skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Show HN: I accidentally helped coaches increase their revenue by 40%
Hello everyone, Madjid here.

Since I was a teenager, there have been two things I've loved most, engineering and playing the piano. Eventually, I became a software engineer.
After graduating, I realized a 9-to-5 wasn’t for me. The only solution ? Building my own software. But I had no idea what to create or who to build it for.

After months of struggling ( because every good story needs some ), I saw a quote : “ If you want to build software that helps, start with a problem you’ve faced. ”

This reminded me of my university days teaching piano. Organizing lessons, scheduling, and balancing studies was a hassle, and I never found a tool to simplify it.

I researched and was surprised that even in 2025, coaches still relied on tools like Calendly and Linktree, which weren’t ideal. That’s when I decided to build a tool to help coaches save time, eliminating manual scheduling, endless messaging, and payment hassles.

I took it seriously because I knew it was a real problem. After three months of dedication, I finally launched it :

- A custom portfolio to showcase classes
- Booking system for one-time & recurring classes
- Accept payments from students at booking
- Manage booking with user friendly interface
- Overview of your key metrics
- E-mail notifications for new bookings & cancellations

Now for the happy ending After launching the beta, we gained few satisfied users. Surprisingly, they all saw increased bookings, even though the tool was just a website builder and booking system.

What one of our beta users sent me : “ After setting up my website and sharing it on social media, I instantly started getting more bookings, as if people didn’t know I offered this coaching service before. ”

After researching, I realized coaches mainly shared their portfolios on social media. Many potential clients avoided booking simply because calling felt like a hassle. It sounds odd, but it's real.

Simply because it was easier to do online, they decided to book.
A server DB monolith that explicitly doesn't scale?
You put some of your game logic on the server and some on the client with no clear dividing line?
When PoE2 uses PostGres and Eve Online uses SQLServer?
Also doesn't tackle the main challenges of online multi-player games (physics sim rollback)?

I'm sorry but there might not be a good market for this.
along this line, “Gravity has no friends.”

http://blog.kenperlin.com/?p=2068
Cool idea! I'm wondering how did you come up with such an idea?
Salaried positions don’t pay by the hour but by meeting benchmarks, job accountabilities, etc. so I’m not sure “fraudulently” belongs in that sentence.
And what if a side is false news? There is news reported from both CNN and Fox that has been completely false.

It would not be impartial to let them lie in an effort to get to the truth. You would have to correct them, at which point someone is going to call you partial. Journalism is about actively finding the truth, but you can see in this thread, people's idea of impartiality is letting everyone talk and shrugging.
I certainly would. Getting blasted w traffic because of an insightful post is an edge case that it doesn't make sense to design around and I'm not really gonna want my personal blog to be a time or money sink when I could be spending either on things that I like more than that. So I'm gonna go with the free tier of something that provides basic protection and availability and if I do get hug-of-death'd by some content aggregator or another it's no real loss to me that they use the wayback machine rather than hit my page directly because I'm not monetizing.
Strategic shoe manufacturing?
RST/Sphinx solves that problem in that there is a single canonical dialect, and it's already effectively used in many very large projects, including the Linux kernel and (obviously) the Python programming language.
> There is one other very important takeaway from disruption: companies that go up-market find it impossible to go back down, and I think this too applies to countries.

There's a lot of talking past each other here. This observation, framed a bit differently, is precisely the argument for radical disruptive change. If there's a structural ratchet mechanism, where outsourcing a particular kind of manufacturing work means the US can never do it effectively again, doesn't every tick of the ratchet pose significant risks?
The Uber example is also an outright lie.

They acquired those customers by burning billions of dollars to deliver rides below the cost of providing them.

Then they raised prices beyond their competition to account for their ridiculous overheads.
what would "better chroot" do?
I’m not, but LLMs could use this browser.
I want to believe you. I just can't bring myself to agree, anymore. Most sites are flat out not optimized, at all. Worse, many of them have instrumentation buckled on to interface with several different analytics tools.

And to be clear, most sites flat out don't need to be optimized. Laying out the content of a single site's page is not something that needs a ton of effort put into it. At least, not a ton in comparison to the power of most machines, nowadays.

This is why, if I open up GMail in the inspector tab, I see upwards of 500+ requests in less than 10 seconds. All to load my inbox, which is almost certainly less than the 5 megs that has been transferred. And I'd assume GMail has to be one of the more optimized sites out there.

Now, to your point, I do think a lot of the discussion around web technologies is akin to low level assembly discussions. The markup and script layout of most sites is optimized for development of the site and the creation of the content far more than it is for display. That we have moved to "webpack" tricks to optimize rendering speaks to that.
Neither South Korea nor Japan are retliating and they sent delegation to "negotiate", which in context means to see what concessions they can offer to try to remove or lower the new tariffs.

That's pretty much "caving in", but that's also expect: Both countries are not strong enough and too dependent on the US to do otherwise.
The designers of the chips in the iPhone are basically US entities. (And more generally, Apple, Nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm, etc. are US companies.) They can gradually limit foreign production and re-shore with subsidies.

Sure, foreign chip manufacturers might gain a leg up, but it might not be totally ruinous. There's a way to do it that's smooth, gradual, and mostly painless.
I’ve always wanted to redesign my apartment, but hiring a professional interior designer felt too expensive and time-consuming.

Last month I came across this AI tool that generates interior design ideas from just a photo of your room. I was skeptical at first, but I uploaded a picture of my messy living room and asked it to design in a “Mid Century Modern” style.

30 seconds later… I was staring at a completely transformed version of my room — same layout, same space, but it looked like something out of a design magazine. I kept generating new ideas, saved a few I loved, and even used them to guide some real-world upgrades.

The AI was shockingly good at understanding light, spacing, and furniture placement. It even suggested wall art and lighting setups I hadn’t considered.

If you’re curious to try it out, it’s here: www.redesignai.co
I haven't had a chance to check it out. I definitely intend to.

> Also would like to note that, at least for TGM1, 2 and 3, the PRNG used is a 32-bit LCG (the common C one, in fact).

Oops. It seems I have manufactured some false memories.
We don't have the labor pool for self-sufficiency unless we want to drastically scale back how we live.
Omg, I got "The Meeting Multiplier"
People with $3 are whales now? TPU prices are similar to other cloud resources.
I's be inclined to agree, but having tried to use Emacs man and woman modes for viewing manpages, I wonder. There's always something broken.
Talking about the merits of these tariffs kind of misses the point. The person who wrote this article is very smart. I am sure they are smarter than I am. He has produced a pretty solid analysis of trade policy. But in articles like this people ascribe their own motivations and goals to the tariffs that aren't actually there. Buried in this article is the assumption that the motivation of tariffs and trade policy is to maintain competitiveness with China in manufacturing for both economic and security reasons.

This may be important to the author but it isn't a top priority for the administration. Competitiveness with China and onshoring manufacturing are certainly talking points but they is not stated as the primary motivation for the tariffs. The administration characterizes trade imbalances as countries taking advantage of us. The tariffs are targeted based on trade imbalance. If manufacturing was the goal why apply tariffs to things like raw materials? If competition with China is the goal why apply tariffs to South Korea or Japan, pushing them closer into China's orbit? These are just not the goals of the tariffs and neither their rhetoric or actions suggest that they are.

People have a hard time dealing with values and motivations that are wildly different from their own so they construct all sorts of parallel explanations and defend those instead. But talking about these explanations is non sequitur. It is like the administration adopted a policy of jailing all Capricorns and only Capricorns and people started writing think pieces about how the criminal justice system would be more efficient if they focused on programs to reduce recidivism.
Haha, learned this technique while installing Void Linux
> Doge Moves ... to Hackable Digital Records

Hackable ? Yes. But always available on Darknet. /s
how come performance is worse than Rust? Isn’t this misleading
Explain the strategic value like I'm 5? I see people reference this idea all the time, but I'm unconvinced it's actually valuable enough to be worth it given all the other downsides. I don't actually believe it's a positive value proposition.

I see the argument for things of military significance. The common one is electronic components. But PCBs manufacturing is easy to spinup quickly. Which leave the critical components like IC where the ones we'd actually need are still exclusively overseas. The TSMC factory being built wont produce the newest generation chips.

Same for agriculture, if we're totally self sufficient, what happens when a blight takes out a staple crop or two? You can't just spin up food production or global food trade the way you can with manufacturing.

Meanwhile, having robust global trade is just a less lethal version of MAD, here being mutually assured economic destruction. It's much harder for other nations to turn on you when you both depend on each other for comfort, convience, or survival. Look at how the US is being seen by the international community. The reputation we had as a strong ally and worthwhile partner has been badly damaged. Why would other nations want to help us now? How are we stronger alone, instead of having their eager support?

There are two people, one grows all his own food, and makes all of the tools he needs. He doesn't need anybody. The other works with his neighbors, they share food, he kinda knows how to sharpen an ax, but he uses the ones made by the guy down the street, who's basically a professional blacksmith, even though he introduces himself as a gardener.

which one of those guys appears stronger? Who's more likely to survive something bad happening? who do you think is more likely to win in a fight? (yes their neighbors will come to help) which one would you rather be?
1 company, taking up multiple positions (5-10) in multiple companies (3-5) as regular full time employees (us salary) and work is spread across lowly paid workers. and its not 8-12 people involved, that would be just 1 position. there would be about 20-50 people in these "smbs"
There's a study underway for a similar implant to help treat sleep apnea. Similar in size, multiple implants can be inserted around the nerves innervating the muscles in the throat. They would be powered by induction using a wearable collar of some sort.

Not sure why this one would be controller by light. Can anyone (heh) shed some light on that?
Show HN: Most learners forget what they've learned
This MVP will solve your problem poorly but I do appreciate if you can give use honest feedback :)

Problem: Most learners forget what they've learned because they don't review or apply it.

Solution: Let users create their own practice sets and schedule reminder. See your performances in daily progress.

How: click wiyomi.com, sign in (because we need to save your quizzes), type the topic and Ai will help you generate subtopics to practice, click create, and happy practicing then.

Why: Forgetting is the default. Without consistent practice, lessons fade away.
I recently spent a couple of days tracking down a problem that one of my coworkers, who built the subsystem where the bug was lurking, probably could have figured out in an hour or two at most.

Why didn’t I hand it off? Because I need to know how this subsystem works. It’s important and quite complicated and this is not going to be the last bug we have, or the last change it needs. It’s part of what I work on so I should understand it. The payoff wasn’t just fixing the bug, it was learning enough to know how to fix it.
The "significant problem" is the same that every other organization faces: the testing and validation isn't quite as good as it could be and I know where to poke.
> Who formats the formatter configs?

Other formatters of course since the configs are often yaml, toml, ini or json.
I _love_ Strong Towns but I want to push back against this article.

Strong Towns is a leading voice on YIMBY, but this is reminiscent of the common arguments I hear from NIMBY folks..."they shouldn't be allowed to build here because ____" is definitionally NIMBY.

While I don't love Dollar General or shop there very often, I have a hard time understanding why it's a "swindle." The reason people shop there is because the store provides what they need at a lower price. If I can buy the same milk for $3 from DG or $4.50 from Grandma's Really Adorable Milk Store, I'm going to Dollar General. No swindle here...that's just a better deal.

> “We feed off of what they don’t do, they can’t do,” the owner of Mike’s Hardware & Supply explained.

Great! Do that. Outcompete them on what makes you distinctly valuable, and if you're right, people will pick you. I go to my hardware store instead of Lowes because I know there's a 70-year-old guy who knows more about my project than I do, and I'm happy to pay an extra couple dollars to ask him questions while I buy a socket wrench.

Now, I get that government subsidies tilt the scales...but rather than yell that it's unfair, let's elect politicians who are ready to build incentive programs to provide similar (or better) subsidies for small businesses who provide fresh food and other goods which are crucial for local communities. Small businesses may need to gather together in some cooperative or union-type organization in order to present a more unified bloc to the political class but that's just the nature of living in a big country.

Big business is here to stay, whether we like it or not. And people are _choosing_ those businesses because they think they provide good value for money.
To my eye that looks essentially like a tie, which may seem like not that big of a deal.

When I run compilation and multithreaded integration tests on my chonky AMD Ryzen 9 5950X (16 cores, 32 threads) on Ubuntu 24.04, and on my 2020 M1 Mac mini (8 cores), *the mini keeps up*. It’s quite impressive.
> It's increasingly hard to watch mainstream films with practical effects or animal actors. Even though most audiences would vastly prefer the real deal, they just put up with it.

I (mostly) prefer today's special effects to the ones in the past. The old ones would take me out of the moment, because I'd notice that it was a special effect. (IE, in the original Star Wars movies you can see the matt lines on VHS, and the strings on the C3P0 puppet in the desert. Really distracting.)

---

A few more points:

A lot of the article reminds me of how recording artists would complain, in the 2000s and 2010s, that they would put a lot of effort into a recording, and then most people were listening to it on a sh*tty MP3. The recording artists didn't understand their audiences. It's hard to know if it's a case where the video game artists don't understand the audiences, or the tool (AI) really isn't bringing value to the process.

> It's easy to envision a similar future where the budget for art simply isn't there in most offerings, and we're left praising mediocre holdout auteurs for their simple adherence to traditional form

I'm not sure what you mean by that.
They tried to appeal to the right by appealing to neocons. But neocons are mostly anti-Trump and going to vote Democrat anyway. It was a weird and very disorganized campaign.
You're not dumb but you didn't read the article.
With the exception of your comment, I enjoyed this day.
*give us honest feedback :)
Certainly doable, grapheneOS has it https://grapheneos.org/features#duress.
Tariffs and Tabletop: A Message from Cephalofair Games
Who knows? probably :D
This would be useful beyond getting in and out of customs too. For instance, most people don't want to carry around a work phone and a personal phone, so we end up mixing two personas on one device, and it gets awful. For instance I keep two 2fa apps, one for work stuff and one for personal stuff. It would be so much easier if I could have a separate login that showed just my work apps. Like ... wouldn't it be nice to only have to see work slacks when you log in using a work persona?
I didn't mention Tailscale. I said "overlay", and both SD-WAN and MPLS L2 VPN are overlay networks.
Placebo WiFi Repeater [video]
> Bringing “manufacturing back to the US” is a fool’s errand. The future of manufacturing is automation, not jobs.

That’s probably correct. But the current trajectory means that China will have the robot-operated factories, not the US. What do you anticipate the US will do to obtain goods from those Chinese factories? Especially when AI stands poised to obsolete a lot of the white collar jobs where the US still retains a competitive edge?

You can’t treat the reserve dollar as something that will perpetually defy physics. The pound used to be the world’s reserve currency not too long ago. There’s no reason for the world to continue flocking to dollars when other economies surpass the US.
> I see the same pattern for movie theaters. They used to be independent mostly with affordable prices.

Movie theaters used to be extremely integrated with the movie studios. You had to go to a Paramount movie theater to see a Paramount movie. Antitrust laws broke that up until just recently Sony bought Alamo Drafthouse.

But that said, there's still a lot of different brands of movie theaters around me. On top of the normal Cinemark and AMC there's also Alamo Drafthouse, Studio Movie Grill, B&B, Angelika, and several other single-location theaters.
That's why I added the section pointing out that even without installing a malicious server you may run into problems with malicious instructions: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/9/mcp-prompt-injection/#m...
The overwhelming majority of AI compute is by either the few bigs in their own products, or by third parties that rent out access to compute resources from those same bigs. Extremely few AI companies are buying their own GPU/TPU buildouts.

Google says Ironwood will be available in the Google Cloud late this year, so it's relevant to just about anyone that rents AI compute, which is just about everyone in tech. Even if you have zero interest in this product, it will likely lead to downward pressure on pricing, mostly courtesy of the large memory allocations.
In Soviet Russia....
Learning piano makes me better at music. Learning the violin is then easier.
All these replies have me so confused, the reason to shove everything into your database when you can is because you can transact across them. That's thing you can't get once you have a second system.
Ha, I do the same for most advertised things. It is as advertised. I've easily gained back more of my time than the $59 that it costs. Game changer if you make a habit to "brick" your phone every morning.
Context: A lot of the board game community has been thrown into chaos with the tariffs and there are a lot of post about it. I posted this one because it provides some insight into what is happening in the background, not just in the board game community but with manufacturing as a whole industry in the United States and explains the problem as some people are still confused.
I’ll just demand my data in machine readable form under GDPR?

https://gdpr-info.eu/art-20-gdpr/
There is a theory going around that this is an attempt to preempt Trump from using the New Mexico National Guard. As I understand it, after 2008, once the Governor has deployed them, the President can no longer take them over. But, as with all legal matters, this is a big confusing mess.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Defense_Authorization...
Expanding on pjmlp's comment [0] buried in this thread:

export MANPAGER="nvim +Man!"

Using Vim's built in ft-man-plugin [1] as the default man pager seems to go pretty far towards resolving what the author is complaining about.

Links work, and it respects the indentation when soft wrapping lines. It isn't doing full reflow or regenerating the page, but it maintains legibility while soft wrapping, and messing up indentation is my main annoyance with less... You can improve less by chopping lines -S by default, but then you have horizontal scrolling so neither is great.

[0] In Vim, you can use K to open a man page for the word under the cursor

[1] https://neovim.io/doc/user/filetype.html#ft-man-plugin
I found reading man pages with syntax highlighting to help just enough to make them readable for me.

You need bat installed- and then you can set the manpager in your rc.

(But as an example it's doing)

MANPAGER="sh -c 'col -b | bat -p -l man'" man tmux
"Is the government spying on me?" tends to be a concern that is secondary to things like "Am I getting paid?" and "Can I buy groceries?"

Technologists repeatedly get this wrong. The best money system is the one that lets me buy groceries in exchange for working, not the one that's cryptographically unbreakable. Unless I'm running an illegal internet-based drug empire, in which case, the ones that aren't cryptographically unbreakable are disqualified, since I'd need the government to not be able to trace the money flow in my illegal drug empire. But even real illegal drug empires that are not internet-based mostly use government-issued currency, with measures taken to hinder tracing!
Either abolish it, or make it stronger so it applies to everyone. (OpenAI included.)

"Copyright for thee but not for me" is the worst of all worlds.
Still an order of magnitude short of "all", and falling farther behind every year.
When Matlab Is Better
Exactly. These are the things I think many companies will fail to realize as they slap "AI" onto and into their products and services.
Chroot has saved my system more times than I care to admit. I didn't really understand how it worked though, interesting.
Previous Discussions

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43593913