skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I built an app that no one wanted to use, unfortunately. It helps people reduce phone usage by displaying things like cats in your screen, the screen time police, annoying cookie banners, and more.

Users complained the app was too annoying, so I've revamped it after asking for feedback properly [1]. Learning more about user research, UX, marketing (even making TikToks!) and so on has been pretty neat. Learnings are:

1. People want to avoid losing track of time on social media

2. Instagram is great to connect with friends, but Reels are dangerous!

3. Complete focus is only necessary in cases like work or study.

This has been one of the most creative projects I've done. It's the closest thing I've done to art as a programmer :)

Also, Kotlin Multiplatform has been a joy! Only faced minor issues because it's too new, but it's been easy to create animations and reuse components. XML on Android was a huuuge pain. I'm happy with myself for prototyping without wasting too much time overall.

[1] https://speedbumpapp.com/blog/v1/
It's kind of crazy going to a port in Alaska where they're nearly as common as seagulls scavenging cast offs from the fishing industry. A few is amazing and majestic a dozen or more just looks silly.
Warranty disclaimers may (or may not, depending on the law of the effected jurisdiction) limit liability for claims on an implied warranty theory, but they certainly don't apply to tortious interference or unfair competition claims.

I’m not saying the claims here are valid, but the warranty disclaimers don't seem at all relevant to the bases of liability asserted.
Define large workload.

Sentry runs large workloads and Postgres isn't a bottleneck. We have also never employed a DBA. Most users never need to shard their database, and at most can just partition datasets by tables for _extremely_ high volume workloads.

You just have to consider architecture and optimize things that are slow, just like any other software. Nothing is free at the end of the day, and nothing else gives you the flexibility that Postgres does, particularly these days with its growing high value extensions.
> The economics of open source are fundamentally broken.

Open source is not about economics in the first place. If your motives are fundamentally economic, then you are in the wrong place, and you should probably do something else instead - or you will become as frustrated as this author seems to be.

> crushed under the weight of entitled users

This will only happen if you allow it to happen. Nobody can force you to carry this burden. You do not owe the users anything, and you are free to ignore their gripes.

It's not like the users of paid products are any less entitled, or obnoxious about their opinions.
The 'wooly devil,' a new plant species discovered in Big Bend National Park
imagine how amazing it would be if every major browser tomorrow suddenly dropped support for JS entirely and said that they only run typescript now. It will be a hard but absolutely mind blowing transition
Reminds me of the first time I had a car with a slow-motion-open glove box.

Maybe that's cool, if you're showing off how Old Money fills the hours of their do-nothing lives? Vs. if you have a job, a family, and often too-few hours in your busy days? NO. I don't travel in a horse-drawn coach paced by footmen, either.
I know a bit about the taschen/luxury books business, having a very good friend who works in this space ( she’s built a publishing business, and makes a living out of it, typically her books print up to a few hundreds at most).

Basically, there are book collectors who are willing to pay for beautiful books ( my friend sells art pieces according to her , not mere books ), companies willing to buy them ( and sometimes codesign them if they’re say luxury brands ) and give them
as gifts to their clients, and then people like you and me who will maybe buy one just because you really want it.

It’s not a highly profitable business by any means, it’s a small market, and it’s the opposite of the high volume mainstream publishing industry.
So your approach to fusion is "the same CFS but stay at roughly the size of the SPARC prototype instead of scaling up"?

When you say "Q > 1 within a few (say 3) years" are you talking about your own reactors, or others? For that matter, are you trying to partner with CFS and license their technology or are you intending on starting "from scratch" (from whatever is publicly available)?

If that timeline is for fusion in general, what do you think your timeline looks like? Assuming adequate access to funding how soon can you build a Q>1 reactor? How soon after that can you actually go to market and sell a reactor?

---

On an unrelated note, I'm curious what you think of the current approaches to commercial fusion being attempted. Are Tokamaks the only game in town in your mind? Or do the various other approaches also being tried out right now have a good shot (MIF/Zpinches/etc)? Any particular approaches you think are particularly likely to succeed.

This being ycombinator and a startup I'm obligated to say that I don't ask this question because I think it impacts your commercial viability much, the greatest risks in fusion definitely aren't the competitors. I ask it just because I'm curious what people willing to start a fusion company think of the competitors.

---

Ships make a ton of sense to me as an early market. An 11 figure market (according to my own napkin calculations awhile back) where power is much more expensive than on land. At the same time it's never struck me that the hardest part of building a fusion company is finding a market.
I appreciate your honesty here, but you really should probably read into this a little more before coming in this hot about how justified Matt is. Maybe in principle, what WPE is doing is questionable, but it's certainly looking like Matt has been as much if not more abusive and shady in his pursuit of profiting off of the work of all the other Wordpress contributors, including doing things that are deeply unethical, if not illegal.
FAA Deal with Starlink Raises Conflict of Interest Concerns
Why? MAGA?
If you are fantasizing the implementation of an imaginary future technology, why not fusion power for SPACE ships?
While it is, the same issue exists in Sublime, Vim, Emacs, Gedit, pico/nano[1], IntelliJ, Android Studio, Eclipse, and every editor.

[1] https://threatpost.com/researchers-show-how-popular-text-edi...

I think Xcode may be the exception but Xcode plugins also can’t do much.
> A bit of decentralization goes a long way.

Electric grid get more reliable with scale, not less (that's why parts of North Africa is interconnected with Europe, which itself is interconnected all the way to Russia).

Small grids (like islands) are always a nightmare to manage for that reason.
Yet Mozilla, for all the flak it gets, isn't paid a dime by its users, but does find resources to vet the most popular extensions. Everything I use is checked by them.

Raymond Hill (of ublock fame) wasn't really impressed with how it is performed, but it's still much better than nothing (which is what MS apparently does).

VSCode is an IDE in name only, it's a glorified text editor, and pretty mediocre one at that. I in "IDE" stands for "integrated", like what you'd expect from JetBrains' products. Or even the real visual studio.
I haven’t bothered to look at the actual filing, but none of the causes of action mentioned in the article were about warranty, merchantability, or fitness for purpose.
I have to say (as somewhat of an Amazon critic): I'm not sure that the smile below “Alexa+” works in this case; it comes across as a tad creepy for me with the AI context.
thank you, now I'm learning the things I wanted to learn when I made my comment
Is the tritium a different isotope than the one I can have shipped to my house on the internet?

https://tritiumworkshop.com/products/megaglow-tritium-marker...
> It seems like an unnecessarily ambiguous term.

Agree, and, I don't even understand why it's in there in the first place (it should just not be) but that's a job for the legislature to resolve, not the courts.
> Probably a heating element to reheat the coffee or tea.

People reheating coffee and tea should be put to jail
Which, by the way: $20/month for a voice assistant is absurd. Absolutely absurd. People pay that for ChatGPT and Claude because you can use it for work! But maybe I'm just a curmudgeon/poor -- do y'all see this as reasonable?
Why not just clean the microwave? Your coworkers would probably appreciate it.
Why would Amazon want you to have it, though? They benefit fantastically from manipulating search results against you.
I want to know how you got out of the AI hype. I try to ignore it but it infects everything.
The parting of the waters in the USA is such an interesting landmark for just how uninteresting it actually is in person. Looks like any other split in a forest river, marked by a sign on a tree that you can only see after a long wilderness hike.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parting_of_the_Waters

https://www.anotherlongwalk.com/2022/07/day-119-parting-of-w...
Bifurcation occurs at the Great Lakes, where the Mississippi flows into the gulf and the St. Lawrence empties into the Atlantic. This forms the “great loop”, a circumnavigation course known by many power boaters . This makes about half of the United States and island by your definitions.
They are very hand-wavy in the privacy & security section.
Seem to have a clean room with no spacecraft.
But it’s of course a ridiculous concept because the world is full of jobs needing to be done that are very hard to accomplish, nigh impossible to automate and as Mike Rowe calls them, simply “dirty.” The world is going to need plumbers for a long, long time.
> VS Code isn't some kind of hobby project by a couple of dudes on laptops with nothing but the best interests of the community at heart.

Which is why I'm pretty confident in first party packages and don't install third party plugins from random authors.
Proving safety is just a small part of the problem to be solved. The hard part is actually structuring the program such that its correctness can even be formulated as a formal property which can be proved. For a lot of software that alone is highly nontrivial.
Nice work. Here’s some crit from someone with a game design degree if you’re interested in refining the visual design. If you’re happy with it as is as a your own little project, feel free to summarily disregard this comment!

Through the comments of the folks here, you’ve surely noticed that some people aren’t really ‘getting’ some of the stuff right off the bat. One of the toughest things about games is the visual communication aspect of it. Notice how little explanatory text most games have now — even the more low-bit style ones? Choosing coins as a mechanism is a deliberate communication strategy— it’s a game mechanic near everyone is familiar with so they don’t need explanation for how it works. A game’s (or any interface’s) visual components must be approached with the same mindset. A designer’s job is to take a step back and ask “what makes a [coin for example] look like a coin? What are the visual signals— from the most obvious, such as a metallic texture and being a round disk, that make people think it’s a coin? How do they tell it’s a coin and not a blank punch-out from a steel electrical junction box? If I take a bunch of pictures of coins into a photo editor and reduce the resolution to something extremely pixelated, what’s the lowest res I can go to while still realizing it’s a coin, and what about those coins are the few remaining pixels conveying?”

And deeper beyond that is figuring out how you can convey things like slowing the ball down without having a little icon. The cognitive load required to parse which icon you’re looking at and the implications of that is a bit much while trying to play a fast-paced reflex-oriented game. It doesn’t seem as hard as it is when you’re the one that chose the icons and configured their behavior, but especially in a deliberately casual game, people probably won’t take the time to become familiar enough with that system to push through the initial cognitive resistance. Identifying objects is a bit different than labelling a button on a control panel because it has context, physical form, and animation. A turtle might be a great way to label a slow-down button out-of-context, but maybe instead that brick could look gloopy and sticky? Conversely, maybe a speed up brick might be arcing or the shape of a lightning bolt, or vibrating like a revving engine block? Maybe you could have a little starburst where the ball teleported from and to when it teleports to visually orient the user better and on the trigger blocks include some of the graphical elements from that to identify it?

Like I said, if you’re happy with this as your personal project I’m not trying to say there’s anything wrong with it! But if you’re looking to refine the playability for broader audience, the visual design would be a great place to start.
then he basically successfully fooled you and rewrote history, mission accomplished. more like the director has beef with theater and attempts to burn the entire thing down while gaslighting the cast and crew. you may have no time for internet drama, but comments like this perpetuate the bad actors.
Taking over (?) from Verizon:

> A satellite company owned by Elon Musk has the inside track to potentially take over a large federal contract to modernize the nation’s air traffic communications system.

> Equipment from Musk’s Starlink has been installed in Federal Aviation Administration facilities as a prelude to a takeover of a $2 billion contract held by Verizon, according to government employees, contractors and people familiar with the work.

* https://apnews.com/article/elon-musk-starlink-spacex-faa-bbe...

> The deal raises questions over whether SpaceX will push out Verizon, which has a contract to upgrade FAA communications. Starlink testing is focused on remote sites, the FAA says.

* https://www.pcmag.com/news/despite-2-billion-verizon-contrac...

> FAA tests Starlink terminals as Musk claims Verizon tech is ‘not working’

* https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/25/faa-tests-starlink-termina...

Verizon won the contract in 2023:

> Under the contract valued at over $2 billion, Verizon will design, build, secure, integrate and operate a new telecommunications network infrastructure and supporting services

* https://www.verizon.com/about/news/verizon-public-sector-win...
Credit-based pricing sucks and users hate it
Even if you believe B, that’s still not reducing document ranking to n-day vulnerability discovery; it’s “reducing some n-day discovery to document ranking”.

A does not require demonstrating doc-rank problems map to n-day problems, since reduction isn’t required to be symmetric.

Where you might be getting caught up is in the mapping of problems vs the mapping of solutions. “Nday reduces to docrank” implies we can turn every nday problem into a docrank problem, and every docrank solution into an nday solution, but does not say anything about whether we can turn docrank problems into nday problems, or nday solutions into docrank solutions.
YC26 featuring Mokkatok - fusion for third wave coffee shops.
You heard it here first
> 1) I have little time for internet drama

Yet create an account and join in you did.
But people wore them on their front side didn't they? I don't remember people turning them around and preparing them on their butts
Yeah I really don't get it. They've gotta know better than anyone right?

And they're the ones with arguably the most power to change it.

So they're knowingly and intentionally choosing money now over burning up our planet AND THEMSELVES.

I just don't get it.

Unless they've somehow rationalized it to themselves that oil isn't accelerating climate change. Which brings me back to my first point -- they gotta know, and better than anyone, right?
I have an APO too and love it. While it’s possible to add a second phase to the cook with 0% steam, it isn’t enough to give you a crust on a steak. I still use a cast iron pan to sear it.

The main issue I have with SV, either bagged or bagless, is that the meat needs to be thoroughly dried before searing. So I normally cook it without steam but at 200F or so with a wireless thermometer telling me when it is 10F below my target doneness. A lot like sous vide and the APOs precise temp control still comes in handy.
I completely agree with you, I’m just being more reductive when I say it’s a practical categorization rather than essential reality. Certainly it’s also reasonable to say there’s no essential reality, just subjective levels of analysis, so everything is practical categorization. The issue is that we’ve gotten nowhere in explaining why we seem to exist.

A video game is relatively easy, at least seemingly, to reduce down to its underlying principles. The content dissolves the more closely I look at the game. The issue here isn’t whether the game still exists (it does, in the place I’m no longer looking), the issue is in seeing why the game arises from its component parts, and not something else. Easy-ish for the game, it follows directly from what we know about physics and such, but hard for the mind. Why do neurons together produce pain that exists, rather than pain as a purpose-driven internal signal to help organize the escape from a predator? Emergence doesn't tell us why one or the other, just that whatever it is must emerge from constituent parts.
> In general the libertarian position is that problems like this would be solved by competition if there weren't government regulations stifling competition. And they're often right

I disagree. There are many situations in which it will always be more profitable to screw over consumers than it would be to not screw them over, even taking into account that you might steal some business from competitors.

Any company that does spring up out of nowhere and do the right thing for the consumer will eventually be forced to screw over their customers or be bought up by someone who will because shareholders will never leave giant piles of money sitting on the table. Even if a company somehow managed to put every one of their competitors out of business, shareholders will still demand endless growth so the only thing left is to screw the customers and degrade the product which is exactly what we see over and over again once a company has anything close to a monopoly.
just a magnified and more common trend of managers taking credit for the actual work done by their subordinates
there's fuel stabilizer you can buy to store fuel for a year+, just calendar a reminder to use/replace once a year (good idea for other reasons).
> Doomscrolling, like drug addiction, is largely the product of the holistic social-biological environment of the actor.

Drug addiction is also a product of the availability of drugs.

China has much less problems with opioid overdose than America because they learned their lesson in the 19th century.
I feel just as excited about this as I did the last Alexa. Why use the name of a failed product?
No, but the market is free, and you are free to decline this terrible offer.
Startups, Impact, and the Search for Meaning
The man who spent forty-two years at the Beverly Hills Hotel pool (1993)
>Isn't the WPF-Automattic relationship more or less the norm with companies that have 'open-source business models'?

No, it's not, and I think that's the crux of most of the controversy. One quick comparison would be Drupal: https://dri.es/solving-the-maker-taker-problem
Hardware-efficient quantum error correction via concatenated bosonic qubits
The argument that I've heard is that roof installed solar is incredibly expensive compared to all other solar. Add in the other compromises with orientation and obstructed sunlight, and you quickly realize that it is likely better to install solar and batteries at dedicated power facilities that scale better than to distribute the infrastructure in residential neighborhoods.
What functionality or property makes JetBrains' products an IDE while VSCode isn't? Honest question, I've never used any of their products.
> try and tell WordPress what they could and couldn't do with their own project.

No, that's completely backwards.
That's gotta be someone else's job!

--everyone
The doomer take that I try to push out of my mind is that maybe the building's really burning now and they're trying to loot out all they can WHILE they still can, optics be damned.
From "No Silver Bullet":

> More seriously, even perfect program verification can only establish that a program meets its specification. The hardest part of the software task is arriving at a complete and consistent specification, and much of the essence of building a program is in fact the debugging of the specification
I think the luxury market proves my point. The perceived value of luxury items is much higher as reflected in the price paid. Although, the cost and effort to produce luxury items is roughly the same as a similar non luxury item.
Neat!

There is no scientifically imaginable form of life that could evolve or survive in or on stars. (So to be clear, this is all a flight of fancy)

Anthropic bias suggests that liquid water and carbon are essential to life.

BUT! I do think it's fun to imagine what assumptions a solarian biologist would make about the world. What would Solarian Bias look like?

What might be easier for a solarian physicist to understand? Would they have a different view of gravity?

They would start with a better understanding of astronomy than us, assuming they could make observations of the 'sky'; As the band Mogwai says "The Sun Smells Too Loud". All manner of EM observations would be more obscure (or rather their instruments would be dazzled). They would have to find some kind of Spot on the Sun where it's dark enough to see out. Maybe they could learn to ride the flares!

They would definitely start with a better version of the atom - there's no way to ignore fusion and fission if you live on the sun!

Or! What if it were possible to make observations of gravity from the surface of a neutron star. We have math and observations from here that make sense to us, but perhaps there's something that would just 'click' if you lived next to one.

Anyway, thanks for coming to my TEDx talk.
"Downtime for maintenance is part of normal operations, making this a far more forgiving early application of fusion, unlike the grid where every down hour is lost revenue."

Planned maintenance, sure, but unplanned maintenance means the same lost revenue, plus you're stuck floating in the middle of the pacific ocean, possibly in need of parts or debugging expertise that only exists half a planet away or, for that matter, food. It's certainly a good idea to find a niche to make market entry easier, but I would guess that reliability requirements are actually higher for ships than for microgrids. Find some isolated town or island running off flaky diesel generators on shipped-in fuel and negotiate a reasonable SLA.

This ignores, of course, the bigger problem: making fusion work at all at Q > 1. If it were me, I'd work on solving that before worrying too much about optimizing market entry. So far every single fusion effort has failed to clear that hurdle, and any effort on the other parts is wasted if you can't actually make power.
There's a fun little MMO-lite that reminds me of Escape Velocity[0]. Its chat system seems to filter and translate on the fly using some tiny ML models, and I think the guy behind it wrote everything himself.

The interesting thing about his implementation is that seeing e.g. Chinese being replaced in-line as it's translated feels way more amazing than knowing a translation has occurred in the background. He's hidden the time difference between paying for a service or running it yourself behind an animation.

[0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1717290/Subspace_Discover...
meh - "By Wednesday, the government said that 90% of homes and businesses affected by the blackout had had their electricity restored, according to the Chilean National Electric Coordinator."