skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Solutions searching for problems, can they succeed?
Interested in what may now be a somewhat contrarian idea. It's startup school 101 to avoid "SISP": Solutions in Search of a Problem. I think YC's startup school actually coined this acronym.

But I'm wondering, have great businesses and products started from this? There's plenty of downsides that have been discussed, but I'd like a different perspective too.

One could argue that anything that began organically as some techie's for-fun side project might fall under this category.

I'd even argue that something like ChatGPT, created by a (formerly) non-profit org, might qualify as a powerful example. I mean, a computer program that just talks back to you and answers generic questions? Sounds like a cool tech project, or 'solution' on the surface, without a specific problem in mind. Of course, now we see it has a transformative technology that at least has a monthly subscription business model that many people are willing to pay.

How about the VR headsets? I doubt the inventor(s) sat down with the explicit goal of solving a problem after extensive market research and customer interviews.

My initial take: on the surface I think this is a "high risk, high reward" approach to technology entrepreneurship. If you take the opposite approach, problem-focused, iteration-driven, lean startup, etc, you're far more likely to end up with something like payroll or accounting software. Not that there's anything wrong with stuff like that, it's very important in its own right to solve more mundane problems well.

Curious to hear your thoughts.
You can, but I think it might be a little hard to do so. I mean it is a well known thing and so people will game it, right? We have people grinding levels leetcode now to trick you. Of course you are probably savvy to that. But who knows what else they’ll do? Getting a good job is a life-changing event, so they are very motivated to trick you…

I love programming. How much? I’ve written a bunch of little programs that nobody else will ever see, just for fun and just for me. Why? I just enjoy doing it. It’s more like knitting than studying. Sometimes it will come in handy—once my boss had an idea an I got to say “oh, I actually implemented that for fun the other day,” which was very funny, but it isn’t intended to be useful and 99% of the time it is just a waste of time.
I agree with all that. But software development also often seems to have a strong thread that if you don't also do this for fun, you're not really A material--in a way that really doesn't apply to other engineering disciplines.

I don't see the same sort of pushback for people who do side-projects as a hobby.
Ideally you could this one step further and feed production logs, user session replays and feedback into the LLM. If the UX is what I'm optimizing for, I want it to have that context, not for it to speculate about performance issues that might not exist.
a) you are neurodivergent and want to drive better
b) you are not neurodivergent and want to drive better

a) you are unlikely to be, as there is no general ADHD medication.
if you are, you know that everyone has a different mechanism of action for the same drug. some people should be banned from driving immediately while using the drug, but there are indirect reasons for this.

b) no help. practice in a closed course

liquid carbon dioxide
The soft HDPE bottles are actually more heat and impact resistant than the rigid clear polycarbonate ones. They’re the standard recommendation for winter hiking.

https://momgoescamping.com/water-bottles-insulators-winter/
System76 has their own UEFI BIOS and EC firmware, but that doesn't even make it better since you can hypothetically buy a Clevo laptop and mod it to be a brother from another mother.
90% agree. Someone is a sucker if they work for their employer during their personal time. If someone wants to code for their employer by day and code for themselves by night, that’s great. I just hope they get enough sleep.
Thank you! I'm planning to ship in this weekend preset tags to make it even better
'We need to start thinking about this as a real public health concern'
I used this frequently, but it really requires your team to enable squashed merges and have consistent feature sizes.

Otherwise a person who commits often (had someone committing per line changed) will make it super noisy. And someone who merges in a giant branch will just blow up the screen for a bit.
Maybe a tangent but the embedded video does not work for me in both chrome and firefox on linux. It's a hevc .mov, a h264/AVC mp4 (or webm) would work almost everywhere.
Related and written by Felix himself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42587259
Working from the office means a pay cut
When working on useful projects with autonomy for money, you're not really losing out.
Also related and written by Felix himself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42587259
37. I wake up, usually between 4 and 5 (5-7 on the weekend), and get dressed. I turn on the PC in the office, turn on the kettle in the kitchen, go to the bathroom, back to the kitchen to make coffee in the press. Back to the PC, login and read some news while enjoying the first cup. Then I pick an album to listen to (from the fresh releases if it's Friday or Saturday) and start working.

Not sure how well my routine works for others, though ;)
The programmer succeeding because he loves to program is a "George Washington chopping the cherry tree" kind of anecdote Silicon Valley likes to represent themselves with. Nine out of 10 times, the fun kind of programming someone is doing during their nights and weekends has zero application to their professional life. Yes doing any kind of coding is a teaching moment, but living your life outside of a computer screen offers lessons as well.
Thank you for creating this. I took Latin in HS (over 30 years ago!) and would like to brush up.
You don’t accomplish things by setting wildly unrealistic goals that you know are unobtainable.

And he’s not going to completely reorganize society so that we can build cheap public transit. Especially not by running a “government agency” that can’t do anything other than make recommendations to the president.

Do you know how many similar commissions we’ve had to reduce waste and spending?
How is any of this introspective, reflective, or self-critical? The author was a caricature of silicon valley tech bro-ness throughout, followed by a final return to form by deciding to "study physics" in order to start another company and sound smart at VC parties. He ended where he started, and managed to produce a carbon copy blog post about how great fortune doesn't solve all problems somewhere along the way. The only thing missing was spiritual enlightenment and self-discovery through some combination of drugs or a trip to burning man.
Yeah, I'm not entirely sure who this system is for. A lot of automotive infotainment is AMD now (if you are gonna sell to console makers..) and ARM64 is a perfectly "sane" architecture that has very decent software support in everything you would need to make a cross-compiling toolchain. Ironically the kind of systems that don't have the latter generally can't be very well emulated (or bought as a workstation) either.

The last time I wished for a native high performance ARM64 system was using PyInstaller to deploy something not very important to an ARM64 based embedded system which needs the native environment. But that's the reason it was "not very important"; I won't live to see them make a sane Python deployment story.
When I was a teenager and while studying at university I used to spend a lot of my spare time coding. Then after I got a job as a developer this dropped off quite quickly, opting instead to socialise and pursue other hobbies in that time.

Since becoming a manager at work less of my time is actual coding, and in the last 6 months or so I have started to code a lot more on my own projects and I'm really enjoying it. It feels like overall there is a certain desire/capacity for it, and if that is getting used up at work, so be it, if not, then it fills up outside of work hours.

Either way, each to their own. Some people would probably love to spend more time coding or on other hobbies but have other commitments like family to consider.
The most ergonomic position is the next one. I have a mouse for each hand, and a track pad, and a sit/stand desk converter, and four chairs, some with and some without arms, and monitors on arms that can be easily repositioned. I'm always adjusting something, or using a different device or chair, and I alternate between sitting and standing a couple times each day. I also have a timer to remind me to stretch and takes walks once an hour. I guess what I'm trying to say is, you can code more on nights and weekends without spending too long at the computer (in the same position).
Good old Eve Online.
Even if someone exclusively writes software that ends up running on Linux servers, doesn't mean they don't appreciate various nice Mac-exclusive applications as a user during their workday.

An example: I love everything about the Things task management app so much that I would never choose to run a desktop OS it doesn't run on.
I don't know about horror, but for me there was definitely a sort of peace that comes with this understanding. If you have imposter syndrome, you've spent your whole life wondering when everyone is going to figure out that you're a dipshit, and I think that finally understanding that it's dipshits all the way up is perhaps the only cure to imposter syndrome.
Here is a fairly good lecture series on graduate level complexity theory that will help understand parts. At least why multiple iterations help but why they also aren't the answer to super human results.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLm3J0oaFux3b8Gg1DdaJOzYNs...
It's Google Cloud Platforms "AI" service[0], so actually more analogous to what is now called Azure AI Foundry[1], and what used to be called Azure OpenAI Studio.

Microsoft Copilot Studio[2] (formally Power Platform Power Virtual Agents) imho is unique in it's enterprise AI offering. I truly think Copilot Studio is going to be Microsoft's "killer app" when it comes to companies utilizing AI at scale internally, and not it's Azure service.

0. https://cloud.google.com/vertex-ai

1. https://ai.azure.com/

2. https://copilotstudio.microsoft.com
I'm in a non-tech job and I never quite got into a tech "career" but I've built my own tools that no SAAS offers and I spend some of my free time tweaking them and I feel proud the more I use them. Everyone in society benefits from a little DIY tech literacy, even those of us not FAANG caliber.
So the three powers system is broken? Almost "by design" one could say, although it seemed to have worked for a while, maybe when the level of sophistication was lower (but whose level?). Or maybe there was a time when the actors tried to use the system, not actively seeking tricks to abuse it?
Here's a steetview image of the town the linked advocate/author lives in.

It would be desolate if it wasn't for the greass.

https://www.google.com/maps/@51.6853372,-9.9542862,3a,75y,18...
Arketa (YC S20) Is Hiring an Engineer Who Can Design
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I pretty much always start with types/signatures when sketching out a design. I guess if there is a complicated algorithm, I might start with pseudo code for it, but even then, I probably want to start with what it's inputs are and what it's outputs are.
The status quo tool Debezium is annoying/heavy because it’s a banana that comes attached to the Java, Kafka Connect, Zookeeper jungle - it’s a massive ecosystem and dependency chain you need to buy into. The Kafka clients outside of Java-land I’ve looked are all sketchy - in Node, KafkaJS went in maintained for years, Confluent recently started maintaining rdkafka-based client that’s somehow slower than the pure JS one and breaks every time I try to upgrade it. The Rust Kafka client has months-old issues in the latest release where half the messages go missing and APIs seem to no-op, and any version will SIGSEGV if you hold it wrong - obviously memory unsafe. The official rdkafka Go client depends on system C library package versions “matching up” meaning you often need a newer librdkafka and libsasl which is annoying; the unofficial pure-go one looks decent though.

Overall the Confluent ecosystem feels targeted at “data engineer” use-cases so if you want to build a reactive product it’s not a great fit. I’m not sure what the performance target is of the Debezium Postgres connector maintainers but I get the sense they’re not ambitious because there’s so little documentation about performance optimization; data ecosystem feels contemporary with “nightly batch job” kind of thing vs product people today who want 0ms latency.

If you look at backend infrastructure there’s a clear trope of “good idea implemented in Java becomes standard, but re-implementing in $AOT_COMPILED_LANGUAGE gives big advantage:

- Cassandra -> ScyllaDB

- Kafka -> RedPanda, …

- Zookeeper -> ClickHouse Keeper, Consul, etcd, …

- Debezium -> All these thingies

There’s also a lot of hype around Postgres right now, so a bit of VC funded Cambrian explosion going on and I think a lot these will die off as a clear winner emerges.
I work at a small company and I do try select for people that create because of internal drive. It doesn't strictly have to be programming, but it tends to be. I agree not every company needs this. It could even be a negative for some type of work.
I went from a gaming addiction at 17 to working at Google and Tesla by 21
Go read a book, contribute to linux kernel, eat a cheeseburger, get in a nice hotel, watch movies, learn to cook, drive though the country, befriend locals, start a wine collection, earn a master's degree, publish papers..

The author seems to put great value on doing grandiose things, so those suggestions may seem frivolous.

It's a respectable goal to pursue huge achievements in professional life, but please be aware that it involves lots of: (a) talk to other people and (b) doing mundane stuff most of the time. It all depends on how hard you want it.
Isn't it typically a flag, nowadays? Even for python, getting an install that works on ARM from X86 is largely `pip install --platform manylinux2014_aarch64 --only-binary=:all:`, if I have it right.

I confess it took me longer to find that flag than I'd care to admit. But AWS Lambda using ARM made this something worth finding. And many of the alternatives on how to get the artifacts to deploy did focus on containers for emulation, if I'm remembering correctly.
Except it's not. The word "design" originated from the notion of marking out or pointing out. To do it well is to take the problem apart into small challenges that can be solved, with a plan on how to make the pieces hang together again.

Design often includes algorithms, which don't devolve merely to types. So this statement only makes tangential sense if all you're ever building is CRUD applications.
So he did manage to turn copper and tin into gold, just indirectly ;) Alchemy vindicated, at last!
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I wake up without alarm between 6 and 7. For the next few hours I sit and enjoy coffee. Some days I take my kid to preschool or make him breakfast if my wife is busy.
First-mover advantage (or close to first) has a lot to do with it, I imagine. Ellison has been resting on his laurels for over four decades.
Kinda funny I was writing a chess engine in Python that was able to beat my tester (who beats the average person but is near the bottom of the bracket at the chess club) with just 6 plies of alpha-beta.

He tells me he'd be happy if it played at the same level but was faster (play more games) and also that if I want to take it to the chess club it has to respect time control. Supporting something like XBoard and UCI would also be a hassle in Python because it needs a comms thread that can interrupt a think thread.

I rewrote it in Java and the process was super-fast because I could cut-and-paste the data in the test suite also I had mastered the signs in the negamax algorithm (I screwed that up and it discovered this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fool%27s_mate !)

It's different from a lot of applications work because it's really a simple program and doesn't have the panopoly of features that you miss when you try something like

https://mobilesyrup.com/2024/09/24/sonos-employees-app-botch...

the hard part is that right now it is spending roughly equal time in evaluation and managing transposition tables. I think I can speed up eval about 20x which is going to make me code up some kind of specialized off-heap hashtable.
How to store multiple on/off states into a single integer
All the birds in the forest they bitterly weep
Saying, "Where shall we shelter or where shall we sleep?"
For the Oak and the Ash, they are all cutten down
And the walls of bonny Portmore are all down to the ground.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonny_Portmore
> When working on useful projects with autonomy for money, you're not really losing out.

You are if you're only making salary.
I place a lot of the blame for the success of this phishing attack with how the Chrome Web Store, and Google more broadly, is operated.

If you train your developers that you are willing to unilaterally and suddenly disable published extensions for editorial, non-security-related reasons (which the article's screenshots indicate was the excuse) - and that it's completely expected that such an action might occur on Christmas, and a well-founded one based on history - that's a poor developer experience.

And on top of that, if Google has the ability for an OAuth app to get extension upload permissions, without screaming as part of the OAuth authorization process "This will provide third parties unrelated to Google the ability to update extensions. Be sure that this is intended." - then that is bad OAuth design that exacerbates the above problem.

If you're designing a software supply chain, and you have a choice to allow updates over API, the onus is on you to either ensure your authentication UX causes spear phishing targets to think twice before they let themselves get pwned. And I get that there are certainly different teams working on the OAuth frontend and the Chrome Web Store backend - but if the backend team doesn't have the willpower and/or ability to have red-teamed this exact spear phishing situation, and have escalated their security concerns to the frontend team, that's an organizational failure.
Pretty sure Lenin wasn't writing about ennui.
How common is it for Apple to pay 8-figure settlements for spurious correlations?
You might be right. I'll try to remember to add a note on that.
No, this post is more, and differently, informative.
Personally, I avoid all side projects at home because they turn into a huge distraction for me at work. It’s hard for me not to think about them all day.

So the whole “program for fun to get a job” thing has always felt pretty dumb to me. Companies should only care about what I get done at work. What I do at home is my business.
Iterating over some huge search space in an essentially sequential manner is generally not going to be nearly performant as simply selecting an odd number at random. You could try using a generating polynomial instead such as f(x) = x^2 + x + 41 but even that isn't going to help much in the long run. (There are Diophantine equations which one day may prove useful for generating random primes however AFAICT finding efficient solutions is still currently considered a hard problem.)
OpenAI offers free daily tokens (up to 11M) for sharing API usage data
The downside part is "it is not an area where I have capacity or willingness to innovate". I'd happily follow, I don't care enough to lead the innovation.
Create a Life You Want to Live for the Next 10 Years
> ofc it also affects YouTubers who didn't have a deal with honey

Yes, that was my primary point. And It may hurt them even more.

e.g If you're a tech YouTuber and Marquee took a deal, odds are you will feel the effects more than he would a A multimillionaire and industry known influencer. Because you'll probably have a huge overlapping audience with him.

Also, remember that a honey spent billions advertising this. I doubt this level of budget was limited only to YouTubers. Plenty of Instagram and TikTok and Twitter influencers to target.
And to respond to your edit:

The study you cited doesn't appear to have anything to say about the general appearance of consciousness, so I don't think it's really relevant to our discussion here.

> We still do not understand the evolutionary emergence of consciousness and why it appears to be so rare, so I’m not going to act like I have the answers there.

Yes, I agree 100%. But because of this, I don't think you're correct in claiming outright that consciousness transcends evolutionary necessity (this is a positive claim that requires evidence). It's OK to say we don't know!
A lot of people are complaining that this seems too "obvious" in one way or another, but I think it can be useful to write down and be explicit about such an important underlying fact of programming. Completely understanding the types in your program forces you to think carefully about the domain.