skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is one of the best articles about running a bootstrapped business that I've ever read.

These are all great tips that obviously come from years of hard work and introspection.

> When I started, I integrated with standard SaaS product analytics software that most big SaaS products use. They tend to have features like session recording, where you can see exactly where their mouse moves in your product, and funnel tracking for working out how many users make it the whole way through from landing page to using your product.

I had the same experience. When I started out, I'd see people talk about complicated views in their analytics with cohort analysis and A/B testing. I'd think those people were succeeding because of their analytics, so I kept trying to build complicated views in Google Analytics or investigate expensive alternative analytics platforms. And I eventually just landed on going even simpler than Google Analytics and not checking it unless I had a specific question I wanted to answer.

> People will suggest you should build particular features to improve your product. They'll never use those features.

I've experienced this as well. Early on, prospective customers would tell me that they'd definitely buy if I had X feature, and I'd spend a week implementing it, and then the customer would disappear or say they couldn't purchase for some other reason.

> When a user signs up for OnlineOrNot, I have an automated email going out asking what brought them to sign up today. I explicitly tell them I read and reply to every email. This is the main source of my insight for building product.

I like this a lot. The main competitive advantage indie founders have is a personal touch and direct access to the founder.

I think too many indie founders over-automate and over-outsource their customer interactions. It always drives me crazy when I use a product from an indie founder, and I reach out with feedback and the response is just a generic, outsourced customer service rep who says, "Thank you for your feedback. I'll pass it along to the team."

> Tracking your MRR is a crap way to measure how you're doing as a business... Find another success metric to figure out if people are actually using your product, and whether it's bringing them value. Things like number of images generated, or number of form completions, for example.

I agree, but I'll add the caveat that the other metric should be as proximate to revenue as you can get.

Early on, I made the mistake of measuring success based on things like social media followers or SEO rank, even though those things didn't directly translate into revenue. I felt like I was succeeding, but I eventually realized I was pursuing metrics that were too loosely related to revenue.
Wouldn't this depend a lot on how management responds to your use? For example, if you just kept a log of prompts and outputs with notes about why the output wasn't acceptable, that could be considered productive use in this early stage of LLMs, especially if management's goal was to have you learning how to use LLMs. Learning how not to use something is just as important in the process of adapting any new tool.

If management is convinced of the benefits of LLMs and the workers are all just refusing to use them, the main problem seems to be a dysfunctional working environment. It's ultimately management's responsibility to work that out, but if the management isn't completely incompetent, people tasked with using them could do a lot to help the situation by testing and providing constructive feedback rather than making a stand by refusing to try and providing grand narratives about damaging the artistic integrity of something that has been commoditized from inception like video game art. I'm not saying that video game art can't be art, but it has existed in a commercial crunch culture since the 1970s.
> The findings emerge in a world enraptured by artificial forms of intelligence, and they could teach us something about how complex circuits in our own brains evolved. Perhaps most importantly, they could help us step “away from the idea that we are the best creatures in the world,” said Niklas Kempynck, a graduate student at KU Leuven who led one of the studies. “We are not this optimal solution to intelligence.”

Some AI startup needs to get this in their marketing, stat.
Thanks for the link.

On a related note, that's a pretty neat site for podcasts.

I vaguely remember that John C. Dvorak had a podcast, but I honestly had forgotten about him since the TechTV/ZDTV days. Though I may not always agree with him, I've always appreciated his point of view and personality.

In the world of tech journalism, he's one of the best.
I believe it's more related to economic crisis and informal work (tax evasion). Brazil is very cashless for normal transactions.
Some stuff is usable, but not fun.

I have a Centrino laptop from 2004, and it's single core, with 1.5GB RAM and, of course, spinning rust.

It works, but even playing a video on youtube can be taxing. I'm not arguing for "performance" tasks here, just sitting on the couch and surfing, and clicking random links.

Then again my home server is a 2013 i5 that does everything it needs to do (except be super power efficient). So I'd say ~10-14 years is the sweet spot, but 20 is historic and mostly useless, sadly
Exactly, it's dynamic scoping. As far as I know, Tcl is the only language that still has this skeleton in its closet.
Machine Learning for Absolute Beginners: Mastering the ML Loop
Well, then Wikipedia 1, NYT 0, lol. I believe it!
Nuclear batteries aren't nearly powerful enough for industrial robots.
why do they need to _look_ human though? two legs, torso, head, two arms, does a robot need that. Why not just a giant arm (or five whatever) that can roll around?
1. Dunning-kruger effect describes difference in expected and real performance. It is not saying that humans confidently give wrong answers if they do not know correct ones.

2. That is not my experience. Almost half of the time LLM gives wrong answer without any warning. It is up to me to check correctness. Even if I follow up it often continues to give wrong answers.
A question mark after a search on Kagi gives you an AI summary, the latency is good.

If you go for the highest tier subscription on kagi, you get https://kagi.com/assistant which gives you a huge swath of AI models to handle your searching.
Perhaps if you get confused by fast things you shouldn't be driving?
I can manually curate YouTube kids. There’s no suggestions outside the curated channels and auto play can be disabled. What’s the problem?
I use DuckDuckGo, with the occasional reddit !g appended if I'm looking for something experience-based.

For me, searches fall into one of three categories, none of which are a good fit for LLMs:

1. A single business, location, object, or concept (I really just want the Google Maps or Wikipedia page, and I'm too lazy to go straight to the site). For these queries, LLMs are either overkill or outdated.

2. Product reviews, setup instructions, and other real-world blog posts. LLMs want to summarize these, and I don't want that.

3. Really specific knowledge in a limited domain ("2017 Kia Sedona automatic sliding door motor replacement steps," "Can I exit a Queue-Triggered Azure Function without removing it from the queue?"). In these cases, the LLMs are so prone to hallucination that I can't trust them.
I agree. I'm not saying it's a different model generating the images. 4o is clearly generating the images itself rather than sending a prompt to some other model. I'm speculating about the mechanism for generation in the model itself.
The whole point of making them humanoid is to make it possible to use them in the same environment as humans. It's the end goal so it needs to start somewhere
This post is a valid Python script that deletes all LLM weights
Hello!

I've been running my startup—a reservation SaaS for restaurants—for a while now. While I have a few customers, I'm finding it challenging to acquire new leads. Do you have any suggestions? So far, I've tried cold calling, in-person visits to restaurants, and Google Ads, but the results haven't met my expectations. I'm based in Paris, where two major players dominate the market, and most restaurants use their services. Our main differentiators are that we're three times cheaper than one competitor and that we charge no commission, unlike the other. Also, I'm not a native French speaker, though I can speak French (albeit with a foreign accent).

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!
Where would be the next best place for a true discussion on the topic?
LLMs are really good at this kind business-centric writing.
The style contains little actual content,
so anything that can produce a lot of words with limited content can do it. Also, meaning in business communication is almost an afterthought.
Strawberry flavored sour candy is not the ship of strawberries you seek.
A CI runner that reduces emissions by picking the cloud region for you
The companies in question virtually don't pay any tax on profits though, even though it's pretty clear they're making money hand over fist.
Sam Altman says AI will make coders 10x more productive, not replace them
Software developers are so aware of "enshittification" and yet also bullish about this generation of AI, it's baffling.

It's very clear the "value" of the LLM generation is to churn out low-cost, low-quality garbage. We already outsourced stuff to Fivrr but now we can cut people out altogether. Producing "content" nobody wants.
Get Started with CarbonRunner in Minutes
Please explain from the first principles, why a suit is "aesthetically better" and more dignified than a t-shirt/jeans combo.
Finally! It was a pain to have to manage the SSG in a Pages instance and the backend in a separate worker. Working with LLMs made it a pain as well. Should be better now!
A better idea is to simply further regulate advertising. We already have many rules about advertising. We used to have more we got rid of, most famously Rx drug ads weren’t allowed, but now they are. I’m sure there are many ideas people have for how to do this. Personally I would just like to see us ban ads for Rx drugs, OTC snake oil, gambling, alcohol, and cars. Maybe also fast food and junk food. It worked so well for tobacco. Don’t need to ban the products, just ban ads for them.
That's fine but my point is that the word "quite" is doing quite some heavy lifting in the claim "they've been quite explicit about their goals" if the entire world has to work off of guesses and assumptions.
Thank you Max, I was looking exactly this type of content today
100% still search first. If I am not super knowledge on the domain I am searching for I use an AI to get me keywords and terminology and then search.

At most I use AI now to speed up my research phase dramatically. AI is also pretty good at showing what is in the ballpark for more popular tools.

However I am missing forum style communities more and more, sometimes I don't want the correct answer, I want to know what someone that has been in the trenches for 10 years has to say, for my day job I can just make a phone call but for hobbies, side projects etc I don't have the contacts built up and I don't always have local interest groups that I can tap for knowledge.
Thanks!

Also worth noting that I spent about 5 years trying other projects (from writing books, to coding addons and building SaaS products) before landing on this one.

I think SaaS might be one of the hardest ways to make money on the Internet, but I'm patient.
In the case of Brazil, besides QR codes, you can also make payments using the user unique key, which can be its phone number, social security number, email or a random generated key.
The APIs where designed for humans,
AI learns the world through the
spectacles of a human.
Yes, the free trier is pretty generous and the paid (5$) is more than enough for the vast majority of people.
In the UK you have to declare the item, and local museums are then allowed to bid a fair market price for it, which you have to accept. This money would then be split equally between the person who discovered the item and the landowner. It works pretty well - there's an incentive to legally declare what you've found, as you'll get paid for it, and by doing so the archaeology is often preserved and the item doesn't just disappear into a private collection.

Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasure_Act_1996
Is that maily using solar panels to power uphill water movement into water reservors?
> I worry about "tax thing I don't like" policies

Equating "things I don't like" with "negative externalities" does not seem like a helpful framing for this discussion. I personally like traveling around the world and eating avocados, but they have substantial negative externalities. I personally dislike watching ballet or eating mushrooms, but they have minimal negative externalities.

Advertising may very well be something that the author dislikes AND that has negative externalities, but the point of a Pigovian tax is solely to apply a price commensurate with negative externalities, not the dislike.

> you to some extent want that activity to occur otherwise you've got budget issues

Perhaps, which is why he mentions "freebates", and why I find revenue-neutral Pigovian proposals like the "carbon-fee-and-dividend" so compelling. The primary purpose is not revenue, it is to ensure the correct price on negative externalities so society can rely on a free market to solve tricky allocation problems.
A company pretending to be some fancy place that everyone wants to work that just isn't that great. The whole A's hire A's and B's hire C's but are pretending to be A's kind of thing. Let's just say that not every company is like Google in the early days (free 3 star restaurant food, clean t-shirts, slides in the office, and all the rest). Even Google is not like that anymore.

There's a lot of that going on where companies just don't realize that they aren't just filtering bad candidates out but scaring the best ones away because they approach them wrong. Hiring is as much a sales job as it is a filtering job. After you filter out the bad candidates, how do you make sure you don't lose the good candidates? How do you get them into your hiring funnel to begin with? The assumption that these candidates are going to drop on their knees and beg you to please employ them is just extremely misguided in many cases.

Whenever you hear companies complain that they can't find good people, that's what's going on. Mostly it boils down to the company not being that great and candidates flocking to more interesting opportunities.
>There is also a very widespread perception that refugee camps are about making money for corrupt politicians and contractors

Even though that isn't what refugee camps are "about" it's something that happens pretty regularly.
I hope the EU comes out stronger and united over all of these hyperpolicy changes.
My ChatGPT “searches the web” and provides URL of the sources as well.
Top-30 Manual QA Interview Questions (+Answers)
Yes, all my searching is using Google and I haven't had any issues with the results or finding what I want.
I went to the repo to find out if your program automatically converted spaces into tabs but it seems it is more oriented toward oneliner expressions

If you're going to plug your toy in this context, showing something more relevant than "print hello" would have saved me the click
The problem with that is that people aren't asking for AI generated images in the style of Raven from Topeka with an Etsy shop. They're asking for Ghibli. So the people whose livelihoods are most directly impacted are (assuming they're not centuries dead) the famous, talented, and trend-making artists, not the lower tier making bad Precious Moments knockoffs. Society's problem is understanding that not wanting to pay for bad Precious Moments knockoffs is rational, while not wanting to pay, say, a Studio Ghibli for quality, professional creativity is insane.
R2 also needs more polish. Still waiting for multi-region storage etc.
And I'll warn you a limited liability entity doesn't necessarily protect your personal assets either.

Undercapitalization is a big one that people don't often realize - going without insurance an not enough funds to cover a claim will usually pierce the veil.

Same goes with little things that typically don't matter to the owner of a one person company, like failing to keep board/member annual meeting minutes and sending them to the state body that requires them, and the biggest one for most small businesses - commingling funds and "alter ego" doctrine - the company is not you, the company's money is not yours.

There are a lot of ways that limited liabilities vanish - especially for smaller businesses like OP is describing.
100%, I have family in manufacturing and this isn't anything new. Most current manufacturing plants already run on effectively a skeleton staff vs 50 years ago.
My website currently shows up on bing (which has an opt-out tool, I just haven't bothered to use it), duckduckgo (which scrapes its results from other engines) and yahoo search (which apparently scrapes from bing). I can't check Kagi as I'm not paying for it, and I can't currently think of other search engines off the top of my head
Well, maybe, but apart from the form factor, it's the same: imperfect sensors driving potentially very powerful actuators.

If we can't trust a gimballed robot arm, I can't see why we would trust these guys.
I like Cloudflare. I also feel they are doing too many things...
>the current government today isn’t already suppressing speech and going after organizations that say stuff it disagree with.

No, actually, it is. Speech involving transgender individuals is being restricted.

https://www.nps.gov/articles/nhl-womens-history-junior-range...

References to trans people have even been scrubbed from NPS pages about Stonewall. It's heinous.
apples contain amygdalin and cyanide, theoretically lab-grown apples that exclude these are far better for you than wild/farmed apples.
The law for speaking negatively about the monarchy is pretty strict. I thought the sentence maximum was up to the king (aka Death penalty) as most matters are.

“The courts seem not to recognise the principle of granting defendants the benefit of the doubt. Judges have said accusers did not have to prove the factuality of the alleged lèse-majesté material but only claim it is defamatory. Pleading guilty, then asking for a royal pardon, is seen as the quickest route to freedom for any accused.”

Thai people won’t say a thing about the king digitally or in person for fear of the law.

How strict the laws are about the royals story: The 1880 queen and her daughter were drowning but no one could save them because looking at or touching the queen was forbidden by commoners. So they drowned while screaming for help.

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A8se-majest%C3%A9_in_Thailan...
Do you have resources that provide info on companies using Linux on Z and the benefits of this verses commodity hardware? I used to work for a Mainframe ISV but the majority of our software ran on z/OS. I only saw customers using Linux on Z to begrudgingly run software that wouldn't efficiently run on z/OS, mainly Java applications when customers didn't want to deal with the complexity of specialty engines. I realize because our software focused on z/OS I had limited visibility into the full operations at our customers.
Hyundai owns Boston dynamics... Still interesting, but it's like buying lemonade from your kid's lemonade stand to support them. Others will see you buying the juice and get thirsty, hopefully.
Oh, no, I wasn't taking issue with what you said, just reacting that, yes, it's not editing the same image but redrawing from scratch every time, BUT it's doing a much better job of that, with some understanding of the context of the previous image so that it can tweak it, even if it's never bit for bit identical.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parts:_The_Clonus_Horror

Fun fact: I had a substitute teacher in school who spent the whole period arguing with the class about how it was inevitable whole people would be cloned for organ transplants.

Ever since I found out about Never Let Me Go, I've been wondering where he got the idea.
you just sound like an anti-vaxer, one of those UPF fearmongering cultists.
Yea, in my opinion, hx-swap or turbolinks is a bit of an antipattern. Seems to me you get worst of both worlds:

- something that kinda looks like full reload

- but with all problems of client side routing

- and without preserving the DOM state like SPA would

- and you don't get the immediate response that is the main reason to build the SPA in the first place

In fact, it's often even slower than native navigation, because native navigation can start processing the stream during download and there's overhead with pre and post processing of the response in the boosted link version. Try to profile GitHub links to see what I'm talking about, opening a link in new tab can be 2x faster than clicking in the same tab.
Wikipedia says uncited that N2O produces heat when it decomposes into nitrogen and oxygen, but that's the opposite of other comments saying that cold oxygen is better because it's denser
Super cool project. The block mode on the 3151 was way ahead of its time — kind of wild how it handled forms locally like that. Love the idea of hooking it up to a mainframe via your translator. Also yeah… we really need to bring back spiral cables.
People called things like Lotus 1-2-3 “killer apps” in the 1980s.

A reference from 1989:

https://books.google.com/books?id=CbsaONN5y1IC&pg=PP75#v=one...
Can you go into more detail about what's frustrating? You can customize the animations, right?
It’s a process alright. A lawless process.
Yes, but we had that problem before when somebody would farm out coding assignments to a friend. I couldn’t say yet how it’s impacted the coding assignment’s effectiveness as a filter yet. We still do get crap code just sometimes it’s obviously AI generated.
Yes, because Google also has AI and it’s integrated into my browser bar, Chat-Gpt is just secondary tool to me.

If I need something more complex like programming, talk therapy, or finding new music then I’ll hop on over to Chat.
I don't know, 5-6 months ago? I used them, found them acceptable at making human sounding text, and haven't really used them since. I've not found a use-case for them that is useful to me. If I don't know how to program something, I'll google it, or just work it out myself
That makes sense to me. They both banned Samurai swords.
So much empty space. Does anyone else miss compact, purposeful UI designs?
> you can also make payments using the user unique key, which can be its phone number, social security number, email or a random generated key.

And you can also use the bank account number, effectively replacing older bank transfer mechanisms like DOC and TED.
I'm always thinking: actuators are close to their peak efficiency for some time now, i.e. electric motors can barely get any better. Same with with mechanical construction, materials and all the newtonian bits. These things are probably close to a theoretical optimum. Now these things weigh a certain amount for a set amount of power needed. It's all a bit like the rocket equation: the more power you need, the heavier the power supply, the bigger and heavier the motors have to be, and so on. So there's a hard limit of what an autonomous robot can do for how long. Now, the Boston Dynamics machines certainly are impressive in their promotional videos. But I've not found any reliable public information on how long their humanoid robots can operate autonomously without recharging. Minutes? Hours? Not that charging is that big of an issue, especially in a factory. But still, I'd be interested how long the machine can actually operate on its own. Maybe someone has information on that?
Amazon's new Nova Sonic foundation model understands how you say it
XL Batteries is using petrochemical infrastructure to store solar and wind power