stuartjohnson12

The Nonprofit Quietly Funneling Paywalled Articles to HN Readers

I have a feeling there's something cool and useful here, but the way it's described makes me, with the utmost respect love and adoration for the work put into this, want to tear my eyes out. If I was the one posting this after I'd spent a bunch of time working on it and got no comments or feedback I'd be sad and confused, so I will try to give the advice that I would want in this situation.

My harsh feedback would be that the way to communicate what your library does is almost entirely defensive and aims to justify its existence but without telling you in basic terms what it does. It feels like it was written off the back of 100 conversations with someone who said "oh okay, but can't you just [...]".

Humans tend to read in a Z pattern, so I've read 3 blocks of mostly irrelevant text that should be buried in an FAQ somewhere before you actually introduce your core primitives.

I think if you took a few hours to do the following and resubmit you'll get a much warmer reception:

1. Drastically reduce the text. Action Engine provides a set of utilities to help developers build multimodal, streaming, stateful, long-running, agentic applications. Actions are bla bla, async nodes are bla bla. Save the philosophy for the docs.

2. Include a middle step before you jump straight from a oneliner to working program in RestOfTheFuckingOwl style. Here's how these abstractions can be combined in simple way to do surprisingly complex thing.

3. Add a complete, highly intuitive code example or if not possible, a neat diagram. Bonus points for comparing to an existing popular framework you want to replace.

HN is starting to feel like early 2010s Reddit and I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing.

After seeing the website but before reading your comments I honestly thought it was an elaborate piece of satire designed to mock people who demand "source?" from you as a rhetorical demand for asymmetrical effort.

And I actually think it would be funny and useful that way as a tongue in cheek response to such bad faith demands.

Retrospectively finding evidence to support a claim is the wrong way around

This isn't real! This is a phantom of the attention economy! AI SDR companies are all very similar and the product doesn't really work so there's too much capital in a small market. The winning strategy is to quickly grab as many eyeballs as possible. 11x got dunked because of revenue manipulation in pursuit of more eyeballs, and this is also shenanigans in pursuit of more eyeballs. People are afraid AI will replace all jobs so saying you're replacing all jobs with AI evokes the consensus fear response and makes people emotionally engage with your marketing. The meme exists because people are afraid of the meme.

From OP's Github: "I am a 20-year-old university student living in Japan. Although I'm a liberal arts major, I aspire to become an engineer."

Just FYI - this is most likely vibe coding that a sycophantic AI has persuaded OP is cutting edge research.

> Uploads to an S3 bucket can trigger a lambda… don’t complicate things.

I read this and was getting ready to angrily start beating my keyboard. The best satire is hard to detect.

AI slop

Closely followed by the ritual lampooning of some senior middle managers who by the fish-in-barrel method were discovered to not be doing very much.

Vibe coded AI slop. Feel free to continue with your day.

"hey claude, please remove the fake data and use the real data"

"sure thing, I'll add logic to check if the real data exists and only use the fake data as a fallback in case the real data doesn't exist"

I was going to make the old joke about discrete vs discreet but I suppose that blockchain trading is both.

This is sad to hear. We loved Gather but the technical issues stacked up and we made the choice to kill it around 2 weeks ago.

We've still been searching for a proper replacement for go-karting. Our team greatly enjoyed that little mini game.

A thought for any lurking vibe-coders.

If today you told me all this about Enron or FTX while they are still an industry darling, I for one wouldn't want to bet against them. For every FTX where cooked books leads to epic failure, there is a Tether where cooked books lead to accidentally unwrapping an unlimited money tap through all sorts of dubious means.

Not to mention "auditors", whose goal is to use the ambiguous nature of feels-like-a-privacy-invasion-but-legally-isnt when you stick a camera in someone's face in a public place to try and get a rise out of people and prance around as victim.

I think this is a case where the reasonable person test is excellent. Is this use of a camera reasonable for personal/professional purposes

You should be expected to take reasonable steps not to victimise someone by use of a video camera, subject to public interest. That means filming strangers with intent to provoke them should be a crime but raging car park lady cannot reasonably claim to have been victimised. Consent affects what is reasonable without creating a duty-bound obligation not to film without consent.

We already have "reasonable expectations of privacy", why not flip that?

I was recently privileged to see video of my long-deceased grandfather who passed away when I was a toddler as a little boy, laughing and swimming in the Thames with my great grandfather and great great grandfather. What a strange thing that is. It felt very familiar but surreal at the same time. I wondered what the moment would be like if I could go back to that moment and tell that 10 year old boy that I'm his grandchild and that there was an entire lifetime of adventure, love, age, and ill health ahead of him, and that one day he'd only exist to me and the world in the stories of his temperament.

And for millions of years, there are similar men. The 19th century provides me with some portraits from archives. The 18th and 17th century has just names.

I will blow away too in time, and my grandchildren can watch the lego engineering youtube videos I uploaded to Youtube when I was 9, and wonder what it would be like to meet me, too.

Sobering.

> "Iron rice bowl" (simplified Chinese: 铁饭碗; traditional Chinese: 鐵飯碗; pinyin: tiě fàn wǎn) is a Chinese term for an occupation with guaranteed job security,[1] similar to life tenure. Traditionally, people considered to have such positions include military personnel, members of the civil service, as well as employees of various state-owned enterprises (through the mechanism of the work unit).

For my fellow westerners.

do not do this lol

This is fascinating. If you wrote a long essay about this, I (and probably most of hacker news) would surely love to read it.

This sounds like a fascinating niche piece of technical expertise I would love to hear more about.

What are the biggest challenges in scaling metadata from a trillion to a quadrillion objects?

Who am I but the average weighted sum of my future preferences? Why should the temporal dimension of my preferences allow them to suppress other preferences?

Algebraic types aren't scary at all. See:

  type CollatzConjectureIsTrue<
    N extends any[] = [unknown],
    M = "∀",
    A extends any[] = []
  > =
  M extends "odd"   ? (N extends [any, any, ...infer R] ? CollatzConjectureIsTrue<R,"odd"> : N extends [any] ? true : false)
  : M extends "half"  ? (N extends [any, any, ...infer R] ? CollatzConjectureIsTrue<R,"half",[unknown,...A]> : A)
  : M extends "3n1"   ? [unknown, ...N, ...N, ...N]
  : M extends "next"  ? (CollatzConjectureIsTrue<N,"odd"> extends true ? CollatzConjectureIsTrue<N,"3n1"> : CollatzConjectureIsTrue<N,"half">)
  : M extends "term"  ? (N extends [unknown] ? true : CollatzConjectureIsTrue<CollatzConjectureIsTrue<N,"next">,"term">)
  : (CollatzConjectureIsTrue<N,"term"> extends true ? CollatzConjectureIsTrue<[unknown,...N]> : false);

Determinism means that the control logic should lead to the same set of behaviours every time with the same set of inputs under otherwise normal runtime conditions.

And if you're gonna come back with "but that's not real determinism!" then I would remind you that actually no code is deterministic because of quantum uncertainty, and that quantum uncertainty isn't necessarily real because of solipsism, and that there's more to life than rhetorical definition interrogations.

Previously discussed:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37750763

I normally try to avoid commenting on politics because this account is tied to my identity and therefore my profession and it's generally not advisable to tie those things together.

So it is with no degree of lightness that I say that I agree and this concerns me gravely.

Having occasionally looked into these, the overwhelming issue is that pretty much all of them are built with themselves and the output is what you'd expect - vast quantities of untested functionality, no documentation beyond a wall of Claude-isms about how next generation and feature rich it is, and no thought to applicability beyond the narrow set of projects that interest the author.

fed combinator startup decelerator

You're absolutely right!

Wow this is gorgeous, definitely finding a way to shoehorn this into my next project. Even if it's not by the same author, I am grateful to both you and him for making me aware of this nifty library :)

It is fetching data from an API though - it's just the live updates that are a trick.