Ask stories

When I was learning to build websites in 2010 Dreamweaver was the go-to. I remember it thoroughly confused the heck out of me. Anyone here able to use it effectively?

I'm not a PhD but I assume training computer controlling agents is a straightforward problem as we can define clear tasks (e.g. schedule appointment with details xyz or buy product xyz) on real or generated websites and just let the models figure our where to click (through vlm) and learn through RL.

What am I missing, why isn't this a solved problem by now?

Before COVID, I started a marketing and consulting services in Nepal, which failed horribly leaving some thousand in debt. Since, I'm trying to develop a product for high school graduates and entrepreneurs to help finding out PMF and FMF, leaving no burden to start their journey as I've been there. I'm 22 now and the most productive age is slipping out of hand.

The FMF and PMF doesn't have strong back support inside south Asia, as compared to west. Though, investors are interested and non-technical individuals have 46% and 68% positive response on it.

How to get started from zero? And what's the right way and path to start and work on? I'm good at research, communication, presentation and management.

All but the first few years out of school I spent the better part of my 20's working in startups. I've networked well enough, had some ups and some downs. Initially just working for startups as an IC eventually moving into product / technical product and later actually founding / co-founding two companies.

One fizzled out, the other was acquired in a way I sort of made money.

Recently the market has been a bit of a mess and although I took a break to avoid burnout I'm realizing startups (at least with my level of ability and intelligence) are likely just not a great way to make money.

I'm newly 30 and starting to realize I kind of just want a life and a reasonable tech salary. Nothing insane, just something that could support me in a b-tier city with my own place where I have enough time to actually have a girlfriend and well... a normal life.

I'm freaking out because the market is beyond fucked and it seems like my only real choice if I want to "grow" as an engineer / product guy is founding another company. Fortunately I got into some solid accelerators in the valley with a friend from a few years back. It feels good, but at the same time, I feel old and just want a normal job. Even shooting around what new college grads are getting would be fine ($120-140k). I feel like a freaking loser given my age and my relative career stagnation / my inability to actually turn my mildly above average skills into any real money.

Last time I interviewed, my litany of previous startups seemed to totally kneecap my chances of getting return callbacks led alone offers. Any advice where I should look next - I feel like between AI and offshoring I might just need to do something else all-together.

Any advice here is appreciated :)

Hi I'm Anqur, a senior software engineer with different backgrounds where development in C was often an important part of my work. E.g.

1) Game: A Chinese/Vietnam game with C/C++ for making server/client, Lua for scripting [1]. 2) Embedded systems: Switch/router with network stack all written in C [2]. 3) (Networked) file system: Ceph FS client, which is a kernel module. [3]

(I left some unnecessary details in links, but are true projects I used to work on.)

Recently, there's a hot topic about Rust and C in kernel and a message [4] just draws my attention, where it talks about the "Rust" experiment in kernel development:

> I'd like to understand what the goal of this Rust "experiment" is: If we want to fix existing issues with memory safety we need to do that for existing code and find ways to retrofit it.

So for many years, I keep thinking about having a new C dialect for retrofitting the problems, but of C itself.

Sometimes big systems and software (e.g. OS, browsers, databases) could be made entirely in different languages like C++, Rust, D, Zig, etc. But typically, like I slightly mentioned above, making a good filesystem client requires one to write kernel modules (i.e. to provide a VFS implementation. I do know FUSE, but I believe it's better if one could use VFS directly), it's not always feasible to switch languages.

And I still love C, for its unique "bare-bone" experience:

1) Just talk to the platform, almost all the platforms speak C. Nothing like Rust's PAL (platform-agnostic layer) is needed. 2) Just talk to other languages, C is the lingua franca (except Go needs no libc by default). Not to mention if I want WebAssembly to talk to Rust, `extern "C"` is need in Rust code. 3) Just a libc, widely available, write my own data structures carefully. Since usually one is writing some critical components of a bigger system in C, it's just okay there are not many choices of existing libraries to use. 4) I don't need an over-generalized generics functionality, use of generics is quite limited.

So unlike a few `unsafe` in a safe Rust, I want something like a few "safe" in an ambient "unsafe" C dialect. But I'm not saying "unsafe" is good or bad, I'm saying that "don't talk about unsafe vs safe", it's C itself, you wouldn't say anything is "safe" or "unsafe" in C.

Actually I'm also an expert on implementing advanced type systems, some of my works include:

1) A row-polymorphic JavaScript dialect [5]. 2) A tiny theorem prover with Lean 4 syntax in less than 1K LOC [6]. 3) A Rust dialect with reuse analysis [7].

Language features like generics, compile-time eval, trait/typeclass, bidirectional typechecking are trivial for me, I successfully implemented them above.

For the retrofitted C, these features initially come to my mind:

1) Code generation directly to C, no LLVM IR, no machine code. 2) Module, like C++20 module, to eliminate use of headers. 3) Compile-time eval, type-level computation, like `malloc(int)` is actually a thing. 4) Tactics-like metaprogramming to generate definitions, acting like type-safe macros. 5) Quantitative types [8] to track the use of resources (pointers, FDs). The typechecker tells the user how to insert `free` in all possible positions, don't do anything like RAII. 6) Limited lifetime checking, but some people tells me lifetime is not needed in such a language.

Any further insights? Shall I kickstart such project? Please I need your ideas very much.

[1]: https://vi.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%C3%B5_L%C3%A2m_Truy%E1%BB%81n_K%E1%BB%B3

[2]: https://e.huawei.com/en/products/optical-access/ma5800

[3]: https://docs.ceph.com/en/reef/cephfs/

[4]: https://lore.kernel.org/rust-for-linux/Z7SwcnUzjZYfuJ4-@infradead.org/

[5]: https://github.com/rowscript/rowscript

[6]: https://github.com/anqurvanillapy/TinyLean

[7]: https://github.com/SchrodingerZhu/reussir-lang

[8]: https://bentnib.org/quantitative-type-theory.html

Does anyone else observe really high variance on how dedicated peers are to their health?

I work at a very fast growing startup and we all aim to work super hard and efficiently.

If we look at the team, approx. ~50% are working out constantly, eating clean, meditating, etc. But then the rest are often dragging themselves as if they couldn't care less about where their long term health is going.

As an anecdote, one founder must be like 10% body fat, does marathons, meditates constantly and probably doesn't ever sleep less than 8 hours. At the same time, the other founder has admitted not making it to the gym for years now, is always sleeping less than 6 hours, and isn't at all on top of eating right.

Do we ever really gain in productivity by sacrificing these things? I've found myself plenty of times skipping the gym because I feel I "must" get a particular PR out or make sure a project hits some arbitrarily-dated timeline.

I've always imagined that at a certain point when you've "made it" that this becomes a healthier balance. But, from what I've seen in peers a few steps ahead of me, it looks like as success grows this only gets harder.

What about you? What's your relationship with your health/wellness/choose-your-own-term and how has it evolved with your career?

Recently I tried playing with https://www.cursor.com/ but got spooked by the LuLu alert (https://objective-see.org/products/lulu.html) when launching the app, where the process args included "JSON.stringify(process.env)" part, see screenshot here: https://imgur.com/a/DmDuGTz

Is this... normal? I don't understand why they might want to serialize/access all of my env vars. Does anyone have a suggestion for that behaviour? I'm probably missing some reasonable explanation, happy to learn more.

I've been running a lot of stuff in VMs lately anyway, but don't want to end up having to spin up a VM for the core app like a code editor. How do you all deal with untrusted (but not really malware-level untrusted) software?

Hey everyone, I’m considering starting a new open source project and wanted to see if anyone else thinks the idea could be useful. The concept is simple: an open source LLM log router that works like Segment—but specifically for LLM logs. It would let you easily route logs to different analytics, eval, monitoring, and data warehouse platforms (think LangFuse, Gentrace, Lattitude, etc.) so you can leverage the strengths of each without needing separate integrations. I’ve run into a few recurring challenges when integrating multiple eval and monitoring tools.

Conflicting Integrations: Many tools use their own forks of popular packages (like the OpenAI SDK or LangChain), which often conflict—making it nearly impossible to use them together.

Inconsistent Prompt Templating: Sometimes different tools require different prompt formats, complicating the process of switching between them or using multiple tools simultaneously.

Data Migration Challenges: Moving logs between systems is a hassle. Testing a new tool often means generating new data or deploying changes in production, making it hard to evaluate if switching is worthwhile.

While some solutions exist (such as LangChain and LiteLLM integrations with various eval platforms), they don’t fully address these issues—especially data migration and integrating with multiple tools at once. To solve this, I’m toying with the idea of a new open source project—a lightweight, self-hosted server that acts as a “Segment for LLM traces and logs”. Here are some of the features I envision.

Self-hosted logging server: Send LLM traces to a single endpoint without impacting your app’s performance.

Centralized aggregation and routing: Gather traces and logs on a single server, then forward them to any destination you choose (evals, analytics, monitoring, alerting, data warehouses, etc).

Lightweight Framework integrations: Support for popular frameworks and SDKs (LangChain, LiteLLM, OpenAI SDK, LlamaIndex, etc.) with integrations that never block your event loop—so even if the logging server or a destination platform goes down your app continues to function as expected.

Easy configuration: A simple interface for managing data sources and destinations without making code changes or redeploying your application.

Data portability: Store logs in a database with the option to re-export to new tools in the future—ensuring you never face vendor lock-in.

Custom integrations: Webhooks to easily set up your own custom destinations.

I’d love to hear if you’ve experienced any similar issues integrating with multiple LLM monitoring, eval, and analytics platforms. If so, how did you address them? Do you see value in an open source data router like this? Please share your thoughts in the comments, and if you’re interested in contributing or using a project like this in the future, it’d be super helpful if you could fill out this survey. https://yk1m5yevl9j.typeform.com/to/cQdxF6bN

Thanks in advance for your feedback!

Hey!

I know this is a question we're not usually discussing here on HN but I'm sure some of you have at least once in their life experienced lucid dreaming if not practicing regularly.

Would be fun to hear about your experiences. I'm not actively practicing now but should pick it up again (it was a lot of fun).

What I always emphasise when talking about LD's this: it's REAL. It's a full virtual reality experience not only with visuals and sounds but with taste, touch, and emotions, too.

I'm putting together a small report called The State of Lucid Dreaming 2025. Here are 9 questions if you'd like to participate: https://dreamvr.co/stats/questions

And here are the preliminary results: https://dreamvr.co/stats

This is a serious question because I'll be the first to admit, I'm not a great business person. Also genuinely not trying to just promote my software either, but looking for some advice and feedback.

I recently built and launched Forms.md, which is an open source JS library that lets you create multi-step forms and surveys. The forms themselves are very similar to what you would find on Typeform. The library works anywhere you can run JS, so it works with all web tech stacks: Django, Rails, React, Angular, etc. The library itself is just the front-end form builder, there is no backend because I expect people to just submit their forms directly to their database as that should be fairly easy to set up. It's also licensed under Apache-2.0.

Website: https://forms.md

Repo: https://github.com/formsmd/formsmd

Some backstory, this was initially known as blocks.md, and I was charging for a one-time license under BUSL. But that version was quite difficult to use because it only worked with Markdown files.

This time, I'm charging around $25/month in order to remove the branding. Everything else is completely free. Now this is the part I struggle with: I feel like the quality of the software is quite high and so is the output. But can this be an actually viable business model? I have really thought about just making it entirely free (even the branding removal) and just seeing it grow, but I would love to make some money from this and potentially even do this full-time (God willing). I spent months building this, and I constantly keep on doubting myself on what to do. I even hesitated to launch for 2 weeks because I was really anxious.

Any honest feedback on this? Could I actually make this into a company or do I need to start adding more features like backend, integrations, etc.? I'm kinda burned out at the moment, just left my day-job, so it's all a bit of a mess really. If anyone has any advice, I'm all ears. My email is also on my profile.

Some other questions:

- Should I go back to charging a one-time fee?

- How do I even reach out to potential customers/users?

I am stuck on 128kbps connection for a while. The only website that loads without the server timing out is HackerNews.

I cannot even click on the commit history of a GitHub repo on the web, it seems to be some sort of bloated react interface for what amounts to an excruciatingly slow `git log`.

Cloning the entire repo is not feasible unless I know in advance that the repo is small, but I cannot know that unless I browse the log and directory beforehand.

I cannot search Google for advanced git commands, as Google times out 90% of the time, while 9% of the time it sends me to a captcha which is even more bloated to load and times out again.

About 10 years ago, multi-armed bandits (and especially contextual bandits) were really important for optimization and business use cases.

But nowadays you hardly hear about it, despite optimization continuing to be a need. The only major open source library continues to be Vowpal Wabbit - and even that is not very robustly maintained or documented.

What are people doing for bandits or optimization needs nowadays? And what are some active, Python-centric, open-source libraries with a strong user community and stable code?

What applications(as in use cases, not in software names) have you found for local LLMs that you use yourself on a daily basis, and which LLMs do you use?

Are you aware of any good Brainstorming agents I can converse with? Gemini has one but needs to have the Gemini Advanced for that.

Normal LLM also works out but would love to have a specialized AI for that. I love brainstorming with AI.

This should be interpreted in the broadest sense to include books like both American Kingpin and Practical Vim as examples.

Curious if there are any social media platforms that are less algorithmic than a facebook/instagram/x?

I'm from Germany and currently rely on macOS and iOS, with all my personal data stored in iCloud. Recent political tensions have made me question what might happen in the event of a military conflict between the US and Europe. Could Apple be forced to shut down its services in Europe? What would happen to my devices, operating systems, and stored data in such a scenario?

Are there steps I can take now to prepare for this possibility? Alternatives like Windows and Android are also American-based, and even Linux has strong ties to the US. What options do I have to ensure access to my devices and data during such an event?

I’d appreciate any advice or strategies for preparing for this kind of situation.

I'm working on a service that targets mainly EU companies/businesses. I have either the option to get servicename.eu or euservicename.com

I know the .com is king, and I always prefer to get .com for non-personal projects. However, I don't have much experience targeting primarily EU markets, so I'm not sure how common it is for EU businesses to be familiar with .eu domains.

Can anyone share their experience with .eu domains? Is it as popular as .com for EU or just a niche TLD created for the sake of consistency?

At Elon Musk's Web site X, just saw their invitation to try their AI software:

     Grok 3 is here. Try it for free.

     The world's smartest AI, Grok 3, is
     now available on X and iOS.  Tap
     below to try.

     https://epoch.ai/frontiermath

Given triangle ABC, by construction find D on AB and E on BC so that the lengths AD = DE = EC.

As a college freshman, solved this quickly using an idea I cooked up in 10th grade.

So, just gave the problem to Grok 3. At first, it did well restating the problem.

Then it tried, guessing at the length AD, using a compass to draw a circle, etc., and finally stated why that effort didn't work, i.e., the guess for the length AD was just a guess and likely wrong.

Then did this ~4 more times.

Net, it quit and, thus, failed.

For the English language part, it did okay. For finding an idea that solved the problem, it never got started and failed.

An idea that solves the problem is likely not in the Grok 3 'training' set. So, Grok 3 is good at plagiarizing English text but not at 'understanding' it.

Knuth's program TeX is good at formating math. The text editor Kedit beats a typewriter for entering text. The program Aspell is good at checking English language spelling. A Brother printer is terrific at printing English language text. But none of these four have much hope at solving this geometry problem.

If Grok 3 failed at what I cooked up in the 10th grade, then there is not much hope soon for AI at

     https://epoch.ai/frontiermath

I am on Windows 11, with WSL2. I have been a user of VS Code for a few years. And I was quite happy with it. I have yet to find another editor with the same level of integration with the languages I work with.

But since the last few weeks, I noticed a change of behavior. The VS Code Remote Server in the WSL starts to eat all the memory. I used to limit my WSL to 4GB of memory, I increased it to 8GB, and it still fills it up, and the swap, causing a huge disk load, making the whole computer extra slow, and the VS Code window becomes unresponsive. Often I either have to kill VS Code, sometimes the WSL itself.

It's so bad it became unusable. And honestly, 8GB for an editor? This is a joke.

I tried neovim, but the days when I enjoyed a vim-based setup are long gone, and honestly the integration with LSP servers is poor at best.

AFAIK, Sublime Text has no WSL integration.

Do you have any recommendations?

You know, like in the movie "The Borrowers". Since we have human-sized bipedals now, it shouldn't be impossible to create miniture robots that would act like living beings, right?

It would be amazing to have a small family of electric gnomes living with you. Doll house and everything. Kind of like real life Sims.

So realistically, how complex would it be to scale it all down to five, seven inches? Any startups working on this?

I'm not well versed with either language as I was reading the article published https://cacm.acm.org/blogcacm/21st-century-c/

I suddenly thought of the forward looking trajectory of the idea of making c++ compiler smart(er) as to ease the burden of memory copying (section 3) with zero overhead. If one traces this arc it means that one day c++ compilers would be equivalent to the borrow checker? That is to say they would throw compile time errors for using some construct in c++ that copied instead of moved?

I wanted to give Zed (https://zed.dev / https://github.com/zed-industries/zed) a try.

I downloaded a binary release from https://zed.dev/releases/stable and I'm presented with LONG license agreement.

I'm particularly alarmed by this section:

> 2.2. License Limitations > > You agree that You shall not: (a) exceed the scope of the licenses granted in Section 2.1; (b) make copies of the Editor; (c) distribute, sublicense, assign, delegate, rent, lease, sell, time-share or otherwise transfer the benefits of, use under, or rights to, the license granted in Section 2.1; (d) reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble or otherwise attempt to learn the source code, structure or algorithms underlying the Editor, except to the extent required to be permitted under applicable law; (e) modify, translate or create derivative works of the Editor; or (f) remove any copyright, trademark, patent or other proprietary notice that appears on the Editor or copies thereof.

This weirded me out because

1. the source seems to be available on github

2. the github pages list three different licenses (GPL, AGPL, Apache)

3. nowhere on the website it is stated that Zed is proprietary software

Needless to say, the "License Limitations" seem to contradict the terms of AGPL and GPL.

Hence the question: is Zed actually Open Source (or even Free Software) ?

Is the binary off the website some blob with stuff I'm not supposed to know about? Is this one of those vs-code/vs-codium situations?

I started my career as a front-end developer, almost twenty years ago, and have been doing the EM thing for the last 10 or so years.

My 7 year-old really enjoys understanding how things work and building physical things. Today I asked her if she wanted to try writing code and she lit up.

What resources, tools, services, etc do other parents recommend to help me and my daughter started?

For those who have introduced kids to programming, what resources, tools, or services would you recommend to help me and my daughter get started?

An age-old question. I've been testing out various browsers but haven't found one that truly satisfies me. Any recommendations?

Have you ever struggled to find the right developer to collaborate with on a project?

Codenearby is a platform designed to connect developers based on location and interests. Think of it as Tinder for developers—swipe to find like-minded coders, chat instantly, and collaborate on projects.

Key Features: - Discover nearby developers & build your network - Swipe to connect and start chatting - Post updates, code snippets, and discussions in a community feed - Host virtual gatherings for hackathons & meetups - GitHub-integrated profiles to showcase your work

Whether you're looking for a coding buddy, startup co-founder, or open-source contributor, Codenearby helps you find the right match.

Would love your feedback! What’s your biggest challenge in finding a coding partner?

Try it now: https://codenearby.space

I suddenly have some time on my hands and would like to use some of that time to write some code and learn some of this new fangled tech that all the cool kids are talking about.

Would love some inspiration and hear about your idea that has always been in the back of your mind that you could neither find the time or motivation to get going. Whether it's a dev tool or a todo list for your family, I'd love to build something that helps improve a Hackers life.

I've been thinking about this one for a while, does it make sense to work on small ideas? Something like a utility a PDF converter or a small game and attempt to make it into an asset generating $10K - $30K in MRR? Or is it better to aim for building something as big as you can?

My thinking around that is it's pretty much the same effort to build something small or something big (especially since you have to start small to go big). Might as well go for the big ideas. But curious if others have different views (or similar for that matter)?

Inspired by the European Alternatives initiative: https://european-alternatives.eu/categories

My non-us based company wants to remain with our current provider, but we want to be realistic with the current political climate.

When it comes to edge workers, the only alternatives I can find are these:

Cloudflare Workers, Fastly Compute@Edge, Akamai EdgeWorkers

Are there other alternatives we're missing?