?
- At what point does copying cross the line?

Context: Been in business 13 years, bootstrapped, profitable. This isn't hurting us - it's almost entertaining at this point. Just curious how others would approach this.
macOS is explicitly designed to not be a server, and the consumer hardware it runs on is also designed that way. Apple even discontinued the Server tools that you could buy on the App Store that used to be called Mac OS X Server.

If you want to run Linux server apps, you should run Linux. Because Apple hardware and macOS isn't giving you any advantages over a generic piece of hardware running a Linux distribution. The hardware costs more and is less upgradable than off-the-shelf hardware.

Servers should not run desktop environments because they are a waste of resources and widen the attack surface due to having more components installed and running.

And even if you want a desktop environment for your Linux server, Linux most certainly has a wide selection of mature stable desktop environments.

If you need to do development work or just achieve the goal of running Linux applications on a Mac, that can be easily done via virtual machines, containers, etc.
You’re right that Tesla’s product is so far ahead that it can’t really be called competition.
Yeah he likely would have said no ports, or lets have only one port, or he would have demanded that the Mac mini has the dimensions of some multiple of pi…

Nobody’s perfect.
I suspect it's not screens alone, but whether one is creating with screens or consuming with them. Different parts of the brain.
I don't remember that, and I can't find any evidence of it.

Some vocal users claimed Systemd was being forced upon them, or was taking over too much of the systems functions, or represented a loss of flexibility or choice, etc. (My opinion isn't relevant to your point.)

No one was claiming it would maliciously interfere with the computer's security or the user's privacy.
The most important thing the Beduins take to the desert is?

Salt
Mind sharing your process? While my parents are still around, I want to digitize the hundreds of photos they have of the previous generations while we can still identify them. It seems like a daunting task!
USA is actually way more dangerous than Europe.
very few on HN pay full price for Mac products ;)
What kind of issues are you having?
At this point maybe the main benefit of an x86 machine is it has a spot to plug in an Nvidia GPU :-)
> That wasn't a norm historically and it's not a reality for probably most working families.

The norm historically is that people lived in homes with extended family like grandparents. There were always multiple people taking care of young children. I get that you want to defend your own parenting experience, but I think you are ignoring what you left on the table.
Former Walmart Executive's Startup Is Near Deal to Buy Grubhub
In theory https://www.openhistoricalmap.org/ could do exactly this.
The only AI product I've found to be useful is ChatGPT and the like. Just chatting it up with a GPT, exploring ideas, getting feedback etc. All derivative products, including coding tools, have been unhelpful at best and actively harmful to productivity at worst.
They've publicly disclosed that they built custom Apple Silicon servers to power Private Cloud Compute.

"The root of trust for Private Cloud Compute is our compute node: custom-built server hardware that brings the power and security of Apple silicon to the data center, with the same hardware security technologies used in iPhone, including the Secure Enclave and Secure Boot."

<https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/>
people really don't grasp that the slowest SSDs are still 3-5x faster than the fastest HDDs (including SAS drives. Yes, the dualport kind).

And, Looking at the anandtech review of a vertex 3 way back in 2011...
My employer is transitioning from salesforce to hubspot. I hope these APIs get put to good use so we can function better as a company.
By the phrase "full time job", most people here seem to mean you can't do anything else substantial on a particular day that you're the main carer for a baby. Not that this necessarily takes up many years (as, indeed, not all full time jobs do). Unless I misunderstood, it seems you comment doesn't substantially disagree with the one you're replying to; it just quibbles pointlessly over definitions.
Yeah, Confluent has really dropped the ball on librdkafka dev of late. :(
In the market cap website, the other companies are in the Top 7.

Netflix is 27.
Video games are technically software and we all know the Japanese are highly skilled in making them, with few to none glitches, etc.

My view is different: software is a response to a need. And the Japanese have found ways to solve many of their problems without software. They are OK using a fax and it works excellently for them.

Sometimes software is a solution to a trust problem, or a reliability problem, or a synchronization problem. The Japanese are trustworthy, reliable and punctual in general and do not have those problems.
Archive link: https://archive.ph/YxF8B
Promise of bluesky is that different front ends can have different moderation policies, and you have account portability should you be prevented from interacting with bsky.app (provided you were self hosting your pod. I don't actually know if you can export your data if you are "banned" from the main instance, I'll have to look into that)
You should check how much a taxi ride is from like Suffolk to London. Last time it was nearly £200
Ask HN: How do you meet new interesting people?
Isn't 6NF essentially a flavor of EAV? I think essentially it is.

6NF means having one non-PK column, so that if the value would be NULL then the row need not exist, and so the value column can be NOT NULL.

But when you need all the columns of what you'd think of as the <thing> then you need to go gather them from all those rows in all those tables. It's a bit annoying. On the other hand a proper EAV schema has its positives (though also its negatives).
I agree that making a lot of people mad doesn't necessarily mean someone is an idiot. At the time time, making a lot of people mad does not necessarily mean someone is genuine.

For example, someone who manipulates a lot of people with misinformation might manifest anger in many. In that hypothetical scenario, I wouldn't think that the anger is because the target's an honest, forthright, genuine straight-shooter.

Furthermore, most people are genuinely kind and compassionate towards others. For those people, mass anger is not their genuine goal, or a likely consequence of them being genuine.
Daily nix user across Mac and Linux, though I use Mac for actual development. No problems here moving between the two with my dev env defined on GitHub [0]

[0]: https://github.com/edude03/dotfiles
The point that people are trying to make is that if you are busy taking care of a baby at home you are not working, or at least not working at the same level of capacity or in the same fashion as as you would if you were not looking after a baby... And if you're not working when you're at home, you're not working from home. You're just home. Most countries in the world would call that parental leave.

Is it possible that we can change workplace expectations to remove synchronous communication & work in such a way that these things aren't roadblocks? Probably, and I would argue that we should.

Is that the current way of the world at the vast majority of employers? Not even nearly.
Regardless, if people start to abuse this by getting discount while not actually being student or teacher, we can say goodbye to that discount and real students and teachers will suffer from it.
I don't think that's been true in the United States for a very long time. In fact, multigenerational households are at a high now, from a low over 50 years ago.
Journalists are interviewing each other, which is then presented as news and facts. Most journalists seem to have stopped presenting facts and fact based analyses anyway, and instead apparently want to involve themselves as a person and pass on their worldview (or that of their employer) instead. Or they simply pass on what is distributed by Reuters and co., without further research and analysis. I'm not interested in that and I'm not paying for it.
> MOSLEY: So those anti-wrinkle finishes and the finishes to prevent mildew and mold and things like that, we're talking about formaldehyde and Teflon were used as chemical finishing as well, right?

> WICKER: Yes. So Teflon is the brand name for water and stain repellent finishes, and that's PFAS, which you might know has been in the news lately because it's been found in the water of half of all Americans. And part of the reason why it's in the water of so many Americans is because there are still manufacturers in the United States of textiles for clothing, performance clothing, uniforms and furniture that use this stain-repellent chemistry, and then they put it in the water. And there's nothing illegal about that.

Man, Gell-Mann amnesia is awful. That is... not what Teflon is, or how the PFAS problems have arisen, and anyone who would say or approve those two paragraphs comes across as having no bloody clue what they're talking about. Now I don't trust the rest of the article, even if its argument seems generally sound!

(That said: never buy from the six-letter "brands" on Amazon and friends if there is any other source for that item. There is no reason to deal with those guys, and so many reasons not to do it. They usually aren't even the factories, they're just middlemen! Factories at least try to build decent reputations.)
1. Given millions of things that are perfect it takes one of them for HN to lose its mind, power button happened to be it this time, Cook didn't decide that.

2. How often do people exactly have to turn off and on a mac that consumes less than a pi for them to constantly be reaching out to that power button?

3. Standby, hibernate exist.
That is an very good observation.
The West Wing episode is what I always think of when I think about the penny, and I almost referenced it myself
That powerful IBM system was unique to other systems being brought into Japan, in that IBM started up that business just before the rule that required a Japanese partner. So it didn't really get shared like other technologies that lead to most other Japanese tech giants.
Just look up "intersex". Or don't. It's your time. Mine is up.
>The Secret Service told 404 Media in an email last week it is no longer using the tool.

Given that parsing non-denial-denials is journalism 101, I wonder at 404’s studious incuriosity about the Secret Service statement. Here are some questions I would ask the Secret Service on the record if this was my story.

1. Does the Secret Service use other tools, partners or methods to collect location data on Americans without establishing probable cause and obtaining a warrant?

2. Does the secret service collect the location data of all Americans, or does it target certain groups in particular? If the latter, how does the service decide who to target?

3. What other crimes become non-crimes if the private company hired to commit them gets the victim to check a box labeled “I agree to the terms of service” prior to watching a funny cat video?

4. Hypothetically speaking, is it now legal for me to start the “uber for loansharking” if my terms of service indicate that the penalty for late payment is kneecapping by non-employee gig muscle?

5. Can the secret service identify my source for this story by determining who i’ve been meeting for lunch at the Holiday Inn every Friday for the past two months? If so will your wife be in a lot of trouble?
I am responding to a comment pointing out the untenability of going to a workplace while also taking care of a kid, which is specifically not what the article is about.
Are those floating things airships? What were they used for?
Why would he step down? He doesn't seem the type to give up power just because something shiny is taking his attention. It's not like the incoming administration has signed a pledge to avoid conflicts of interest or anything
I’d also be interested in this. Right now, I use Fastmail with a partner and we use the new “Notes” feature to track what’s been open/plan for response.
You can put money in the bank as legal income and pay your mortgage with that.
That doesn't match my definition of echo-chamber.

Anyone has the ability to speak, and to pay.

If people leave at their own will, that's their decision. Compare it to censored social networks, where you're kicked out for the wrong-think.
It might not always be possible to directly translate it to revenue, but in my company, we started using an RAG system to help the Customer Support team answer inquiries. It replaced the old Knowledge Base articles search system, and it improved the number of processed inquiries by about 30%. This decreased customer support times and probably helped make customers happier, which is a pretty nice win, even if it would be pretty much impossible to attribute any revenue numbers directly to it.
Maybe not your infant, but this is certainly not any sort of universal truth. Possibly you could argue that physically attending to the infant themselves is not a full time job, but all of the associated tasks in maintaining any sort of functional environment (food, dishes, laundry, etc. etc.) is, at least to me, at least a 9-5 job.

Our son demanded by wailing or screaming to be held during all waking until at least 12 months, including sleeping for more than 10 minutes alone. I worked from home during this period and I cannot fathom having been at home alone with him and attending any meeting or focusing on a task in a realistically productive way.
Kibana is once again Open Source, as of 2 months ago.
https://github.com/elastic/kibana/blob/main/LICENSE.txt
Local news tends to be much more actionable as member of that locality at least in my experience. Things like when the burglary season starts, local/regional investment opportunities (e.g. wind farms), gatherings, events, road blocks due to construction.

Not American and dunno about CNBC, but national news seems more for economic decision makers, politicians. Not saying nobody else should have access to that sort of thing, but it's cognitively too hard to follow for me alongside everything else.

It's a difficult delivery/targeting problem. Everything's happening all the time. Right (truthful and complete) information for the right person (role, intention, interest?) at the right time/occasion (entertainment, time-sensitive, deliberate research?). And to be clear: I do not necessarily mean algorithmic targetting or recommendation. E.g. the (hobbyist) historian certainly wouldn't want to be swayed this way.

Incidentally sifting through news archives is something LLMs might be quite good at, e.g. for consolidation, comparison, lookup. However they mustn't kill their sources doing that. There's no replacement for primary sources (except AGI yadda yadda)
I'm not sure. I've worked on a few projects now which employed simulation testing and passed, only to discover serious bugs using Jepsen. State space exploration and oracle design are hard problems, and I'm not convinced there's a single, ideal path for DB testing that subsumes all others. I prefer more of a "complete breakfast" approach.

On another axis: Jepsen isn't "trying to get there [to FDB's testing]" because Jepsen and FDB's tests are solving different problems. Jepsen exists to test arbitrary, third-party databases without their cooperation, or even access to the source. FoundationDB's test suite is designed to test FoundationDB, and they have political and engineering buy-in to design the database from the ground up to cooperate with a deterministic (and, I suspect, protocol-aware) simulation framework.

To some extent Antithesis may be able to bridge the gap by rendering arbitrary distributed binaries deterministic. Something I'd like to explore!
Shush ;)

But also a ton of people are absolutely in college, at any age, new people are coming to HN every day; I'd think HN is an easier place to discuss and explore vaguely tech/startup related topics than in school
As an outside observer, I'm interested to see how poolside handles keeping up with their competition on two fronts. On one side, they're trying to build a better code model then the large labs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft). On the other side, they need to outperform the UX of Cursor and VSCode w/ integrations.

It seems to me they raised on the pedigree of their founders, but to win they need to be better than the competition. The margin for being better than the competition on both fronts seems quite narrow.

But I also wouldn't mind having $500M to train a foundation model, deploy fine-tuned and RAG-based solutions on top of it for big customers and see what sticks.
Haha are they really? I asked Broadcom's support today, and they had no idea. Didn't know about this announcement. Didn't know how to get a free for commercial license/download/whatever for VMware Workstation. A bizzare rollout.
I worked with one of the contributors..looked very interesting
Depends what 'home server' means.

MacOS would need syncookies to be a viable tcp server on public IPs, IMHO, but MacOS pulled FreeBSD's TCP stack a couple months before syncookies were added, and they never rebased or otherwise added syncookies later.

I haven't looked into if they pulled any scalability updates over the years, but I kind of assume they haven't, and the stack would have a lot of lock contention if you had more than say 10,000 tcp sockets.

Given that, if I were Apple compatible, I might run a mini as a LAN server, but my home servers provide services for the LAN as well as some public services (of limited value and usefulness, but still public).
> The true culprit, the risk-averse culture -- while with own merits -- did not mesh well with the more fluid flat culture of software development.

Not even that. It's just about financing.

Japan's domestic capital markets collapsed due to the Asset Bust in the early 1990s, the Asian Financial Crisis in the late 1990s, and the Great Recession in 2008-12, and domestic asset managers turbocharged the "Flying Geese" development model in order to make themselves whole.

There's no reason for an Asset Manager at SoftBank, Nomura, or MUFG to invest in a Japanese startup when a South Korean, Chinese, Indian, or Singaporean startup can command outsized returns in an IPO or Acquisition.

Japanese asset managers play a major role in Tech VC/PE in Asia, but they prefer to invest abroad.

Look at the outsized returns from Alibaba (SoftBank), Flipkart (SoftBank), and Grab (MUFG) compared to anything that came out of Japan in the last 30 years.

> but at best, keiretsu is a symptom

South Korea and China both use the same corporate model that Keiretsus use, as much of the reform era leadership in both SK and China studied in Japan, and both countries got significant technical and economic advising from Japan via the "Flying Geese" model
They don't "fluorinate the machines" but they sure as hell do use fluropolymer liners for cans and containers and such. It's usually PFA Teflon (alkoxy) but it is fluorinated nonetheless.
Quite the opposite. The part of the crowd that has site:old.reddit.com in their muscle memory has to be the premium end of the search market.

Sure, garbage tier searches will be done LLM style. But few smart people might be bored with that, and pay for something better.
Yes, we're not disagreeing about semantics, we're disagreeing in substance. You can provide excellent care for an infant and toddler while delivering knowledge work (including software development) at competitive levels while working from home.
People who use PostgreSQL instead of MySQL just want to suffer while pretending "they are better than others".
> I think the only real issue with Nix on macOS is that Nix can eat through storage quite quickly, and storage upgrades are pretty expensive on Macs. This might push the balance back to an fanless ryzen build

Only if you want to be able to roll back multiple versions. Otherwise, I think it is fine.
"Upgradable" if you are willing to desolder and replace the BGA chips.

You can't just swap the module out.
The uppercase is usually there to show people what's SQL vs what's custom to your database. In books it's usually set in courier.

I thought he was talking about psql's case sensitivity with table names, which is incredibly aggravating.
Huh? I would assume incumbent GitHub Copilot has way more (paying) users than all of Anthropic's B2C products combined. Is that wrong?
But you have to realize this computer only “partially” belongs to you.
IIRC it used Qt with QML and WebEngine.

Not that surprising given Spotify started as a Qt application before it became a webview.
I have one and still waiting on an easy way to flash it on a Mac. So far it's either Windows or Linux. I'm sure it will come but for now it's kind of a chore.
I wouldn't mind going back, but I can't re-live the horrors of windows 8 or 8.1 ever again.
Why would you bother to use or even more so patch the official youtube client if not to sign in to your account? It's objectively shitter (bloated, buggy, full of dark patterns) than the open-source alternatives. NewPipe/PipePipe work beautifully without an associated account...
> I'm as pro-natal as they come, but a newborn should have your full undivided attention.

Exactly - the attention it takes has to come out of SOMETHING - whether it is your work or health or the child. You can see the difference between kids that have full undivided attention of someone who cares a lot about them (family members or a great paid caretaker) versus ones who are physically near parents but ignored (since the parent is looking at a screen focusing on work) versus ones who have been distracted by some electronic stimulant versus ones who have been outsourced to daycare where the caretaker ratio means babies don’t get full attention.

But even leaving aside what’s best for the child, I think it’s about getting the most out of your own parental experience. You only get so much time with your children. That time goes away in a blink. Be there for them as much as you can, and make the best of it. Making it “just work” with less than that may be something you end up regretting later.
What's a CPU that is faster in some given 1T workload? I am fairly sure this thing is the fastest out there.