skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Small Ideas vs. Big Ideas?
I've been thinking about this one for a while, does it make sense to work on small ideas? Something like a utility a PDF converter or a small game and attempt to make it into an asset generating $10K - $30K in MRR? Or is it better to aim for building something as big as you can?

My thinking around that is it's pretty much the same effort to build something small or something big (especially since you have to start small to go big). Might as well go for the big ideas. But curious if others have different views (or similar for that matter)?
I have bouts of BPPV like this, an extremely common condition which is vertigo and/or tinnitus due to calcium crystals in the ear interacting with either hearing and/or balance.

I get bouts of this from wearing sealed headphones for too long (not specifically noise cancelling headphones but pretty relevant since noise cancelling headphones almost always form an airtight seal with the ear to work so they too fall into this category).

I think for myself there's certain atmospheric conditions that lead to the otoconia (the crystals that cause it) irritating my hearing and sealed over the ear headphones are a huge cause for me.

Might be worth looking into. The treatment for BPPV is to move your head in specific ways to shake the crystals out which is damn simple to do too so if it is the cause it's actually quite treatable.

https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/treatment-tests-and-t...
You're right, but progressives treat crime statistics as dog whistles for racism, which to be fair isn't uncommon. However, you can make a very similar "woke" argument. Much of crime is caused by centuries of systemic racism that Singapore and China never experienced, so you can't do an apple to apple comparison between incarcerations per capita.

Overall, Singapore and China are significantly more willing to sacrifice freedom in exchange for security. There is more surveillance and no trial by jury, for example.
Yup, that's the one I had. Best keyboard I ever used on a pocket device. So I used your calculator, a little.
> Horizon Worlds continues to look like a product with leaders who don't actually want to use a virtual world, or understand the appeal. There is no amount of money which can fix that.

Hmmm people worth millions of dollars, who basically won in real life and can experience/afford pretty much anything they desire don't see the appeal in locking themselves up in some sort of virtual wii sport looking universe

Perplexing...

Everywhere I look I only see desperate techbros trying to keep the money printing machine running. I'm still not convinced anything good came out of tech after google maps
I wonder if you could turn it into a graph by adding connections between the two most similar entries until everything is connected.
Well, do you have any idea what software you're pulling (and under what licenses) if you run `apt install vim`?

Because let me tell you, if you think it's just vim, you're quite mistaken. And if you're distributing a docker image that contains vim, even for non-commercial purposes, it's technically your job to know. And perhaps to extend anyone downloading that docker image the offer of getting the source code for the specific version of any GPL software it might include, which it's up to you to archive.
> it helped me immensely in life

you're making me question what I should do lol.
Author of memreserver (one of the mentioned userspace workarounds) here. I've debugged this a few years back, only public comment I can quickly find is [1]. I also remember some mailing list discussions, but it basically came down to the isuse that Linux didn't have staggered suspend hooks that reliably ran before disks and parts of the memory subsystem were frozen. Apparently this is now possible. Sadly the Freedesktop Gitlab doesn't seem indexable so this knowledge seems to have gotten lost.

[1] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/2125#note_17...
> This did cost us about 8,000 € in Germany.

The apparently extensive legal assessment you just described costed just 8'000 euro?

I am sorry but that had to be some hasty review at best. Do you take the full legal risk in case any of your customers would be found in violation of privacy laws because of using your service?

For reference, with similar hourly rates as Germany, reviewing a standard apartment-purchase contract cost me ~3500 euro.
Arbitraging is so 2024. The future is prediction market manipulation/crowd funding. Imagine shorting "asteroid hitting earth" and using the proceeds to divert the asteroid.
Really not seeing the forest through the trees on this one. The president is not supposed to have unilateral authority to axe written law. He's trimming the legislative branch, not the budget.
I am peripheral to cybersecurity, I work in process (GRC).

AI isn't going to fix your security problems, in fact, it is the cause of security problems you will face in the future because your employees are using it and leaking data that should probably be confidential. I've got clients whose senior management is pushing AI in to their businesses without considering access control and security. I've already seen dozens of really bad practices (how about every employee can read a transcript of every meeting, including management ones where employee performance is discussed on an individual level and you can search for your name?) and that's just within the last year.

Cybersecurity is not full, and it's underfunded. Thank the tech gods that "certifications" (ISO, SOC, etc.) are seen as marketable and are causing funding increases in cybersecurity for some organizations.
A quip I'm often fond of that I think I stole from an old web comic eons ago

"I can't ever get even with past-me, and I'm already on thin ice with future-me"
There’s also the claims to Tibet and Xinjiang…
I learned about Butler and his letter from George Dyson's book, "Darwin among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence" -- it's a very entertaining account. Butler was quite a character.

(If I recall correctly I learned about Dyson's book from a postscript to Neal Stephenson's "Quicksilver.")
Ah yeah I mean there's always some big archive that is constantly dodging takedowns, I find it hard to keep up as these tend to go down every few months and you need to know the new one somehow
The installment of kleptocracy was meticulously planned in advance, despite Trump making it look chaotic. He creates chaos, but behind the scenes the plan is implemented, by people that are loyal-to-death MAGA (the procedures selected out anyone with a modicum of honesty). The tech oligarchs vowed obedience to Trump. There has been an endless stream of sane-washing, false balance, getting the right nut jobs in the right places, buying twitter, buying the Supreme Court etc.
With god speed they shook out science and institutions, to ensure critical people are gone. This might remind you something about history, and that might trigger the wrong response from you.

Content on social networks is suppressed, eg pro-Ukraine voices has been silenced for a long time now on Twitter. Then suddenly problems with tags on other social networks. Content disappears. Bezos sinks on his knees to save his enterprises.

It has been an enormous project, with many not knowing they worked for it.

It is not insane to imagine that the most influential forum on tech incubation, the breeding ground, is actively being undermined to reach a political and moral understanding of issues that might result in a counter movement.

There can be a group of some genuinely brainwashed people that take this as their identity, sure, but then still. All it tells is that the social system here is politically exploited. Don't tell me that side would absolutely not do that.
Do you have to sign noncompete before joining the job or after?

If before, why not find another job? Is anyone forcing you to accept a job with noncompete?

If after, they should be banned.
TFA notes that it may not have been declared legal. Rescinding a memo doesn't reverse existing case law; the meaning of said case law is subject to some disagreements (that the memo sought to clarify/remove).
Plane crashes and flips on landing in Toronto
Well yes, but keep in mind the homeless population is still a minority. Apparently SF has a homeless population of 10k out of 900k people. This is your minority.

>The people who end up in truly dire circumstances have backstabbed everyone who ever trusted or helped them.

Or their family backstabbed them, if they ever had one (this article has a case study on someone raised out of an orphanage). Or this continually individualistic society has loosened support networks so you never truly got "friends". Or you simply got priced out because rent became 3k and you're not a silicon valley engineer.

Not all homeless people are drug users. Just the ones you remember most.
Setting doesn't exist on my os, and I certainly would not approve of a setting that gives people license to do (imo) shitty things to the user experience just because there's an obscure setting somewhere.

It's your site, you can do what you want; it's my browser, I will close tabs that annoy me with extreme prejudice.
Thing is, trying to make everything individually testable in tiny bits takes a lot of effort that wouldn't otherwise be needed. Furthermore, with all the mocking this usually requires, you end up with tons of extraneous code that now needs to be maintained as well (and by very nature of mocks, you'll have to fix them every time the corresponding real code changes behavior observable across the boundary). In practice, the ostensible benefit of knowing exactly what the problem is as soon as you see the test failure is usually dwarfed by all these costs. And, at the same time, the more mocks you have, the less likely your tests are to catch real issues.

Now, as you rightly note, in many cases there's already an obvious component boundary that is inherent in the design. And then it makes perfect sense to write functional tests for individual components along those boundaries. And in some cases, the component may be "library-like", and those tests will end up looking a lot like your typical unit test, where individual classes and even methods are covered one by one. But most classes and methods in a typical app aren't like that.
For reference, the very first thing on the HN Guidelines⁽¹⁾ says:

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics

and:

If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

but people keep submitting stories where politics is the primary focus anyways.

Personally, I come to HN to read tech (and some tech-adjacent) news. There are plenty of other places to discuss things considered "off-topic" for HN.

⁽¹⁾ https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I just spent 5 years of my life building such a system. Then we were asked to do it again (a refresh of the refresh, if you will) and everyone marvels that suddenly we can do everything both fast and correct.

Well, we just spend 5 years training the team on how to build the old refresh, and now the new refresh can be done properly.
Too bad it's in node
Completely. But security is only optional until it isn't.
HL2 on Steam had an achievement called "flushed" if you killed a combine with a gravity gun toilet.

I was about 15, HL2 was my first "real" video game that I bought with money, the xbox did not exist in my country and I've never heard of game achievements before. In the second last act of the game, in the push towards the citadel through waves and waves of combine, I was low on ammo, and stresses out. I picked up my gravity gun and started lobbing junk to the enemies to get away from them. I picked up a toilet and chucked it into a whole pile of combine. As I paused to have a brief chuckle about the absurdity, Steam chimed with that achievement.

It was as if GabeN Himself looked over my shoulder and went "heh, nice" when I did it. Truly magical and a gaming highlight for me.
This happens to me all the time, but mostly with work code.

I'm under pressure, I have to deliver, things get rewritten many times, edge cases are found and fixed in production after they slipped through multiple qas but need to be fixed instantly or we lose money.

It happens.

But personal code? I am almost always proud of my work. It shows in general I was not under pressure and enjoying building it.

Even my code from the first year of programming, it shows it was made to make a point in writing a nice solution.

I may cringe at times, but still proud.

Context does matter, and code quality is more often than not a byproduct of our emotional state rather than skills.
> has verifiably silly things about software design and development

Even if you're willing to ignore everything else you said, you'd think a group like Hacker News commenters would recognize how obviously out of touch Musk is with anything software related.
It's mentioned on IBM's site:

https://www.ibm.com/history/social-security-act

https://www.ibm.com/history/punched-card#The+Social+Security...

And the SSA site mentions using IBM machines for it in 1936. IBM machines only used IBM cards:

https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v69n2/v69n2p55.html

The checks used to pay people were also IBM punchcards.
> For all the outrage, I yet have to see a single person in Argentina produce a TXHASH that proves they put money on the project.

Normally people here (arg) don't follow politicians they don't like on X. It's probable that most argentines that put in any money were his own followers. Among those, there were very well known influencers that actually did complain about the whole issue saying they lost money but they later deleted their posts (Fran Fijap, for example). I agree that a very sizeable portion of people that "invested" seem to be foreigners, though.

Milei's governmental structure is a very vertical one, they even expect para-official influencers to not criticize anything the government does.
The problem is that money cannot solve homelessness, because you cannot live in it or eat it or be treated by it. It's just money - numbers in a computer.

Things that might help would be housing, food or treatments. But those real-world things are often very hard to come by, and often encumbered by the very people who profess to want to help.

For example, maybe building more homes would help - but developers are often hamstrung in their ability to do so - and often by exactly the same people that want to fund homeless programs.

So what happens when we give people a lot of money to "solve" a problem, but then prevent them from taking the actions that might help? Well, they still will always find a way to "use" the money (I'm not necessarily implying fraud here), but the results will never materialize. What this looks like in practice is funding studies, working groups, paper-pushing bureaucracies, etc.

So the money is gone, any we don't have anything to show for it.
IndexNow
And if companies collude together to all agree to use non-competes to depress salary (reminder that this has already occurred), what would you recommend?
Systemd fans are always saying that it's not monolithic but consists of many executables. So how do I replace any of them with my own, small tool? They have no stable interfaces. There are quite a few complaints about them [0] and yet nobody was able to write a replacement.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42889878, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42889792, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42886965, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42897105

See also: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Hard_dependencies_on_systemd and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42918448
Does replacing a completely unsalvageable legacy project count? It's done and dusted at this point, but I replaced a C/PHP codebase written by an IP-trolling freelancer who kept project sources as his personal IP, won back after a legal settlement. It was all deliberately obfuscated single letter naming and misdirected logic paths, along with a heavy reliance on global state. Investigating any individual part was manageable, thankfully, but I still had to unwind a great many useless stack frames and reverse-engineer several intense procedural bit-logic algorithms.
Argentina president faces impeachment calls over crypto crash
Nah, without the government to help defend against "frivilous" lawsuits by big corps, big corps won't be afraid to just sue the employees and make they pay the costs to defend or sue those hiring them to scare them from from employing them.
By buildings small things, you will find ideas for bigger things that people actually need.
10k MRR no debt solo biz more or less means retirement in a high COL country. I would worry about maximizing your odds of success
Sorry to have been sufficiently specific. I am critical of the article, not the post.

"Physicists uncover evidence of two arrows of time emerging from the quantum realm"
dusts off HN account

AI coding is even more impactful considering that most coding-oriented AIs will explain what the generated code does. My offline combo of Ollama, Qwen Coder 14b, and the Continue.dev VS Code extension will always explain what it did at the end of each chat message in understandable English. And if I'm still confused, I can literally type in "I don't understand these changes could you walk me through it" and it will walk me through the code changes with the whole codebase as context/RAG material. All running on-device with no token limits or subscription fees (runs really slow, but still $0), only limited by the computer hardware itself.

In fact, I credit my AI stack with removing a huge coding "writer's block" I've had since recovering from a mental health crisis right before the start of the COVID lockdown, and has made me fall in love with building software all over again.

And it's only going to get even better the more open/shared source on-device stuff gets released. Forget multimodal models, these specialized tools are where the real magic is happening!
I don't like saying this much as an ex-redditors. But it's a shame seeing this downvoted as if a huge cause of a lot of things isn't our gridlocked politics bribed/powered by donors and billionaires robbing the country blind.
Look, I agree with you on all points: politically, about rule of law being destroyed and also about Supreme Court being knowingly complicit. But, pushback is happening and is ignore. And it wont make change this year, not until actual catastrophe happens to America itself. Pushback can slow down descent, it can achieve improvements in the long term.

Lasting change for the better could happen only if it was possible to prosecute actual crimes that happen. As long as these are immune (which they are), things will only get worst.

And as long as half of Americans are determined to euphemism away and both side away and twist themselves into pretzels to enable and excuse, things wont get better. And then it will take massive amount of reforms to make things good again. And pretty much all the totally not pro-Trump people full off infinite benefit of the doubt towards him will suddenly loose it.
> If yes, why?

Some people are smart, insightful, and for some reason insist on only posting on X. I don't see the harm in continuing to follow them, even if I do wish they'd choose a different site to post on

(I expect a lot of people also have less techie friends and family that only post on a single social media site - I've had accounts all over the place trying to keep track of some old friends)
Integrating comments in a static site via the Fediverse
" Elon wrote the source code because he claimed to know C++."

lol
Related:

Javier Milei backtracks on $4.4B memecoin after 'insiders' pocket $87M

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43072790
There is no cluster at 150 in the underlying data though, there's even distribution among unrealistically high age ranges. This is yet another case of people taking partisan telephone game conjecture literally.
I misinterpreted you as implying a libertarian anti-state argument. I had thought I was returning the same energy.

My apologies.
Fully opt-in, fully client side. Just offers a warning. People's
problems holding boundaries aginst technofascism notwithstanding, this
is a good and useful tool right?
So build small things to get to big things? (I guess you can decide at that point)? This maybe successful as a strategy to find "big" ideas ...
Does iOS have something like PTRACE_SYSCALL to hook up on syscalls entry and maybe change the return value? (Or detect where the SVC is being made)
In a similar low brow vein, I once took a wizz next to RMS in the old LCS building. When we were washing hands he tried to talk me into contributing to OpenJDK because we had previously talk a bit about a Java project I was working on for my UROP.

Karger's Randomized Algorithms class remains the only class I ever dropped at MIT. Still have PTSD from the psets for that class. Although I might have made it if it weren't for the fact that I was taking Compilers that semester, and 2 out of the 4 people in my group dropped the class. So my friend Dave and I basically had to do double the work for the final compiler implementation project.
You can always go big after starting small. The most important thing is to start. There are 1000s of small things which are not visible unless you start.

The effort to do something small is definitely less than when you try something big. And my little experience even hitting small is exponentially difficult.
Silence, Out Of Time-liker.
Well, it's not just doing exhaustive search. I don't think exhaustive search would get you far.
For anyone curious the earning thresholds in Washington for non-competes to be OK were $120560 for employees and $301400 for independent contractors last year.

When non-competes are allowed they are limited to 18 months, and if you get laid off they are void unless the employer continues to pay your base salary during the duration of the non-compete.
Deploying Sinatra Applications on OpenBSD in 2025
We're redoing some of our application servers to bring everything under Ansible management, modernize, etc. Most of what we write gets deployed on OpenBSD. It's mostly been a painless process, except for that nagging "have to build it by hand with command line switches" issue with Nokogiri :P

Anyway, this writeup is basically everything you need to get your Sinatra application deploying under Puma, using Capistrano to manage the deploys, onto OpenBSD hosts. Reverse proxying and TLS
It's been interesting seeing those with an entirely materialist understanding of the universe try to grapple with and deal with consciousness as LLMs have emerged.

To maintain that belief you have to either believe there is a physical source of consciousness, or that consciousness doesn't exist, neither of which most people can accept, yet LLMs are forcing people to confront.