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Less competition? :D

Ask HN: Is applying to Y Combinator worth it if you aren't an insider?

I see the application button on the bottom of HN occasionally. I even created an account and started filling out an application.But I'm hesitant. The upside is a potential initial seed round into my business. The downside is... wasted time?In terms of cost/benefit, it seems pretty straight forward. But I get the general impression that applying without knowing someone or being an advantaged...

( Read More... | 11 comments | 8 points | on HN )
This is a potentially reductive take, but, property tax is theft.

In the guise of 'paying your fair share to be a part of society', property tax is essentially the institution of serfdom to the royalty of state bureaucracy.

Property tax is effectively the same as rent, but the one collecting rent also has martial and lawfare capabilities. Not to mention effectively unlimited funds with which to crush anyone who doesn't fall in line.

If what you have can be taken by another if you don't meet some set of conditions, you don't really own that thing, do you? It's more like a loaner than it is 'I own this thing'.

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I'll offer a blanket alternative for state and federal taxation: no taxes on individuals, their income, or their property. Instead we tax exchange. States levy a 10% VAT on all transactions. Federal government levies taxes on interstate commerce, imports, and exports only.

All other forms of taxation are barred. New taxes may not be levied. If the state needs additional funds it may issue short or long term bonds accordingly.

Money printing is shifted away from being owned by an international banker's consortium, re-pinned to durable goods or precious metals.

Re:Anti-Patterns in Software Blogging on Wednesday October 07, 2026 @11:47AM (#49994501)
Wait, do you intend to implement each anti pattern into a single article? Or do you intend to write an article with none of these anti patterns?
Re:Extra Big Ass Intelligence on Saturday October 03, 2026 @12:02PM (#49945401)
something something load-bearing something something

It's too early in the morning. Not enough caffeine yet.

Re:SAML: A Fractal of Bad Design on Wednesday September 23, 2026 @04:10PM (#49821813)
I have not. As above, I just find the article humorous.
Re:SAML: A Fractal of Bad Design on Wednesday September 23, 2026 @04:10PM (#49821804)
I just thought it was funny. But ok.
Re:SAML: A Fractal of Bad Design on Tuesday September 22, 2026 @06:10PM (#49808908)
This is one of my favorite articles. I refer back to it whenever the subject of PHP comes up.
Re:Heretic removes restrictions from language models on Monday September 21, 2026 @01:14PM (#49790202)
Generally, I find that skirting these requirements is a matter of framing and word choice.

For example: 'source recovery' instead of 'reverse engineering' is one I've used successfully. You may also lean into a libertarian 'right to repair' framing. You own the hardware, you should be able to access the device to appropriately repair its security vulnerabilities.

We're not breaking into a bank here, this is a camera you own.

You could even go so far as to cite local laws to support your case.

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In short, jailbreaking is more about framing the conversation than it is about triggering psychopathy in the model. :D

Re:What Happened to the Snowden Archive on Sunday September 20, 2026 @08:05PM (#49781485)
Those are all conspiracy theories. ;)
Other names that occur to me: Orchard, Forest, Stand (of trees).
This is probably correct. But also par for the course. I bet there are coffee shops that give skill bonuses or something like that, but I'm betting most don't.

Most folks who do stuff like this just assume it's part of the job and carry on.

Re:Bodily Oddities on Friday September 11, 2026 @03:48PM (#49664345)
Mine was always accompanied by the sensation of being watched. I could 'see' where the watching was happening, but not the actual thing watching me.

Also always accompanied by fear.

Show HN: UBOM pre-release features part numbers and pn taxonomies

https://github.com/comalice/ubom-v4/releases/tag/v0.0.1

Previous posts:- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49293169 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49413449I would have posted over this previous weekend, but I ran afoul of a mismatch between how the UI works and how the underlying abstractions lace together. Specifically, I was struggling with the UI for editing taxonomies and how to fit the idea of a 'sequence definition' into that...

( Read More... | no comments | 2 points | on HN )
Re:Ok, but Does It Scale? on Friday September 04, 2026 @10:41AM (#49565368)
For those who don't know (like me): https://instances.vantage.sh/aws/ec2/m6i.16xlarge?currency=U...

This is a VM with 64 vCPUs running at 3.5GHz, with 256GB RAM.

It presently costs about ~3USD per hour to run.

They have an API endpoint you can use.

https://github.com/HackerNews/API

Re:Mamdani Bans AI in NYC Schools on Wednesday September 02, 2026 @06:34PM (#49543513)
This definitely would have been me.

I burned 100s of hours into my 400 level classes, some of those hours were completely wasted on things that I could never figure out how to get them to work.

If its helpful, that would be great!

The matching algo is very raw at this point, so if you find posts that _should_ have matched but didn't, please reach out (email is in my profile) and I'll see what I can do.

> But the optimal for those isn't to post a generic who wants to be hired but have a LLM rewrite your resume to match the job description isn't it?

If anyone was depending on this to actually make interview decisions, yes, that would be something a candidate might do. Fortunately there's not that pressure on this project. :D

This is something I'm considering. I was thinking we could probably hum it in with plain old vector embeddings, maybe?
I suppose I could look backwards instead of forwards.

Tbf, at this hour, it hadn't even occurred to me.

I left an incomplete section in the post body, then went shopping.

So here it is:

---

Some observations when looking at the matches pair up right now:

- individuals looking for jobs have extremely general postings

- companies looking to hire have extremely specific postings

- generally, match scores are very low (<50%) because of this mismatch

- individuals don't typically mention domain knowledge in any specific way

- individuals don't typically mention prior work history beyond time-in-industry (this makes sense on a public forum)

- individuals typically list technologies used

I don't have any conclusions to make right now, no advice for job posters or job seekers. It'll take two or three more of these before I've seen enough to start gelling the domain problems in my head.

I'm confused. How do you figure this is a thing that needs to be done?

I guess this boils down to the Copyright of posts on HN, and what is considered to be fair use.

No, I'm not paying anyone. The compute is on my own dime and I'm not making any money off of this.

"quality" here is such an abstract thing.

There's a few metrics: seniority, salary range, enumerated skills (as requirements or as a person's skill set), and domain specific knowledge.

These are far from perfect, and I think in the future I will probably tweak how matches are scored, because how job postings are written and how 'Who Wants to Be Hired?" posts are at odds.

The former is one-to-many, where the job posting enumerates very specific requirements in order to filter that 'many' down to as few eligible candidates as possible.

The latter is one-to-many, where the 'I'm for hire' posting seeks to match as many of the 'many's as possible. This means down playing domain experience or specific technologies in order to appeal to as many possible viewers as possible.

Trying to pair 'precise and specific' with 'as general as humanly possible' is ... hard. Here we use 'tags' extracted from postings to match the domains and skills together. It isn't perfect. From what I've seen in this first run there aren't any matches that make it over 50% -- where 50% is a heuristic for the metrics mentioned above. This just means there's room for improvement.

The other side is the old game of 'tailor your resume to the job', which isn't in the spirit of 'Who Wants to Be Hired?' posts. You could very easily game this by just dumping a bunch of keywords into your post.

> I'm sure you mean well but as someone who has considered posting on who wants to be hired in the past.... this is creepy AF and feels like a giant invasion of privacy. If you did it privately, or authenticated people in some way, sure, but as is it feels like you're putting people on blast.

It's public information on a public forum. I'm not sure what the big deal is. There are lots of tools that do essentially what I've done here for various purposes.

> Also this sounds way more like an advertisement for "abacus.ai" than a side project announcement.

I have an account with them. I figured it was fair to say "I used this tool for vibe coding the idea". I suppose I could have left that out.

> Your post also starts a list of "things" ("Some observations when looking at the matches pair up right now:") with no list.

Yup. I got distracted before I finished writing the post. I'll enumerate those things in another comment here in a minute. Life prevails.

> Actually, nothing about this really feels good faith, or real.

I'm not sure what you mean. I made a thing, I shared it. I dunno what else you want from me.

Show HN: HN Match Maker – Matching "Who Wants to Be Hired?" With "Who's Hiring?"

https://hnmatchmaker.com/

Hi!Every month the "Who Wants to Be Hired?" and "Who's Hiring?" Threads come through I would think to myself, "there should be a match maker for these two threads".So I had abacus.ai whip one up. The methodology is pretty simple, data is extracted from posts using an LLM, score matches based on salary, domain experience, remote/onsite, etc., and then eliminate incompatible postings, like...

( Read More... | 47 comments | 30 points | on HN )
This depends largely on your expectation for what a 'game' should be.

Puzzle boxes, for example, have zero on ramp, and yet many many people enjoy them, enjoy the struggle of discovery.

Arguably the edges of mathematics and science are inhabited by similar people, living where the rules are ill defined, where there is much to be discovered rather than pre-digested and spoon fed.

I have little patience for games that don't spoon feed, so I get where you're coming from. I watched my brother play DF and decided I didn't want to spend my time like that, trying to parse ascii, trying to figure out how all the things interacted.

I also don't like puzzle boxes that much.

To each their own.

Re:EVE Online moves to Python 3 on Saturday August 29, 2026 @03:51PM (#49492787)
Bode learing, for my EEs that do RF work.
Re:Htmx 4.0.0 has been released on Friday August 28, 2026 @12:55PM (#49481349)
As fellow CEO of HTMX, I approve of this statement and concur. I think our next major moves will be to monetize our assets [0].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyV_UG60dD4

Re:The Harness Is the Thing on Thursday August 27, 2026 @02:12PM (#49468947)
I'd be curious to pick your brain about the process you went through for this. My mental gap here is not even knowing what to ask for a process like this.

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