wqtz

I’ll be the jerk here: I’ve stopped reading articles that include the word "lesson" unless they provide tangible impact metrics—like how much money you actually made as an indie dev. I have skimmed the article and to me it is generic. It might sound harsh, but that’s the reality. Hacker News has become nothing more than a launchpad for new apps and services. These posts are often just veiled advertisements, like yet another "Show HN: Timelines.app."

> He followed this advice and the results were disastrous.

The whole idea of this article hinges on this sentence. What disasterous thing happened exactly? Considering the premise seems to be missing, dare I say, this article seems to rhetorical.

Sorry. I meant to say "bit.io"

Ahhhh... my mistake it was "bit.io"

Bit.io was a serverless postgres platform similiar to neon. They got acquired by databricks and their service was shutdown extremely fast.

- Where are you getting the data to train the model? You need initial historic data of different products including pricing information and inventory. I am assuming you are buying scraped data. Don't have an opinion just curious. The words data and AI feels to be lacking context.

- Will you also be looking into real time competitor pricing to make discounts more competitive?

In my opinion.

I do not get the value of BaaS platforms. By the time you have spun up your 3rd postgres instance in a VM you get a hang of it and create a boilerplate docker container with an API layer.

Firebase has auth for free. Firebase has custom domains for free. Supabase is BaaS and Firebase is an app platform. You can make firebase just work, but for supabase you need other services to compliment.

I maybe missing the point of supabase, but I have tried it for a year and it is not for me. VPS from medium and small vendors are quite cheap and it is worth the investment to set it up in your way.

Fly.io shutdown, planetscale canceled free tier, heroku canceled free tier and frontend layer platforms like Vercel and Netlify has pricing related reputational issues.

I just do not trust these platforms any more. VPS and dedicated servers are cheap, sutainable, and experimentable. They are tried and true. But that's my opinion, I could be wrong.

We used a real estate agency focused CRM but it is just too niche and might expose my client. On the more popular end, I used hubspot, and a little bit salesforce. The main thing was any CRM that provided reminders. So, I often used Google Sheets and airtable and calendar events. Tried to convince the clients to use Monica or Nat for personal crm but they prefered Google Sheets.

I used to run a social media management firm where we catered to real estate agents. For 12 dollar an hour, me and my partner would manage personal facebook and instagram accounts of realtors and small business owners but mostly realtors. We would pretend to be them, interact with people, add new friends and maintain a CRM of influential facebook acquitances they had. We had better virtual relationship with complete strangers then our realtors had in real life. To us it was the same. We pretended to be charasmatic and took risks in social communications that we wouldn't in real life. People trusted the person they thought they were talking to and recommended them as a realtor to their friends. We journaled their birthdays, anniversary and any significant thing in the CRM.

It was a win, win and win.

But at the end of the day real estate market crashed and we had an incredibly hard time to convince new clients that these business model actually works.

I have seen my fair share of ML Python codebases. Distribution is a mess, onboarding new people is a mess. The thing I would says just works is OS level configuration things like Kubernetes or NixOS are proven technology that works and there are enough resources for issues that can be self-debugged instead of opening tickets/ gh issues or reaching out to support. But as these are much complicated technology, you need domain experts and should not pressure ML engineers or data scientists to figure this out. I have seen Python packaging to be such a mess it is easier to teah to Python engineers ML or DS, then ML engineers proper package handling and distribution. The very existence dozens of packaging solutions show that engineer would rather create something from scrath rather work with existing tools.

Not trying gatekeep, but I think considering I can not even see the site on mobile, I would label this as a POC (Proof of Concept) instead of an MVP.

My philsophy is simple. If the program is intended to be distributable, just use Go. If it does not require port stuff, use docker. If you have an IT team or someone to hand you a computer with OS and Python version installed that everyone else in the org uses, use venv.

If you have to work with ports, you have to distribute programs, or your libraries depend on C or OS stuff, then start consulting where you do not have to manage the codebase or have no committment to it after getting paid.

Based on the policy of "piercing the corporate veil" of corporate governance, it is rare that a corporate agent (a person who works for a company) is held accountable. A company operates as an artificial human being meaning that it can perform action and be accountable for it. The people running the company is not largely liable, it is the company itself who is liable. It isn't the board of directors of 3M or Dow Chemicals accountable for chemical spills. It is Dow and 3M who are accountable. There is a separation of identity. Now, in extreme cases the board of directors or upper management are charged for activities of a company as they are the "brains" behind the artificial human entity representing the company. However, the investor, sponsors or other influential stakeholder will never get criticized (formally) because they can claim they do not have operational authority, legal standings or insights into company's internal mechanism. They can claim they acted on "good faith" and it is legally impossible to prove otherwise even if they have consulted or advocated for the company.

Corporate governance as a field of study is interesting. Feel free to explore it.

I think a bunch of people were introduced to Vim by Luke Smith, Geohotz and primeagen around 5 years ago. I wanted to be one of the cool guys using Vim but it took a while to admit it that except for Vim keybindings Vim wasn't doing much for me. Vim is less of an editor and more of a system and I struggled to adopt Vim completely or introduce Vim approach to other systems. If I need to write a document in word or google docs and colloborate with other people Vim keybindings was a distraction. I have to write the content in Vim and then transfer it to docs. Vim makes editing documents difficult. It is not friendly to people who make constant typos as character traversal is not part of it's design. Vim appeals to a very niche group of people who are working on a personalized environment and are comfortable with the idea of daily struggle for the promise of progressive productivity. Vim people are different kind of people.

After trying out every text editor out there, I think sublime text (vintage mode enabled), VS code (with Vim plugin) and liteXL are the generally useful editors and provides a better user experience then vim and terminal based Vim variants. Even though I do not use Vim, my hot take is that if you are installing Vim plugins from the get-go you are missing the point Vim. Vim is not like the GUI editors and you should not attempt making it that way. That defeats the purpose of Vim and makes using vim more like an agenda.

I geniunely think "anti doping" as a policy practice stands against everything that makes human as a speicies progress as a physcially being. 'Doping' should proudly inducted biomedical research, regulated and commercialized. Because anti-doping is fundamentally a flawed concept, it does not surprise it's application is marred with corruption, negligence and incompetence.

What transition plans do you recommend for coal producing counties? The issue is that these coal counties get fucked (for a lack of a better words) with coal and without coal. With coal every family suffer generational health problems. But atleast they get to eat and live. Without coal they do not have an economic system to make a living out of it. During the colonial times (here we go) the Bri'ish forced Bengal farmers [0] to cultivate indigo which caused literal famines. They could not produce food crops and colonialist didn't bother to compensate the farmer obviously. Then the farmers got "fucked" over again, when industrial revolution resulted in creation of artificial indigo and farmers struggled to make a transition to another crop. Now, your average WV native is far from a Bengal peasant but idea of policy based restrictions on making a living can be compared. My argument is that broad sweeping policies about establishing how people in particular regions make a living needs to carefully evaluated. Now, I am not for or against coal at all. Coal producing counties are always marginalized and politicians rarely care about them except for election times. For/against coal does very little in terms of coming up with a solution. If you are against coal present a solution on how these counties can transition to making a living without being relocated.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigo_revolt

I am interested in learning about how something is being used and in what context, instead of what it has to offer. Can anyone tell me if they are using HTMX in a proven environment, like a user-facing environment?

I think adopting HTMX as a framework would be difficult to switch from a React, Vue, etc. environment. I think using it inside internal tooling or a hobby project will not be able to justify its merit.

I understand that it is just a simple framework and it addresses an industry-related issue, but migration is a lot of effort. Does HTMX really provide enough value to justify the engineering investment required?

The healthcare industry will never be "revolutionized" by just a few million dollars in venture funding. The core revenue backbone of healthcare is not healthcare itself, but rather "bureaucracy as a service." A true revolution in healthcare would involve a brutally simplified exposure of costs and impact, divided between each individual element and organization in the invoice.

No country in the world can address this without a government organization. You start by telling patients where their money goes in a transparent way and which organizations benefit from it. That is it.

The problem is the trust aspect of this level of transparency. There is so much money (large insurance and healthcare groups) and chaos (biotech stocks), making it extremely difficult for businesses to be reliable to individuals as a business. To run a business, you need money, and to operate a business like this, you need an unconditional amount of money for the long term. VCs can take care of the unconditional giving of money, but they are never long-term. They will badger the investee to join the darkside of healthcare because they need an answer in 5 years of series A whether the startup is going to be a unicorn or not.

Is it possible for a hundred billion dollar company to hold constant stream of innovation that is not in big tech?

From what I understand MBA-fication of innovation is inevitable. Innovation is funded by revenue and revenue is backed by sales. Sales is driven by "who you know" aka networking.

Technical prowess will convince someone to buy your product, but networking gets you through the doors in the first. Inevitably you need MBAs to generate revenue. After a certain points MBA-fication creeps in to engineering decisions and innovation.

From what I understand, innovation is largely fueled by chaos and risk. MBA fundamentally is about risk minimization and certainty. So, I can't blame Boeing, like I can't blame Intel, IBM, Ford, GM, General Electric, Phillips etc.

I don't get it. Can anyone kindly share where this practice can be applied to a commercial software? I am struggling to wrap my head around "how run by user" works where they are using a commercial software service.

I have the same question. Atleast a few companies here should be running on a profitable level, because of low overhead costs and smaller scope. But YC did raise the seed round for them and could have even brought in a few seed/angel investors. My assumption is that, these investors are either pressuring them to raise more funds or look for a way to be acquired. But VCs do operate on shorter timelines. I am pretty confused on what the arrangement is.

I would absolutely love to hear what the conversation is between YC and these founders.

I came across Ninite today and saw that they had 2 employees and was a YC company. It felt quite interesting. They didn't fit the framework of "break things, do stuff" strategy of blitzscaling.

I tried to use "5+ years" as a proxy for survival, but that is a very weak metric as many companies are inactive, had dead domains or the cofounder LinkedIn showing a different story. But the "5+ years" does remove fund raising companies.

Most folks in HN dream of having a solo business with them being the owner-operator. This list provides an interesting database of things that spans from "Boeing for electric planes" to essentially job-boards or newsletters.

As far as I know the strategy he used - "Shell Companies + Phony Individual Information" can be used to purchase any form of assets. Usually, either federal law agencies ignores these activities mostly because how difficult it is to prosecute them. I am out of my depth here, but that is what I know. It is illegal but rarely people get punished for it. I don't think he is getting punished for the acquisition part, but for something else.

What makes ARIN so special? I am going to bet for other RIRs this is pretty normal. AFRINIC IPv4 has a hassle to transfer, and ARIN and RIPE IPs is the target. That leaves APNIC and LACNIC.

I believe, APNIC allocated MASSIVE IP ranges to government research agencies and government educational institution which are slowly being traded and re-registered under ARIN and RIPE.

How do you verify the "integrity" of a system like this?

I was doing business studies research stuff when blockchain was all the rage. The accounting integrity was a major buzzword around that circle. Nobody came up with anything concrete or utilitarian.

The challenge is that you need to remove malicious reviews or spams. But at the same time that review system cannot be exploited.

Is there a systematic way to do this?

Throwing an idea here. What if there was a distributable append only database that obfuscated the content (reviews, company, user, company etc) with hash function only showed the action (new review, update review, delete review etc.)?

The database should be shared across multiple stakeholders as single source database is easily corruptible. For each actions to go through, these stakeholder databases need to be verify them. Tis verification process essentially links these databases to a single system. Then once the verification is done the review can be added.

To incentivize the storing and verification we need to offer an incentive of sort that is not money. As money corrupts everything and is the source of all evil it should be a form of token of gratitude that can be essentially transacted with other participants a form of pseudo currency. The value of the pseudo currency derives from everyone believing in the system.

In fact we can probably create an algorithm that automates the verification process using LLM algorithm and historic patterns. Those LLM algorithms can run on the stakeholder machines preferably on GPU.

Would a system like this work?

I guess the dude who wrote that function thought, maybe I shouldn't add a docstring or any comments to that function. What is he/she even supposed to write "function to commit corporate insurance fraud."?

Protip. If you are committing fraud in the future - use a compiled language, do not use offsite version control and UPLOAD ONLY THE BINARY.

It is an honest and unfiltered take.

My theory is that honest takes should be written on first take without revisions and without edits. The moment I massage a statement to be more coherent I am compromising on my honesty.

My apologies. I agree. How long does it take for Ketamine to wear off? I only had a little bit after breakfast. I hope the edit button stays.

Let me pull up the literal map of fucking Marvel cinematic movie timeline to confirm that information..... screw that.

I am already at mental capacity with Agile terminology, 17 different cybersecurity concepts that might ruin my job and 5 different SQL dialects. I barely have the capacity to remember my youngest kid's name.

Oh no! We don't know who killed beloved professor, Dr. Tots and his unethical student love interest, Lira Buckshire Dunningsworth, heir of Lord Cantishwayshire.

They had the perfect western european historical dispute contextual relationship going on. <I have no idea of western european conflicts but I am going to say the professor is Irish because IRA, and the student is daughter of a british lord because not-IRA>

Who killed them? Why would they even go to a shady part of London where crimes and prostitution happens. That doesn't make any sense. Also on the other hand Dr. Tots actor was a bitch to work with and there was allegations of how he treated atleast one underage actor badly.

Anyway who was the mysterious shadowy figure! Why did he kill them so randomly.

I have no clue who that is, but I would love to have Anthony Hopkins or one of those marvel villains like Ms./Captain Marvel or something to play that role.

They are really banking on the season 1 pre finale TikTok dance move.

In fact, they have sprinkled in dozens of "meme" reaction per season so they can have contract social media managers create 1,000 memes that they plan to distribute across reddit and instagram through power-repost-accounts.

In fact one of their crucial Gen-Z adoption metric is based on virality of those memes. For that metric they have a analytics contract with Reddit where Reddit has said they will provide only provide analytics information of the usage meme pictures and in no way they will push those memes are or corpo-moderate reddit threads around those memes. And also obviously the ad department is a separate department and has no influence on the analytics contract with Reddit.

Most management consultants are useless. But there are some realities you must accept.

Number 1. In a team of 20-30 engineers there is only one extremely god "why is he with us" engineers who is great at technical stuff and being a people person. However, no matter how nice he is his approach to his job, it is a job and I will only drop hints how the management should be done. He doesn't care about where the company is headed because he plays video games, has a family and has a literal life. He doesn't care about management and taking on undue responsibilities. Moreover, the people up to has a label for him as an "engineer" does not see as a "manager".

For the rest of the engineers and managers, have also adopted the approach of "not my problem", you see a bizarre communication gap. Engineers working closesly with the product don't want to talk to their managers, becase the conversation goes like "if you know this so much, why don't you.... <a description of something results in more work that goes outside their JD>" and managers don't want to talk with engineers because "if you are you so interested, why don't you.... <a description of something results in more work that goes outside their JD>"

From this progressive distance between managers and engineers comes the "manaegment consultant". Management consultant have the upper management given flexibility of going back and forth between engineers and managers. They can have conversations with full flexibility but they are not bound to "why don't you...." phrases. They can talk with anyone and submit a report and take home 1 years worth of salary of managers/engineers in 1 month.

The conversation gap between product and business where management consultants come in. And the funny thing is that, management consultants target those "I don't want to but I should" work things and report to the upper management. They can do this so well, because they are not burdened with the "work" part.

Seriously, if you do some introspection, you will see there is plenty of things you know your company should do, but you don't want to voice them because it results in more work and in fact more risk. There comes a "good" management consultant who will discover those things and report to upper management who will create the system to get those jobs done.

That is my pitch if anyone wants a management consultant hire me. I am going to tell them why their company sucks in 20 different ways with 18 of those points being generated by ChatGPT.