skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Swinging big or not, the odds of (by definition of startup) "failure" are high. Therefore, you might as well swing big. A swing small experiment that doesn't connect is still a "failure".

Put another way, there is an endless supply of noise (read: competition for attention). If you're not swinging big enough to cut through that clutter odds are good you're just adding to the clutter. That's going to be an endless struggle.

Less risk is actually more risk.
The Slow Death of Neon
It is, until it's not. It's a classic Tragedy of the commons.
Then what, print it out to play on the kitchen table?
Why would you feel like you’re wasting your time if you care about the person and it’s important to them?
Does Task Complexity Moderate the Benefits of Liveness? A Controlled Experiment
Do you maybe have a constructive advice for people that need to return errors that demand different behaviour from the calling code?

I gave an example higher in the thread: if searching for the entity that owns the creds.json files fails, we want to return a 404 HTTP error, but if creds.json itself is missing, we want a 401 HTTP error. What would be the idiomatic way of achieving this in your opinion?
I called them readline bindings because more people are familiar with readline than emacs. Furthermore macos certainly doesn't take enough of emacs outside of readline bindings to make me comfortable referring to them as emacs bindings.

I hadn't even noticed that zsh and fish used something other than readline. To me, they effectively are using readline as that's the name for the functionality that's fulfilled.

I don't really give a damn what they're called or why they exist, so I'll happily call them emacs bindings if that makes more sense to you.
Every religion thinks they're the "purer" form of religion though, don't they? x)
> it is freaking hard to commit to 3-5 years of virtually no salary to maybe get to the same outcome you would have had with a funded business.

I agree and I disagree.

It is hard to bootstrap a product. It's even harder to bootstrap a product that folks want to buy. It's even harder to do that when the prevailing wisdom on this (and other tech sites) is to go the VC-funded route.

The VC funded route -- for the vast, vast, vast majority of software businesses ends up being the exact same as the bootstrapped route -- except that you lose one avenue when you find out your business isn't "hyper-growth" or isn't going to be a huge as you claimed in your pitchdeck to the VCs. You lose the ability to pare back and to be what is described as a "lifestyle business". On failure, the business gets sold or stripped for parts, unless the founder can somehow get the VCs to agree to let them 'buy it back' or write-off their investment and give it back.

Bootstrapping means taking that risk on yourself; but it also means control over your options, and that is one fundamental strength to bootstrapping you don't get with VC funded startups.

Absolutely, it's no salary or the aptly named ramen profitability for a long time if your marketing is not aligned with the folks that will buy your software, or if your software really is just selling a solution to a problem no one actually cares about.

The 'hard part' isn't the engineering. It isn't the technology. The hard part is the marketing -- the connecting the hopefully expensive problem you solve to the right folks who want to buy that solution.

To your second part, I wholly agree that selling $10/month licenses is not a viable way forward if you want to be anything more than a solopreneuer.

But to do that, you need to hone your positioning so that you get in front of the folks with money who need to solve the problem your solution solves.

In your case, it looks like you run a web-auditing tool (according to your bio) called caido.io; and it looks like you're targetting basically everyone who needs to audit a website.

In the thought that "there are more fish in the ocean so why not fish there", that is a seemingly sound idea.

But you don't really want to spend your time trying to fish in the ocean if you have a barrel you could fish in and get the same result... dinner. (I did not come up with this metaphor, that was Jonathan Stark -- who writes a lot about positioning in this context).

The question you have to ask yourself is, are you positioning your product so that the CISOs or the large cyber-security firms would want to buy it? And if you did, do you think they'd trust your product at a mere $25 per month?

Anyway, the point to all this is that the problem is learning how to position the thing you build and get it in front of the right folks, and that's a marketing problem, not a technology problem, and that's something that we as engineers have ignored for far too long collectively.

I wish you the best of luck with your product -- we need more small software businesses in this world!
One fun fact I learned while at uni was that _technically_ referring to the ethernet connector as RJ45 is incorrect, and 8P8C would be the correct term [1]. But obviously, these days everyone knows what RJ45 is, and almost no one knows what 8P8C is.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modular_connector#8P8C
It's because you can sell "Token-Based UI Architecture" for $1,000 an hour, but you can't sell "CSS variables", so they try to make it sound as complex as possible.
The protocol isn't really an issue for the use-case you talk about. I founded the Snikket project, which aims squarely at the family-and-friends use case you mention (after all, it was made to scratch my own itch - my family's excessive use of WhatsApp for communicating with each other). I can tell you that my family don't care a bit whether Snikket uses IRC, XMPP or Matrix or some real-time Gemini equivalent.

There may be some scalability differences between different protocols/implementations for the admin of the service, but Snikket fits comfortably on even low-end Raspberry Pi devices, and literally over half of the typical resource usage is by the web dashboard (yay Python).

So what difference does the protocol make? It can make a difference to the developer experience. If all you want to do is exchange text messages, then yeah, XMPP and Matrix are absolutely overkill. But - especially for a family-and-friends use case - people also want file sharing, audio/video calls, and all that stuff. It very quickly gets quite complex to support all this stuff, especially in a way that allows you to evolve the protocol over time (trust me, what you think of as core messaging features today, were not a thing 10+ years ago, and messaging in 10+ years will also involve a new set of features).

There will always be a set of users for whom plain text messaging is enough (90% of my own daily communication is via messaging in a terminal app). However that set does not intersect significantly with the general population, and practically none of my family members would accept such a solution as a replacement for WhatsApp.
It's simple, portable, flexible, and packed with useful features - I like it.
There is nothing in the Bible that describes the practice they promote. Sure, there is a claim that people who are filled with the Holy Spirit will not die if bitten by snakes, but no description of it being used as a ritual practice and you could claim it contradicts “do not put the Lord God to the test”.

I have no idea if there is extra-biblical evidence for people doing that in early churches, and whether those churches were considered orthodox or heretical at the time, or perhaps the 1st century equivalent of “we don’t know yet, we’re just trying stuff out to see what works”.
Grubhub to pay $25M for deceiving customers with junk fees
> That's part of the issue, such software is not illegal to sell compiled binaries by the licensee.

It would be under the proposed law, which is basically the point of the proposed law. Closed software is only closed because the (regulated) market enforces its being closed, even if it's contrary to the interests of everyone but the producer of said software. The point of said regulation would be to give a (regulated) market incentive to provide actually free software. Hardware manufacturers should not rely on software moats to stay afloat!

And of course with a "free market", people would be buying bricks in boxes thinking they're buying routers or cameras.
Table salt is safe, but you definetively not want to eat a full glass of table salt. I guess it's fatal.

Sugar is perhaps safe, there is a test for diabetes during pregnancy that consist in drinking a (small) glass of very concentrated sugar solution. I think it's not a full glass, so don't try it without medical doctor authorization and supervision.

A glass of food oil? Does it give you diarrhea?

A glass of alcohol? It's like two glasses of vodka. I think you get alcoholic coma or worse.

Also, the level of purification is different for food/medicine and other applications. Don't try to eat the salt that is sold to clean snow.
Free Your Vacuum from the Cloud
Verbosity of Coding Styles
Rio terminal creator is joining Charm.sh
Does not "understand" traffic situation...
https://youtu.be/ysAPCAZ-Omc?t=250

Does not see the ambulance...
https://youtu.be/ysAPCAZ-Omc?t=361

Does not recognize the school zone...just follows the vehicle ahead...
https://youtu.be/ysAPCAZ-Omc?t=1283

Conflicted at the STOP sign...
https://youtu.be/ysAPCAZ-Omc?t=1327
and again...
https://youtu.be/ysAPCAZ-Omc?t=1566

Wont work well with rest of traffic
https://youtu.be/kTX2A07A33k?t=809

I wonder it will play with the self driving taxi mirage...
https://youtu.be/kTX2A07A33k?t=848

No driver would stop in this situation...
https://youtu.be/kTX2A07A33k?t=1420

Not yet there Leon. Give it another 10 years...

The more preloaded maps and selected videos of Tesla
fanbois are posted, the more dangerous the false sense of security.
I am sure however it will drive even more the totally
absurd Tesla stock price...
Ok, rich text is always a good litmus test for a gui library. I get from this that ImGui is unfortunately not based on a good, versatile graphics engine.
a BTRFS subvolume can be exported as a snapshot, and this can be passed around rather easily.
i know the concern mounting BTRFS, but there are windows drivers for that as well, and you can also mount it via WSL nowadays, to have proper linux tooling.

the approach of having a custom storage blob with pointer references which is something i consider as well, will play around with that during the holidays and do some experimenting.
thanks for your input.
the pytest example screams for @assert as a macro, if only the language supported it
> Constantly winning in a competitive environment with no runaway feedback loops[0] is evidence of cheating.

Right. How did Usain Bolt cheat? How did Michael Phelps cheat? How did ABBA cheat?

> any good profit-seeking actor will aim at becoming a monopolist in their market segment

Of course. And then hackers redefine the market segment to encompass that businesses product and ta-da, you have a monopoly. Like Apple.

If we're talking about real monopolies, then I couldn't agree more. But what hackers and the EU are doing is redefining monopoly in a dishonest way because they have personal grudges against a company.

> The donkey needs to believe they can win, so it keeps running, but it also can never be allowed to actually get their prize, because then it'll stop.

Here's something to blow your mind: The donkey enjoys running. Or let's take a real life example: sled dogs. They love pulling the sled. Entrepreneurs love working and love competing. Those who don't love it usually pull out of the game with their profits way before they have even national impact.

This is a huge divide in attitude I've seen everywhere in the world in my life. You have category X of people who see all kind of work as an immense suffering. They complain endlessly, do the minimum effort, and never get anywhere. And you have category Y of people who love working, because it's doing something productive and learning. That doesn't mean that they're satisfied with being abused wage slaves. Rather it is the first category who never advances in life, because they think it's all a scam. People in the second category also fail a lot because they take chances. But they usually get up again.

> Who's turning a blind eye to it? Fraud and scams are the base state of the market; it's what it decays to if left to its own devices. Regulations are there to counteract this tendency.

All governments and law enforcement seem to be turning a blind eye to it. About 50% of advertisements on Facebook and Instagram are outright scams, ie physical products from brand names that are advertised at bargain prices and if you "buy" it you will not get delivery because it is an outright scam. US and EU governments should fine Meta billions of dollars for having their main source of income from organized crime and fraud. But they are focused on completely irrelevant crap like app stores. Talk about sieving mosquitoes and swallowing camels.
The one they gave me seems to vibrate when I face any direction but only when I leave the house.
Thank you! I was searching for this the whole morning!
“Less risk is actually more risk.” - Maybe the title of Nassim Talebs next book?
Not too sure what you mean by intrinsincs.

The `json` gem is implemented in C, so it's a black box for YJIT (the reference implementation's JIT).

The TruffleRuby JIT used to interpret C extensions with sulong so it could JIT across languages barrier, but AFAIK they recently stopped doing that because of various compatibility issues.

Also on TruffleRuby the JSON parser is implemented in C, but the encoder is in pure Ruby [0]

[0] https://github.com/ruby/json/blob/e1f6456499d497f33f69ae4c1a...
>> So your position is that we should allow criminals to launder the proceeds of violent and organised crime

> Your response is similar to someone who opposes privacy activists and their fight for E2E encryption saying "so your position is that children should be sexually exploited online".

Re-read my accusation. I never stated that you support committing crimes, I stated that you believe that, once the crime is committed, the money can be entered into the legitimate system.

With that said, let's look at your clarification:

> No, a person who opposes heavy-handed, invasive KYC and AML laws

> their transactions shouldn't be designed in such a way that it also penalizes the vast majority of people

I need to see evidence that the "vast majority" of people are being "penalized" by this system. The most "inconvenience" I ever faced was having to provide bank statements when applying for a mortgage to prove the deposit was legitimately my money. There was a post just last week from patio11 that makes me doubt your claim that the "vast majority" of people are inconvenienced by AML. In addition, I watched this video by a former financial services advisor [1] that also suggests to me that your claims are wildly overblown.

> Also, like many other kinds of privacy, financial privacy should be a right that isn't exclusive to government black budgets and well-connected elites.

Weirdly "well-connected elites" are the people most inconvenienced by AML, KYC and PEP regulations (see above references), so I think your grasp of the issue is not aligned with reality.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAFlRSftffc
>knowledge accumulated and scientists / engineers created from them can bring success to other areas

Japanese companies and institutions hate sharing knowledge (read: trade secrets) with each other.
Show HN: Txt2musicxml – Converting simple text into beautiful chord sheets
I wrote a CLI tool that converts simple chords text (i.e. "Cmaj7 | A7b9 | Dm7 | G7b9,13") to MusicXML, which can be converted to a nice looking PDF using any music notation software. You can think of it as "Markdown for chords".

Repo: https://github.com/noamtamir/txt2musicxml
It's not a binary decision though. Just because the article arrives at overkill for most things in my opinion doesn't mean sentinel errors or wrapping errors in custom types should be avoided at all costs in all situations.

In my experience, it's good and healthy to introduce this additional context on the boundaries of more complex systems (like a database, or something accessing an external API and such), especially if other code wants to behave differently based on the errors returned (using errors.Is/errors.As).

But it's completely not necessary for every single plumping function starts inspecting and wrapping all errors it encounters, especially if it cannot make a decision on these errors or provide better context.
> If you never take big swings and big risks and are happy with small wins and stable growth you'll never win the big prize.

If you do, you still won't win the big prize. The people who do win the big prize are so few, even in the US, that it's an almost certainty you won't do it. Perhaps you're right that there must be thousands of losers for even a single winner to come up, but that seems so inefficient I doubt that's really true.
It is very well designed, the palette makes the information easy to grok as an overview - without being overwhelming.

Impressively subtle design.
Awesome, will be learning a lot from this. I feel this is much of an operational playbook as one could get.
The problem is that a checked exception makes sense only at a relatively high level of the app, but they are used extensively at a low level
James Brooke becoming the monarch of Sarawak is another interesting case.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Brooke
Ask HN: What Vim habits did you need to unlearn?
If you don't use Vim, know that it has probably the steepest learning curve of any text editor (or at least non-IDE editors) and many users pick up habits along the way they need to unlearn.

I'll start: I need to unlearn pressing `i` when I mean to press `a`. `i` moves one character back while `a` doesn't which is what I want most of the time.

And apparently many users need to get used to `h j k l` over arrow keys, though I already binded `CMD h j k l` on my mac since that's much more efficient than arrow keys.
The Hidden Autopilot Data That Reveals Why Teslas Crash
My wife is a social worker at the county welfare office and swears there is a strong correlation between phase of the moon and the nature of her work with the homeless. To the point where where she checks the calendar to schedule more time for crisis handling around the time of the full moon.
Thanks!

Sorry about misuse of “intrinsics”. There is a simdjson library that uses SIMD instructions for speed. Would such an approach be feasible in the ruby json library?
The Act doesn't actually require him to do this. More detailed explanation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42439911
First, if the author is going to read this, let me thank you for your work. As a Rails developer, I find the premises very relatable.

Again, as a Rails developer, a pain point is different naming conventions regarding Ruby hash keys versus JS/JSON object keys. JavaScript/JSON typically uses camelCase, while Ruby uses snake_case. This forces me to perform tedious and often disliked transformations between these conventions in my Rails projects, requiring remapping for every JSON object. This process is both annoying and potentially performance-intensive. What alternative approaches exist, and are there ways to improve the performance of these transformations?
> only semi-literate

Seems very possible when you consider that this is before the Roman Aristocracy decided to muscle in on the action and take over the church. Many of the original disciples and apostles were semi-literate working class types from the north country (see “nothing good could ever come from Nazareth”) and Paul, the one who wrote the most (but even then likely dictated a lot of it) was a late addition to the team. Sure he recruited a bunch of possibly “middle class” tradesmen and business owners to set up churches in their homes (Priscilla and Aquila, famously) but it was still mostly an underground movement among the slave and worker classes before Constantine decided he could put it to his own use.
My family bought our first own PC in the early 2000s (maybe 2002?) - it came with 128 MB RAM, of which 32 were used by the integrated S3 GPU.

I did install a graphical Linux on the whopping 96 MB RAM, and it did run reasonably well, without any issues that I noticed. (Granted, I deleted it a day or two later, when my 15 years old self wanted to play Diablo2, but couldn't install it on Linux)
Maybe our timescale of what is 'modern' is not so modern at all.
What Is a Bitcoin Address?
The trend of Custom app development tailored to your business needs exclusively is amazing. Your business can smoothly outshine others when adapt to custom app solutions. Can’t believe it is beneficial or not? Learn the favorable reasons for using custom app development!
I would argue it is less healthy for the economy. Large companies are very good at extracting value, not necessarily producing it.
The guy is so out of touch it's like a cartoon. Like, right, why did they think of that?! Just create something that's worth several thousands a month instead of a small value product!!! And get all the big companies who can actually afford that kind of thing to buy your product!!! How hard can that be?
oh wow, I live just round the corner from there. I guess I'll go check out if there's still a mosque there
> Climate is something one lives with. Given the choice between Bakersfield CA and Chicago, I’d choose Chicago any day, only because the opportunities are greater in Chicago. I absolutely loved living in Chicago. Even Seattle where I live now is too small for me.

The data on population changes in the USA indicates the people want to avoid freezing temperatures over hot temperatures.
unfortunately it's not. please try it on your computer!
Learnings Comparing AI Agent Frameworks LangGraph, CrewAI, AG, Semantic Kernel
After a week of researching different AI agent frameworks, I’ve put together insights that might help other builders:

Ecosystem: LangGraph, CrewAI, and Autogen (plus the widely discussed LangChain) are the most commented right now. Semantic Kernel is there too, but it’s more niche.

Autogen Warning: Autogen is popular but not production-ready. It’s undergoing rapid changes and may merge into Semantic Kernel, forcing future migration work.

Ease of Use vs Customization: CrewAI is the simplest to get started with. LangGraph gives you more freedom if you need complexity and flexibility.

Framework Popularity vs. Utility: Popular frameworks aren’t always the most stable or developer-friendly. Don’t base your decision only in Github stars

Semantic Kernel: More oriented towards C#/.NET community. Not very appealing for Python devs

Takeaway: If you’re just starting, go simple. Try CrewAI or even a no-code tool like n8n. Only switch to something more robust (like LangGraph) when you hit the limits.

What are your experiences with AI Agent frameworks?
There is this great serie of Peter Zhu too. https://blog.peterzhu.ca/ruby-c-ext/
Even if it's C extension, it helps understanding some concepts.

But I agree with you.
thank you! YouTube has a player API for controlling embedded videos with JS
> Plausible explanations exist for the large neuron numbers in the outer brain, but not for the inner brain, and we propose new research directions to remedy this.

Going on a limb here, but perhaps we shouldn’t modify biological composition of the human brain.
Super handy! I guess I'll get started with Crew AI then!