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I mean anything in the 0.5B-3B range that's available on Ollama (for example). Have you built any cool tooling that uses these models as part of your work flow?

I want to move our local communities off Facebook and onto our own platform. Is there a off-the-shelf solution or any collaborators I can join to move something along?

EDIT: I live in a more rural community (moved from a big city). We have 5-6 small (~50k people) towns, all well connected. Everything happens on Facebook. I would like to move to a different platforms. Plus points for self-hosted, federated.

e.g. Word Processor, LLM, Rhymezone, Masterwriter, etc.?

I'm particularly interested in any AI assisted software. Assisted being the keyword; I'm not interested in AI generated slop, but something that makes intelligent suggestions as you write.

I'll be here for the next 3 hours and then again at around 4 pm EST for another 3 hours. As usual, there are many possible topics and I'll be guided by whatever you're concerned with but as much as possible - because we've received so many questions about this the past few months - I'd like to focus on the impact of the new administration on U.S. immigration law and policy. Please remember that I can't provide legal advice on specific cases for liability reasons because I won't have access to all the facts. Please stick to a factual discussion in your questions and comments and I'll try to do the same in my answers. Thanks!

Edit: Thank you again for the great questions and discussion. I'm taking a break now and will return in about an hour. If I miss any questions before the AMA ends today, I'll do my best to respond tomorrow

It's very hard to find current non-ideological information on this topic.

(Part of) the team who recently reanimated the original ELIZA (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42746506) is now working to reanimate what are often considered the first AIs -- the symbolic heuristic programs built by Newell and co at RAND in the 1950. Most of these programs were written in IPL-V, the fascinating (if ugly) machine level language for a stack machine that was the first to introduce list processing, recursion, and symbolic computing, among other innovations that we take for granted today.

There were many implementations of IPL-V. According to the manual (https://bitsavers.org/pdf/rand/ipl/Information_Processing_La...) implementations existed for at least these machines: B220, CDC 1604 and G-20, Ferranti Mercury, IBM 650, 704, 709-7090, 1620, Philco 2000, UNIVAC 1105 and 1107, and the AN/FSQ-32 (whatever that was). And we know that it was also on the IBM 360 and 7094.

If you have access to a code archive for any of these machines, and can search it for the IPL-V interpreter, we would greatly appreciate it. (A print out is fine -- preferred in fact!) We are building one ourselves in (ironically) Lisp, but it would be amazing to be able to run an original stack, as we did with the 7094->CTSS->MAD stack in reanimating ELIZA.

We (obviously) open source everything we do.

You can post here, or DM me (my email is in my "HN about"). Thanks!

A Minimalist TypeScript for C. Cp1, or C+1, or C plus 1 programming language adds only the bare essentials to C language that allows you to output C codes and able to use namespaces, modules, methods on enums/structs, auto variable deduction and more.

Github: https://github.com/galileolajara/cp1

Curious if any HNers are running successful businesses selling desktop/downloadable software with a one-time payment model - not SaaS, not subscriptions. Something like the old days. How's the market for that? What's your experience with support and updates?

Couldn't find any previous discussions on PEPPOL on HN. If you're unfamiliar with it, it is an electronic invoicing network, which the EU is starting to force on businesses. All business-to-business invoices in Belgium will have to be sent over PEPPOL as of next year [1]. Gone will be the days of emailing PDFs.

This obviously impacts every business which deals with other businesses. Access to the PEPPOL network is not free. Direct access is nearly impossible (it is expensive and requires technical audits). A variety of third parties are popping up to mediate access. They all seem complex and expensive. Not only will you have to use the network to send your invoices, you will also have to receive them somehow. If you're a small business, this could get pretty complicated pretty quickly.

I'm assuming we have some EU business owners/freelancers/entrepreneurs on HN. How are you preparing for this (apparently inevitable) future of PEPPOL?

[1] https://finance.belgium.be/en/enterprises/vat/e-invoicing/mandatory-use-structured-electronic-invoices-2026

As a young FinTech startup (± 2yo, 10 software developper), we are considering to adopt AG Grid as our main framework to display data table in our VueJS / GraphQL webapp. The licence is pricey and the learning curve does not look quite easy. Is AG Grid really worth it?

Hi, as the title says, I tried everything, checking my bookmarks and chatgpt but cannot find a post about someone telling the story of some engineer using pencil and paper for a month or so and then typing the code in one go and it worked flawlessly.

He was writing some niche OS system and the blog was a collection of posts about that system.

I also remember from the discussion thread that the developer had passed away.

With X, formerly Twitter, going the way it has, I find myself lacking spaces on the internet to scroll and learn things at the same time (besides this one.)

Where does HN spend their downtime on the internet?

When coding small programs in python, js, java, C++ it often feels to me that the dependency requirements list in pyproject.toml, requirements.json, maven.xml, CMakeLists.txt, contains information that is redundant to the import or include statements at the top of each file.

It seems to me that a reasonable design decision, especially for a scripting language like python, would be to allow specification of versions in the import statement (as pipreqs does) and then have a standard installation process download and install requirements based on those versioned import statements.

I realize there would be downsides to this idea. For example, you have to figure out what happens if different versions of a requrement are specified in different files of the same package (in a sense, the concept of "package" starts to weaken or break down in a case like that). But in some cases, e.g. a single-file python script, it seems like it would be great.

So, are there any languages whose standard installer / dependency resolvers download dependencies based on the import or include statements?

Has anyone hacked or extended python / setuptools to work this way?

Hello hn. I'm looking for a device that I can insert between the audio output and speaker to normalize the audio.

The goal is to ensure that sudden loud noises don't become overwhelming and quieter parts sound reasonably the same.

My reason for doing this is because it's so hard to watch movies these days because of the inconsistent volume levels (2x harder at night).

Any suggestions or recommendations on specific products or solutions would be greatly appreciated! Any DIY suggestions are also welcome too.

I know of Hyperlapse Pro, which did some kind of 3D reconstruction of the scene to stabilize a video, Hyperlapse Mobile which just does frame selection (but still works very well), and LocalRF [0] which seems to use NeRFs to construct a smoothed video. But all are relatively old given the rapid rate of improvement in AI and computer graphics, and all are hard to run. (Hyperlapse pro only runs on windows, hyperlapse mobile is no longer on the play store, and I have no idea how to run localrf.)

There is also Gyroflow [1] which does a great job using gyroscope data, but the results are not as spectacular as those discussed above. What is the modern state of the art?

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36348483 [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36360018

We’re hosting a meetup in SF for founders applying to the first-ever spring batch

Come connect with other ambitious founders and gain insights from the YC alumni

Date: Feb 6

Time: 6:30 PM

RSVP here: https://lu.ma/lwdw64cn

See you there!

A week ago, we reached 200 users for our SaaS solution (social media). We expected to hit this number by May.

We've learned 2 lessons from this milestone that I want to take the time to share with you:

Lesson 1: You don't know how good your solution is until it's tested in the real world.

In the beginning you have great ideas. By the end you have great ideas. In the middle you realize that your great ideas weren't that great after all.

We assumed (educated guess) that our software is great enough to ask the customer to pay for a trial and then afterwards pay for a subscription. But we were wrong. Instead, we saw:

- 21% conversions for trial offer. - 2% conversion for subscription offer. Our solution is not living up to our users expectations (or the ones we set). Ouch. But necessary.

Lesson 2: You're not ready for the unexpected.

Our plan was to launch on Product Hunt, get a high place and go from there to 2000 customers. What happened instead was a ranking below the top 12 launches. Essentially we didn't "make it". But then something unexpected happened:

We got featured on a popular and trusted AI newsletter (Superhuman, anyone?) and a Spanish newsletter (who 1-to-1 copied the other one).

They had found us on Product Hunt and they liked our idea enough to feature us.

Wow. Grateful.

That's all. I know these lessons aren't new. But sometimes you just need to go through it yourself to actually understand them. I wish the same for you!

I'm a PM and Product Designer looking to transition into launching my own products. While I have basic programming knowledge, I'm trying to be strategic about what technical skills to develop given the current AI landscape.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on what technical skills would give me the best value-for-effort ratio as a solo founder in 2025. Should I focus on learning prompt engineering and AI integration, dive deeper into a specific programming stack, or perhaps take a different approach entirely?

Appreciate any insights from those who've been in similar positions!

I’ve spent almost two decades in digital-focused roles, specialising in strategy, user research, and creating frameworks for better customer experiences (ostensibly UX I suppose).

While I’ve found the work rewarding, I feel it’s time for a significant career change—potentially outside of this domain entirely.

I’m seeking advice from others who have made mid-career transitions:

• How did you pinpoint new directions that matched your skills and interests?

• What were the most effective ways to reposition your experience in a new field?

• Are there any resources or strategies you’d recommend for upskilling or building networks?

I've often thought about cybersecurity as something I'd like to specialise in, but it seems like bootcamps and the like aren't worth the money they charge (most advice has been starting at the bottom as an IT helpdesk worker and going from there, but I'm no spring chicken anymore. But I'm not against starting at the very bottom and working my way up).

I realise this is quite a broad ask, and apologies for the throwaway. I’d appreciate any insights, especially from those who’ve shifted from established careers to something entirely different. Thanks in advance!

I was talking to a friend and said there aren't _that_ many companies with the scale to truly justify FAANGesque solutions. I've only had two projects where a server couldn't just hold all hot data in 256gb. For most, services I've seen, a laptop + hard drive would suffice.

I'm curious how big the DBs you touch are, how much ram all your microservices use or other such metrics.

Is Apple allowing fake reviews on the App Store? I find it very unlikely that TurboTax is beloved enough to merit 4.8 stars.

I know this isn’t scientific, but take a scroll through the most recent reviews. They are made up of 1-3 star reviews with complaints of the customer experience.

I may be jumping the gun here, but can we trust no one? Fraudulent reviews are rampant on the internet, but I assumed Apples App Store would be somewhat walled off through the requirement for an Apple ID.

Please share any information HN may have on how reviews work on the App Store and if anyone knows of ways they are being manipulated (like Yelp, Amazon, and Google Maps do).

I want to try out AI/ML finetuning on a laptop.

Nothing too involved. I just want to see the output of the model improve in a couple of hours as I finetune it.

Is there a pre-trained model out there that is small enough to do this? (Ideally something that can be installed via a single Docker-Compose command.)

Long story short, I'm building a new product and will likely launch it as a yearly SaaS with a permissive license. I'm later in my career and am mostly building it for fun, but I think it has potential to be a good, small business that I'd have fun fiddling with for a long time.

I went through and set up the usual LLC, but was curious about how I could set it up to be a member or worker-owned company. Has anyone done anything like that from the beginning? Should I just worry about this later?

With licensing, the typical model has been to make your core permissive, and keep the hosting / billing application private. Has anyone made even that part of their SaaS open? I know that would make is really easy to fork the business, but was thinking something like a time-gated Functional Source License (FSL) might work?

I'm open to ideas. I don't see this discussed commonly on HN, so figured it was a good topic.

I've now consulted ChatGPT on a solution for a vulnerability which I even filed a patent for long time ago and I feel less stupid right now.

Say bank.com has SSL. Cool! Now how does Angular work? You visit angular-site.com/some/path and backend server rewrites the request to angular-site.com/index.html. You still see angular-site.com/some/path. And it works and that's how Angular servers that serve Angular apps work.

Now, what prevents bank-malicious-url.com from acting like a viewer, where it access bank.com when you visit it hence the SSL encryption/decryption is made between it and the legit bank.com, whilst malicious-bank.com url has a simple letsencrypt certificate that is showing you a not so legit green secured URL web address on the top of your web browser?

Please help! I abandoned my patent, I've been building my Angular web app and now I think that the old me was not so dumb after all. Where to proceed from now?

I have a bunch of blog posts, with URLs like these:

  https://mywebsite/1-post-title
  https://mywebsite/2-post-title-second
  https://mywebsite/3-post-title-third
  https://mywebsite/4-etc

  https://mywebsite/1-post-title/2-post-title-second
  https://mywebsite/1-post-title/3-post-title-third

Since the blog engine simply discards everything after number (1,2,3...) and just serves the content for blog post #1, #2, #3,... the web server returns a valid page. However, all those pages are the same.

The main problem here is that there is no website page that has such compound links like https://mywebsite/1-post-title/2-post-title-second

So it's clearly some bug in the crawler.

Maybe OpenAI is using AI code for their crawler because it has so dumb bugs you cannot believe any human would write it.

They will make 90000 requests to load my small blog with 300 posts.

Cannot imagine what happens with larger websites that have thousands of blog posts.

We’re in the early days of building something new. Our research has led us to the following value prop:

Frictionless payments for Next.js developers: No more billing sync madness or reconciliation bullshit.

We’d like to know, does this resonate with you? Why or why not?

We’d also love to hear about your payments headaches.

If you had a magic wand, what would you change about your payments integrations today?

Bonus points for hopping on a call with us to treat us like your therapist (let me know in comments). In exchange - I’ll provide a design critique on anything you’d like (YC alum/RISD/founding designer of Imgur).

Past big data, ML, Metaverse, crypto, blockchain, and now AI. But what do you believe will be the next trend?

I’ve noticed that YC companies often advertise their hiring positions. That’s great news! However, I’ve also seen some of their comments that raise concerns. I know for a fact that some of them have toxic hiring or team practices (which is why they need to advertise so frequently). I’m curious why comments aren’t available on those ads.

Currently building a little app.

To see if people would be interested in it, I want to build a little landing page that features some screenshots and has a waiting list (via email) at the bottom.

Are there any services or open source projects for this? Preferably using shadcn/react/supabase. I don't want to reinvent the wheel here.