Normally during Christmas I tend to build something by hand. Last year I started in Terminal making simple kids games with Python. Then I got more ambitious and moved to Xcode for an iOS app. My wife and I were during this time planning a family trip to Japan and I wanted my 9-year-old to share in the anticipation. We had guidebooks; she had nothing and no clue because we\u2019re staying just days on more than 10 locations. So I started building her a hard coded app which showed our itinerary in pictures. Friends were so positive that I rebuilt it in an app for user generated content. Parents pre load the itinerary (even spouses will benefit from this) and kids can upload photo's and diary texts and share those with friends and family. All information is only stored on the phone or iCloud.
I started with ChatGPT which was a pretty strict tutor. It really wanted me to understand the concepts of programming. Building like this was slow but fun.The real shift came when I switched to Claude Code (as it was called earlier this year) and not much later in February the Claude AI agent integrated into Xcode 26. That sped things up and it built a much better view structure, one that I myself couldn\u2019t have designed. But still, I've spent days, and a lot of tokens, to get pictures to fit the iPhone screen for instance. AI did the coding part, but it was I who was fine-tuning everything until satisfied and all text and design are mine; I called this "artisanal vibe coding".
Working this way, SwiftUI was actually not the hard part. The hard part was everything around the code: Xcode project settings, GitHub workflows, domain configuration (uploading DNS records), App Store Connect metadata, the EU Digital Services Act trader status that almost killed visibility pre-launch. Without AI I'd probably have given up at the first "abracadabra" config screen. I bet that before next December Agents will take this part too. I\u2019m hesitant for cross application agents though.
A few things I learned as a non-engineer generalist:\n\u2022 Swiftdata is great until you touch migrations; I deferred Spanish localization specifically to keep raw data values stable. Engineers could probably see that happen up front.\n\u2022 Adding Android now would mean a different language and toolchain. For me that feels like starting all over again while keeping one foot in iOS, effectively doing everything twice. This is keeping me from Android for now ; (\n\u2022 ASO is its own discipline, with its own set of rules. And even AI bots don't always seem to know how it works themselves.\n\u2022 Privacy-by-design is the way and honestly less work to build too.
TravElly is free and will stay that way. For the next release I want to add AI-generated travel tips per destination. AI did this for the hard coded app and it really gave great ideas. Keeping it free does mean I need to keep AI costs from going sky-high. I'm okay though with this hobby costing me some. And the app is such a niche being in Dutch and for kids that I don\u2019t count on big numbers.
Any advice is welcome! On keeping AI token usage under control in a free app, I\u2019m familiar with setting limits. Minimizing the gap to Android. And of course, about the term artisanal vibe coding.
https://mijn-travelly.nl/en/\nThe original Dutch site: https://mijn-travelly.nl"},"title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Show HN: My first app, artisanally vibe-coded in 4 months"},"url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"https://mijn-travelly.nl/en/"}},"_tags":["story","author_jeroen_stulen","story_48256017","show_hn"],"author":"jeroen_stulen","children":[48256176,48256180,48284966,48325180,48360996],"created_at":"2026-05-24T10:07:13Z","created_at_i":1779617233,"num_comments":6,"objectID":"48256017","points":3,"story_id":48256017,"story_text":"Hi HN, I'm Jeroen, 49. Father of two, and manager in the Dutch government by day. Until last December I had never written a line of code. You get the picture. Since April my first app, TravElly, is live in the App Store.
Normally during Christmas I tend to build something by hand. Last year I started in Terminal making simple kids games with Python. Then I got more ambitious and moved to Xcode for an iOS app. My wife and I were during this time planning a family trip to Japan and I wanted my 9-year-old to share in the anticipation. We had guidebooks; she had nothing and no clue because we\u2019re staying just days on more than 10 locations. So I started building her a hard coded app which showed our itinerary in pictures. Friends were so positive that I rebuilt it in an app for user generated content. Parents pre load the itinerary (even spouses will benefit from this) and kids can upload photo's and diary texts and share those with friends and family. All information is only stored on the phone or iCloud.
I started with ChatGPT which was a pretty strict tutor. It really wanted me to understand the concepts of programming. Building like this was slow but fun.The real shift came when I switched to Claude Code (as it was called earlier this year) and not much later in February the Claude AI agent integrated into Xcode 26. That sped things up and it built a much better view structure, one that I myself couldn\u2019t have designed. But still, I've spent days, and a lot of tokens, to get pictures to fit the iPhone screen for instance. AI did the coding part, but it was I who was fine-tuning everything until satisfied and all text and design are mine; I called this "artisanal vibe coding".
Working this way, SwiftUI was actually not the hard part. The hard part was everything around the code: Xcode project settings, GitHub workflows, domain configuration (uploading DNS records), App Store Connect metadata, the EU Digital Services Act trader status that almost killed visibility pre-launch. Without AI I'd probably have given up at the first "abracadabra" config screen. I bet that before next December Agents will take this part too. I\u2019m hesitant for cross application agents though.
A few things I learned as a non-engineer generalist:\n\u2022 Swiftdata is great until you touch migrations; I deferred Spanish localization specifically to keep raw data values stable. Engineers could probably see that happen up front.\n\u2022 Adding Android now would mean a different language and toolchain. For me that feels like starting all over again while keeping one foot in iOS, effectively doing everything twice. This is keeping me from Android for now ; (\n\u2022 ASO is its own discipline, with its own set of rules. And even AI bots don't always seem to know how it works themselves.\n\u2022 Privacy-by-design is the way and honestly less work to build too.
TravElly is free and will stay that way. For the next release I want to add AI-generated travel tips per destination. AI did this for the hard coded app and it really gave great ideas. Keeping it free does mean I need to keep AI costs from going sky-high. I'm okay though with this hobby costing me some. And the app is such a niche being in Dutch and for kids that I don\u2019t count on big numbers.
Any advice is welcome! On keeping AI token usage under control in a free app, I\u2019m familiar with setting limits. Minimizing the gap to Android. And of course, about the term artisanal vibe coding.
https://mijn-travelly.nl/en/\nThe original Dutch site: https://mijn-travelly.nl","title":"Show HN: My first app, artisanally vibe-coded in 4 months","updated_at":"2026-06-06T20:00:09Z","url":"https://mijn-travelly.nl/en/"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"ChrisMarshallNY"},"title":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"partial","matchedWords":["act"],"value":"White House Considers Waiving Jones Merchant Marine Act"},"url":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["act","trade"],"value":"https://apnews.com/article/jones-act-trump-trade-abcac596db839bff3679b3117d2e81b2"}},"_tags":["story","author_ChrisMarshallNY","story_47375212"],"author":"ChrisMarshallNY","children":[47375213],"created_at":"2026-03-14T10:30:26Z","created_at_i":1773484226,"num_comments":2,"objectID":"47375212","points":3,"story_id":47375212,"title":"White House Considers Waiving Jones Merchant Marine Act","updated_at":"2026-03-14T19:51:59Z","url":"https://apnews.com/article/jones-act-trump-trade-abcac596db839bff3679b3117d2e81b2"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Oatseller"},"title":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["act","trade"],"value":"Obama Signs Defend Trade Secrets Act Requiring Immediate Action by All Employers"},"url":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"partial","matchedWords":["trade"],"value":"http://www.natlawreview.com/article/trade-secrets-going-federal-president-obama-signs-law-landmark-defend-trade-secrets"}},"_tags":["story","author_Oatseller","story_11703037"],"author":"Oatseller","created_at":"2016-05-15T22:17:10Z","created_at_i":1463350630,"num_comments":0,"objectID":"11703037","points":5,"story_id":11703037,"title":"Obama Signs Defend Trade Secrets Act Requiring Immediate Action by All Employers","updated_at":"2024-09-19T23:09:40Z","url":"http://www.natlawreview.com/article/trade-secrets-going-federal-president-obama-signs-law-landmark-defend-trade-secrets"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"arikrak"},"title":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["act","trade"],"value":"Computer Programming Is a Trade; Let's Act Like It"},"url":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["act","trade"],"value":"http://online.wsj.com/articles/computer-programming-is-a-trade-lets-act-like-it-1407109947"}},"_tags":["story","author_arikrak","story_8132520"],"author":"arikrak","children":[8132747],"created_at":"2014-08-04T16:22:03Z","created_at_i":1407169323,"num_comments":2,"objectID":"8132520","points":2,"story_id":8132520,"title":"Computer Programming Is a Trade; Let's Act Like It","updated_at":"2023-09-06T22:07:07Z","url":"http://online.wsj.com/articles/computer-programming-is-a-trade-lets-act-like-it-1407109947"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"ruchika_mk"},"story_text":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"I believe this will help in saving and securing future of social networking."},"title":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["act","trade"],"value":"Facebook acts on follower trade"},"url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8370302.stm"}},"_tags":["story","author_ruchika_mk","story_957015"],"author":"ruchika_mk","children":[957017],"created_at":"2009-11-23T07:18:19Z","created_at_i":1258960699,"num_comments":1,"objectID":"957015","points":2,"story_id":957015,"story_text":"I believe this will help in saving and securing future of social networking.","title":"Facebook acts on follower trade","updated_at":"2024-09-19T16:50:14Z","url":"http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8370302.stm"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"MAshadowlocked"},"title":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["act","trade"],"value":"Microsoft Pushes Defend Trade Secrets Act 2015"},"url":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["act","trade"],"value":"https://thestack.com/world/2015/12/02/microsoft-defend-trade-secrets-act-2015-support/"}},"_tags":["story","author_MAshadowlocked","story_10664154"],"author":"MAshadowlocked","created_at":"2015-12-02T17:05:25Z","created_at_i":1449075925,"num_comments":0,"objectID":"10664154","points":2,"story_id":10664154,"title":"Microsoft Pushes Defend Trade Secrets Act 2015","updated_at":"2024-09-19T22:36:03Z","url":"https://thestack.com/world/2015/12/02/microsoft-defend-trade-secrets-act-2015-support/"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"simas"},"story_text":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":""},"title":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["act","trade"],"value":"Computer Programming Is a Trade; Let's Act Like It"},"url":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["act","trade"],"value":"http://www.wsj.com/articles/computer-programming-is-a-trade-lets-act-like-it-1407109947"}},"_tags":["story","author_simas","story_9402574"],"author":"simas","created_at":"2015-04-19T09:50:48Z","created_at_i":1429437048,"num_comments":0,"objectID":"9402574","points":1,"story_id":9402574,"story_text":"","title":"Computer Programming Is a Trade; Let's Act Like It","updated_at":"2023-09-07T02:33:32Z","url":"http://www.wsj.com/articles/computer-programming-is-a-trade-lets-act-like-it-1407109947"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"jcabala"},"story_text":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":""},"title":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["act","trade"],"value":"Computer Programming is a Trade \u2013 Let's Act Like It"},"url":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["act","trade"],"value":"http://m.us.wsj.com/articles/computer-programming-is-a-trade-lets-act-like-it-1407109947"}},"_tags":["story","author_jcabala","story_8132721"],"author":"jcabala","created_at":"2014-08-04T16:58:05Z","created_at_i":1407171485,"num_comments":0,"objectID":"8132721","points":1,"story_id":8132721,"story_text":"","title":"Computer Programming is a Trade \u2013 Let's Act Like It","updated_at":"2023-09-06T22:07:07Z","url":"http://m.us.wsj.com/articles/computer-programming-is-a-trade-lets-act-like-it-1407109947"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"arch_stanton"},"story_text":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":""},"title":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["act","trade"],"value":"Computer Programming Is a Trade; Let's Act Like It"},"url":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["act","trade"],"value":"http://online.wsj.com/news/article_email/computer-programming-is-a-trade-lets-act-like-it-1407109947-lMyQjAxMTA0MDAwNDEwNDQyWj"}},"_tags":["story","author_arch_stanton","story_8131672"],"author":"arch_stanton","created_at":"2014-08-04T13:45:36Z","created_at_i":1407159936,"num_comments":0,"objectID":"8131672","points":1,"story_id":8131672,"story_text":"","title":"Computer Programming Is a Trade; Let's Act Like It","updated_at":"2024-09-19T21:04:22Z","url":"http://online.wsj.com/news/article_email/computer-programming-is-a-trade-lets-act-like-it-1407109947-lMyQjAxMTA0MDAwNDEwNDQyWj"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"raleighm"},"title":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["act","trade"],"value":"Massachusetts Is Set to Adopt the Uniform Trade Secrets Act . . . What Now?"},"url":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["act","trade"],"value":"http://blogs.duanemorris.com/tradesecretslaw/2018/08/02/massachusetts-is-set-to-adopt-the-uniform-trade-secrets-act-what-now/"}},"_tags":["story","author_raleighm","story_17684581"],"author":"raleighm","created_at":"2018-08-04T00:14:47Z","created_at_i":1533341687,"num_comments":0,"objectID":"17684581","points":1,"story_id":17684581,"title":"Massachusetts Is Set to Adopt the Uniform Trade Secrets Act . . . What Now?","updated_at":"2024-09-20T02:52:43Z","url":"http://blogs.duanemorris.com/tradesecretslaw/2018/08/02/massachusetts-is-set-to-adopt-the-uniform-trade-secrets-act-what-now/"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"jPendleton"},"story_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["act","trade"],"value":"A U.S. citizen who has been chased out of the country by a corrupt federal judiciary in an attempt to cover for the crimes of Palantir Technologies, joined X last year in an attempt communicate with government officials in a public forum and found that he was unable to interact with any other users on the platform. He had apparently been preemptively "shadow banned."
Jochen Edmund Pendleton, formerly known as Jonathan Eric Pendleton, who is currently seeking asylum in Canada, has filed suit against Elon Musk and X Corp in Bastrop County, Texas, under the Deceptive Trade Practices Act and the First Amendment, petition available here: https://drive.proton.me/urls/RGBJPXCMCM#NCUEmjiNFLxc
Judging from the complaints X Corp. has received on the Better Business Bureau website, https://www.bbb.org/us/tx/bastrop/profile/social-media-marketing/x-corp-0825-1000230350/customer-reviews, many of which occurred while Musk was an employee of the federal government, X Corp. has done the same to many other consumers, making this a potential mass tort action for violations of the First Amendment.
Pendleton has no prior relationship with Musk or X Corp. who appear to be participating in an ongoing cover up of a very high-profile matter in DC's federal court, Pendleton v. United States, et al, No. 01218 (2025), involving a tangential connection to Musk's friends at Palantir Technologies and their serial violations of the Fourth Amendment.
Musk has tried to dodge service of the petition in Bastrop County and has sent grossly incompetent attorneys to argue on behalf of X Corp. that "Musk\u2019s alleged personal statements on freedom of speech or X being the platform for free speech around the world do not constitute any promises or representations as to how content posted on X will be treated, monitored, or promoted and amount to nothing more than puffery." Musk apparently does not take his citizenship oath very seriously.
Because Palantir has turned the world into a North Korea style digital prison brought to you by the Intel Management Engine and its progeny, giving the CIA total access and control of all networked devices, if you would like to share this story, print these instructions and post them in a public space:
1. Go to a foreign search engine, like swisscows or yandex.
2. Search for a foreign URL shortener, the more foreign the better.
3. Without visiting the link, obtain a redirect URL for https://jpendleton.substack.com/
4. Post the link to social media using non-descript language, avoiding keywords that would alert skynet to your activities.
5. Repeat these instructions for all subsequent shares.
If enough people share the story in this way, it is at least possible that they will not face retaliation and suffer the same fate as Pendleton. Good luck with your country!"},"title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Elon Musk Censors Dissident Fleeing the United States"}},"_tags":["story","author_jPendleton","story_46960701","ask_hn"],"author":"jPendleton","children":[46960890,46961549,46961644],"created_at":"2026-02-10T15:09:55Z","created_at_i":1770736195,"num_comments":12,"objectID":"46960701","points":13,"story_id":46960701,"story_text":"A U.S. citizen who has been chased out of the country by a corrupt federal judiciary in an attempt to cover for the crimes of Palantir Technologies, joined X last year in an attempt communicate with government officials in a public forum and found that he was unable to interact with any other users on the platform. He had apparently been preemptively "shadow banned."
Jochen Edmund Pendleton, formerly known as Jonathan Eric Pendleton, who is currently seeking asylum in Canada, has filed suit against Elon Musk and X Corp in Bastrop County, Texas, under the Deceptive Trade Practices Act and the First Amendment, petition available here: https://drive.proton.me/urls/RGBJPXCMCM#NCUEmjiNFLxc
Judging from the complaints X Corp. has received on the Better Business Bureau website, https://www.bbb.org/us/tx/bastrop/profile/social-media-marketing/x-corp-0825-1000230350/customer-reviews, many of which occurred while Musk was an employee of the federal government, X Corp. has done the same to many other consumers, making this a potential mass tort action for violations of the First Amendment.
Pendleton has no prior relationship with Musk or X Corp. who appear to be participating in an ongoing cover up of a very high-profile matter in DC's federal court, Pendleton v. United States, et al, No. 01218 (2025), involving a tangential connection to Musk's friends at Palantir Technologies and their serial violations of the Fourth Amendment.
Musk has tried to dodge service of the petition in Bastrop County and has sent grossly incompetent attorneys to argue on behalf of X Corp. that "Musk\u2019s alleged personal statements on freedom of speech or X being the platform for free speech around the world do not constitute any promises or representations as to how content posted on X will be treated, monitored, or promoted and amount to nothing more than puffery." Musk apparently does not take his citizenship oath very seriously.
Because Palantir has turned the world into a North Korea style digital prison brought to you by the Intel Management Engine and its progeny, giving the CIA total access and control of all networked devices, if you would like to share this story, print these instructions and post them in a public space:
1. Go to a foreign search engine, like swisscows or yandex.
2. Search for a foreign URL shortener, the more foreign the better.
3. Without visiting the link, obtain a redirect URL for https://jpendleton.substack.com/
4. Post the link to social media using non-descript language, avoiding keywords that would alert skynet to your activities.
5. Repeat these instructions for all subsequent shares.
If enough people share the story in this way, it is at least possible that they will not face retaliation and suffer the same fate as Pendleton. Good luck with your country!","title":"Elon Musk Censors Dissident Fleeing the United States","updated_at":"2026-03-05T23:33:58Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"kd5bjo"},"story_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["act","trade"],"value":"Every time intellectual property comes up, there seems to be two basic positions that get taken. On one side is the position that intellectual property law is useful. On the other, that it is broken. It seems to me that both sides are right: the concept is useful, but the implementation is broken. IANAL, but here is my understanding of the current state of things, as well as my ideas about how to fix them. If this sounds reasonable, what is the best course of action to take? If it doesn't, what's wrong with it?
There are four fundamental types of \"intellectual property,\" and each has to be dealt with in its own way:
Trade secrets are IP that is fundamentally protected by not telling anyone about it. There are legal protections against espionage, but not independent invention or accidental disclosure. There don't seem to be any major complaints about how current law handles this.
Trademarks are signs of brand identity, and cannot be used by direct competitors. The same trademark can be used by multiple companies so long as they operate in distinct markets (by industry or location). The primary complaint about the law here seems to be around what can and can't be considered a trademark. For example, can a fictional character's name or appearance act as a trademark? Also, many companies are overzealous about sending C&D letters to protect their trademarks, for fear of losing them. All in all, this seems to work relatively well, especially relative to copyrights and patents; I have no suggestions to improve them at this time.
Patents exist to protect useful inventions. The fundamental idea of a patent is that an inventor agrees to teach the industry about his new invention in exchange for a time-limited monopoly on its use. The current patent system fails to live up to this ideal in several ways. In practice, patents provide no real education because the language they are written in is too obtuse for anyone other than a patent lawyer to understand. Also, the current practice seems to be to blatantly ignore patent infringement until the patent is almost expired and then sue for several years of damages. Not knowing about the existence of a patent should be a valid defense against a patent infringement suit, and it should be the patent holder's responsibility to make sure that most other people in the industry know about the patent and how the invention works. Also, patents should be voided if their inventors do not actively seek to enforce their monopoly.
Copyright protects creative expression. The justification for copyright is to increase the value of creating creative works, so that society has a richer culture. The current mechanism is through a (theoretically) limited-term monopoly on production of copies of the work. As copying technology has evolved, this mechanism has started to become infeasible. I propose that this mechanism should be replaced with a compulsory licensing scheme. All technological barriers to making copies of creative works should be banned, but technologies to determine who has a copy should remain legal. The copyright office should maintain a consumer-facing system through which anyone can buy a personal-use license for any registered work at standardized rates, and distribute the funds to the copyright holders. Copyright holders may reduce the cost of a license as much as they like, but there will be a statutory maximum. The maximum rate should be determined by the type and age of the work such that it is not too high to be prohibitively expensive to the average consumer nor too low to encourage creators. All licenses sold will be both perpetual and transferrable. In any sale, it is the seller's responsibility to make sure that the copy sold is properly licensed."},"title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Ask HN: How to fix intellectual property law"},"url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":""}},"_tags":["story","author_kd5bjo","story_3698637","ask_hn"],"author":"kd5bjo","children":[3699148,3699305,3700465,3700554],"created_at":"2012-03-13T14:46:01Z","created_at_i":1331649961,"num_comments":11,"objectID":"3698637","points":9,"story_id":3698637,"story_text":"Every time intellectual property comes up, there seems to be two basic positions that get taken. On one side is the position that intellectual property law is useful. On the other, that it is broken. It seems to me that both sides are right: the concept is useful, but the implementation is broken. IANAL, but here is my understanding of the current state of things, as well as my ideas about how to fix them. If this sounds reasonable, what is the best course of action to take? If it doesn't, what's wrong with it?
There are four fundamental types of \"intellectual property,\" and each has to be dealt with in its own way:
Trade secrets are IP that is fundamentally protected by not telling anyone about it. There are legal protections against espionage, but not independent invention or accidental disclosure. There don't seem to be any major complaints about how current law handles this.
Trademarks are signs of brand identity, and cannot be used by direct competitors. The same trademark can be used by multiple companies so long as they operate in distinct markets (by industry or location). The primary complaint about the law here seems to be around what can and can't be considered a trademark. For example, can a fictional character's name or appearance act as a trademark? Also, many companies are overzealous about sending C&D letters to protect their trademarks, for fear of losing them. All in all, this seems to work relatively well, especially relative to copyrights and patents; I have no suggestions to improve them at this time.
Patents exist to protect useful inventions. The fundamental idea of a patent is that an inventor agrees to teach the industry about his new invention in exchange for a time-limited monopoly on its use. The current patent system fails to live up to this ideal in several ways. In practice, patents provide no real education because the language they are written in is too obtuse for anyone other than a patent lawyer to understand. Also, the current practice seems to be to blatantly ignore patent infringement until the patent is almost expired and then sue for several years of damages. Not knowing about the existence of a patent should be a valid defense against a patent infringement suit, and it should be the patent holder's responsibility to make sure that most other people in the industry know about the patent and how the invention works. Also, patents should be voided if their inventors do not actively seek to enforce their monopoly.
Copyright protects creative expression. The justification for copyright is to increase the value of creating creative works, so that society has a richer culture. The current mechanism is through a (theoretically) limited-term monopoly on production of copies of the work. As copying technology has evolved, this mechanism has started to become infeasible. I propose that this mechanism should be replaced with a compulsory licensing scheme. All technological barriers to making copies of creative works should be banned, but technologies to determine who has a copy should remain legal. The copyright office should maintain a consumer-facing system through which anyone can buy a personal-use license for any registered work at standardized rates, and distribute the funds to the copyright holders. Copyright holders may reduce the cost of a license as much as they like, but there will be a statutory maximum. The maximum rate should be determined by the type and age of the work such that it is not too high to be prohibitively expensive to the average consumer nor too low to encourage creators. All licenses sold will be both perpetual and transferrable. In any sale, it is the seller's responsibility to make sure that the copy sold is properly licensed.","title":"Ask HN: How to fix intellectual property law","updated_at":"2024-09-19T18:30:07Z","url":""},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"namemenot"},"story_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["act","trade"],"value":"Back Story: Two years ago, I cofounded a company with a business guy who had an idea and I fleshed out all the technical details, built three working applications, wrote several white papers and authored the majority of the text used in patents we filed.
A year ago we had two other partners in our venture which would have taken 10-15% equity each and had plans to raise VC which we estimated could take as much as 50% of the equity. I told my partner I would be happy ending up with 10% of the equity so I signed a loose agreement around that amount.
Fast forward to now: My partner has been absent for months, has not kept me in the loop about multiple investment we've taken and every meeting he's had with potential partners has flopped.
However, despite not taking VC investment and our other two partners leaving, the 10% equity number has stuck. So my partner is expecting 90% of the company.
My Question: I've decided to walk away from the venture. However, my partner is threatening to file a civil suit and an injunction to get me to hand over the IP to the company. He said I'm in violation of the following laws:
* Uniform Trade Secrets Act\n* My state's Civil Theft statute\n* Law of Misappropriation
Have I broken the law by not releasing the intellectual property that I built? It may have been his idea to start but it's entirely been my implementation.
I am going to consult a lawyer but I wanted to get feedback from HN since you guys are always so helpful.
Thanks!"},"title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Ask HN: Who Owns the IP?"},"url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":""}},"_tags":["story","author_namemenot","story_2236571","ask_hn"],"author":"namemenot","children":[2236610,2237520,2237625,2237725,2238583],"created_at":"2011-02-18T18:22:43Z","created_at_i":1298053363,"num_comments":4,"objectID":"2236571","points":4,"story_id":2236571,"story_text":"Back Story: Two years ago, I cofounded a company with a business guy who had an idea and I fleshed out all the technical details, built three working applications, wrote several white papers and authored the majority of the text used in patents we filed.
A year ago we had two other partners in our venture which would have taken 10-15% equity each and had plans to raise VC which we estimated could take as much as 50% of the equity. I told my partner I would be happy ending up with 10% of the equity so I signed a loose agreement around that amount.
Fast forward to now: My partner has been absent for months, has not kept me in the loop about multiple investment we've taken and every meeting he's had with potential partners has flopped.
However, despite not taking VC investment and our other two partners leaving, the 10% equity number has stuck. So my partner is expecting 90% of the company.
My Question: I've decided to walk away from the venture. However, my partner is threatening to file a civil suit and an injunction to get me to hand over the IP to the company. He said I'm in violation of the following laws:
* Uniform Trade Secrets Act\n* My state's Civil Theft statute\n* Law of Misappropriation
Have I broken the law by not releasing the intellectual property that I built? It may have been his idea to start but it's entirely been my implementation.
I am going to consult a lawyer but I wanted to get feedback from HN since you guys are always so helpful.
Thanks!","title":"Ask HN: Who Owns the IP?","updated_at":"2024-09-19T17:32:01Z","url":""},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Lord_Nightmare"},"story_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["act","trade"],"value":"https://cdn.cnn.com/cnn/2020/images/12/21/bills-116hr133sa-rcp-116-68.pdf
PLSA (no longer under that title) is on page 2539
CASE Act is on page 2544
Trademark Modernization Act of 2020 is on page 2606"},"title":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"partial","matchedWords":["act"],"value":"Released text of stimulus bill still contains the PLSA, CASE and TM Acts"}},"_tags":["story","author_Lord_Nightmare","story_25499261","ask_hn"],"author":"Lord_Nightmare","children":[25499430],"created_at":"2020-12-21T20:36:33Z","created_at_i":1608582993,"num_comments":1,"objectID":"25499261","points":1,"story_id":25499261,"story_text":"https://cdn.cnn.com/cnn/2020/images/12/21/bills-116hr133sa-rcp-116-68.pdf
PLSA (no longer under that title) is on page 2539
CASE Act is on page 2544
Trademark Modernization Act of 2020 is on page 2606","title":"Released text of stimulus bill still contains the PLSA, CASE and TM Acts","updated_at":"2024-09-20T07:34:40Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"orrsella"},"title":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["act","trade"],"value":"U.S. Senators Introduce 'Deter Cyber Theft Act' to Help Protect Trade Secrets"},"url":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["act","trade"],"value":"http://www.securityweek.com/us-senators-introduce-deter-cyber-theft-act-help-protect-trade-secrets"}},"_tags":["story","author_orrsella","story_5697795"],"author":"orrsella","created_at":"2013-05-13T09:07:25Z","created_at_i":1368436045,"num_comments":0,"objectID":"5697795","points":6,"story_id":5697795,"title":"U.S. Senators Introduce 'Deter Cyber Theft Act' to Help Protect Trade Secrets","updated_at":"2023-09-06T21:29:57Z","url":"http://www.securityweek.com/us-senators-introduce-deter-cyber-theft-act-help-protect-trade-secrets"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"sexyalterego"},"story_text":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":""},"title":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"partial","matchedWords":["act"],"value":"Deter Cyber Theft Act picks up where CISPA left off"},"url":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["act","trade"],"value":"http://www.dailydot.com/politics/deter-cyber-theft-act-cispa-hackers-trade-secrets/"}},"_tags":["story","author_sexyalterego","story_5682972"],"author":"sexyalterego","created_at":"2013-05-09T21:12:21Z","created_at_i":1368133941,"num_comments":0,"objectID":"5682972","points":1,"story_id":5682972,"story_text":"","title":"Deter Cyber Theft Act picks up where CISPA left off","updated_at":"2024-09-19T19:34:59Z","url":"http://www.dailydot.com/politics/deter-cyber-theft-act-cispa-hackers-trade-secrets/"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"punnerud"},"title":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["act","trade"],"value":"Illegal for U.S. citizens to own or trade gold (1933 act)"},"url":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"partial","matchedWords":["act"],"value":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_Reserve_Act"}},"_tags":["story","author_punnerud","story_31762420"],"author":"punnerud","created_at":"2022-06-16T04:23:37Z","created_at_i":1655353417,"num_comments":0,"objectID":"31762420","points":4,"story_id":31762420,"title":"Illegal for U.S. citizens to own or trade gold (1933 act)","updated_at":"2024-09-20T11:22:38Z","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_Reserve_Act"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"gt2"},"title":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["act","trade"],"value":"Bad Behavior Database Aims to Stop Rogue Traders Before They Act"},"url":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["act","trade"],"value":"https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-18/bad-behavior-database-aims-to-stop-rogue-traders-before-they-act"}},"_tags":["story","author_gt2","story_13425655"],"author":"gt2","created_at":"2017-01-18T11:38:23Z","created_at_i":1484739503,"num_comments":0,"objectID":"13425655","points":3,"story_id":13425655,"title":"Bad Behavior Database Aims to Stop Rogue Traders Before They Act","updated_at":"2024-09-20T00:14:03Z","url":"https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-18/bad-behavior-database-aims-to-stop-rogue-traders-before-they-act"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"jakarta"},"story_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["act","trade"],"value":"via Appendix D in Damn Right: Behind the Scenes with Berkshire Hathaway Billionaire Charlie Munger
It is 1884 in Atlanta. You are brought, along with twenty others like you, before a rich and eccentric Atlanta citizen named Glotz. Both you and Glotz share two characteristics: first, you routinely use in problem solving the five helpful notions, and, second, you know all the elementary ideas in all the basic college courses, as taught in 1996. However, all discoverers and all examples demonstrating these elementary ideas come from dates transposed back before 1884. Neither you nor Glotz knows anything about anything that has happened after 1884.\nGlotz offers to invest $2 million, yet take only half the equity, for a Glotz charitable foundation, in a new corporation organized to go into the non-alcoholic beverage business and remain in that business only, forever. Glotz wants to use a name that has somehow charmed him: Coca-Cola.
The other half of the new corporation\u2019s equity will go to the man who most plausibly demonstrates that his business plan will cause Glotz\u2019s foundation to be worth a trillion dollars 150 years later, in the money of that later time, 2034, despite paying out a large part of its earnings each year as a dividend. This will make the whole new corporation worth $2 trillion, even after paying out many billions of dollars in dividends.
You have fifteen minutes to make your pitch. What do you say to Glotz?
And here is my solution, my pitch to Glotz, using only the helpful notions and what every bright college sophomore should know.
Well Glotz, the big \u201cno-brainer\u201d decisions that, to simplify our problem, should be made first are as follows: first, we are never going to create something worth $2 trillion by selling some generic beverage. Therefore we must make your name, \u201cCoca-Cola,\u201d into a strong, legally protected trademark. Second, we can get to $2 trillion only by starting in Atlanta, then succeeding in the rest of the United States, then rapidly succeeding with our new beverage all over the world. This will require developing a product having universal appeal because it harnesses powerful elemental forces. And the right place to find such powerful elemental forces is in the subject matter of elementary academic courses.
We will next use numerical fluency to ascertain what our target implies. We can guess reasonably that by 2034 there will be about eight billion beverage consumers around the world. On average, each of these consumers will be much more prosperous in real terms than the average consumer of 1884. Each consumer is composed mostly of water and must ingest about 64 ounces of water per day. This is eight eight-ounce servings. Thus, if our new beverage, and other imitative beverages in our new market, can flavor and otherwise improve only 25 percent of ingested water worldwide, and we can occupy half of the new world market, we can sell 2.92 trillion eight-ounce servings in 2034. And if we can then net four cents per serving, we will earn $117 billion. This will be enough, if our business is still growing at a good rate, to make it easily worth two trillion dollars.
A big question, of course, is whether four cents per serving is a reasonable profit target for 2034. And the answer is yes, if we can create a beverage with strong universal appeal. One hundred fifty years is a long time. The dollar, like the roman drachma, will almost surely suffer monetary depreciation. Concurrently, real purchasing power of the average beverage consumer in the world will go way up. His proclivity to inexpensively improve his experience while ingesting water will go up considerably faster. Meanwhile, as technology improves, the cost of our simple product, in units of constant purchasing power, will go down. All four factors will work together in favor of our four-cents-per-serving profit target. Worldwide beverage-purchasing power in dollars will probably multiply by a factor of at least forty over 150 years. Thinking in reverse, this makes our profit-per-serving target, under 1884 conditions, a mere one fortieth of four cents or one tenth of a cent per serving. This is an easy-to-exceed target as we start out if our new product has universal appeal.
That decided, we must next solve the problem of invention to create universal appeal. There are two intertwined challenges of large scale: first, over 150 years we must cause a new-beverage market to assimilate about one fourth of the world\u2019s water ingestion. Second, we must so operate that half the new market is ours, while all our competitors combined are left to share the remaining half. These results are lollapalooza results. Accordingly, we must attack our problem by causing every favorable factor we can think of to work for us. Plainly, only a powerful combination of many factors is likely to cause the lollapalooza consequences we desire. Fortunately, the solution to these intertwined problems turns out to be fairly easy, if one has stayed awake in all the freshman courses.
Let us start by exploring the consequences of our simplifying \u201cno-brainer\u201d decision that we must rely on a strong trademark. This conclusion automatically leads to an understanding of the essence of our business in proper elementary academic terms. We can see from the introductory course in psychology that, in essence, we are going into the business of creating and maintaining conditioned reflexes. The \u201cCoca-Cola\u201d trade name and trade dress will act as the stimuli, and the purchase and ingestion of our beverage will be the desired responses.
And how does one create and maintain conditioned reflexes? Well, the psychology text gives two answers: by operant conditioning, and (2) by classical conditioning, often called Pavlovian conditioning to honor the great Russian scientist. And, since we want a lollapalooza result, we must use both conditioning techniques \u2013 and all we can invent to enhance effects from each technique.
The operant-conditioning part of our problem is easy to solve. We need only (1) maximize rewards of our beverage\u2019s ingestion, and (2) minimize possibilities that desired reflexes, once created by us, will be extinguished through operant conditioning by proprietors of competing products.
For operant conditioning rewards, there are only a few categories we will find practical:
Food value in calories or other inputs;\nFlavor, texture, and aroma acting as stimuli to consumption under neural preprogramming of a man through Darwinian natural selection;\nStimulus, as by sugar or caffeine;\nCooling effect when man is too hot or warming effect when man is too cool.\nWanting a lollapalooza result, we will naturally include rewards in all the categories.\nTo start out, it is easy to decide to design our beverage for consumption cold. There is much less opportunity, without ingesting beverage, to counteract excessive heat, compared with excessive cold. Moreover, with excessive heat, much liquid must be consumed, and the reverse is not true. It is also easy to decide to include both sugar and caffeine. After all, tea, coffee, and lemonade are already widely consumed. And it is also clear that we must be fanatic about determining, through trial and error, flavor and other characteristics that will maximize human pleasure while taking in the sugared water and caffeine we will provide. And, to counteract possibilities that desired operant-conditioned reflexes, once created by us will be extinguished by operant conditioning employing competing products, there is also an obvious answer: we will make it a permanent obsession in our company that our beverage, as fast as practicable, will at all times be available everywhere throughout the world. After all, a competing product, if it is never tried, can\u2019t act as a reward creating a conflicting habit. Every spouse knows that.
We must next consider the Pavlovian conditioning we must also use. In Pavlovian conditioning powerful effects come from mere association. The neural system of Pavlov\u2019s dog causes it to salivate at the bell it can\u2019t eat. And the brain of man yearns for the type of beverage held by the pretty woman he can\u2019t have. And so, Glotz, we must use every sort of decent, honorable Pavlovian conditioning we can think of. For as long as we are in business, our beverage and its promotion must be associated in consumer minds with all other thing consumers like or admire.
Such extensive Pavlovian conditioning will cost a lot of money, particularly for advertising. We will spend big money as far ahead as we can imagine. But the money will be effectively spent. As we expand fast in our new-beverage market, our competitors will face gross disadvantages of scale in buying advertising to create the Pavlovian conditioning they need. And this outcome, along with other volume-creates-power effects, should help us gain and hold at least 50 percent of the new market everywhere. Indeed, provided buyers are scattered, our higher volumes will give us very extreme cost advantages in distribution.
Moreover, Pavlovian effects from mere association will help us choose the flavor, texture, and color of our new beverage. Considering Pavlovian effects, we will have wisely chosen the exotic and expensive-sounding name \u201cCoca-Cola,\u201d instead of a pedestrian name like \u201cGlotz\u2019s sugared, caffeinated water.\u201d For similar Pavlovian reasons, it will be wise to have our beverage look pretty much like wine, instead of sugared water. And so we will artificially color our beverage if it comes out clear. And we will carbonate our water, making our product seem like champagne, or some other expensive beverage, while also making its flavor better and imitation harder to arrange for competing products. And, because we are going to attach so many expensive psychological effects to our flavor, that flavor should be different from any other standard flavor so that we maximize difficulties for competitors and give no accidental same-flavor benefit to any existing product.
What else, from the psychology textbook, can help our new business? Well, there is that powerful \u201cmonkey-see, monkey-do\u201d aspect of human nature that psychologists often call \u201csocial proof.\u201d Social proof, imitative consumption triggered by mere sight of consumption, will not only help induce trial of our beverage. It will also bolster perceived rewards from consumption. We will always take this powerful social-proof factor into account as we design advertising and sales promotion and as we forego present profit to enhance present and future consumption. More than with most other products, increased selling power will come from each increase in sales.
We can now see, Glotz, that by combining (1) much Pavlovian conditioning, (2) powerful social-proof effects, and (3) wonderful-tasting, energy-giving, stimulating and desirably-cold beverage that causes much operant conditioning, we are going to get sales that speed up for a long time by reason of the huge mixture of factors we have chosen. Therefore, we are going to start something like an autocatalytic reaction in chemistry, precisely the sort of multi-factor-triggered lollapalooza effect we need.
The logistics and the distribution strategy of our business will be simple. There are only two practical ways to sell our beverage: (1) as a syrup to fountains and restaurants, and (2) as a complete carbonated-water product in containers. Wanting lollapalooza results, we will naturally do it both ways. And, wanting huge Pavlovian and social-proof effects we will always spend on advertising and sales promotion, per serving, over 40 percent of the fountain price for syrup needed to make the serving.
A few syrup-making plants can serve the world. However, to avoid needless shipping of mere space and water, we will need many bottling plants scattered over the world. We will maximize profits if (like early General Electric with light bulbs) we always set the first-sale price, either (1) for fountain syrup, or (2) for any container of our complete product. The best way to arrange this desirable profit-maximizing control is to make any independent bottler we need a subcontractor, not a vendee of syrup, and certainly not a vendee of syrup under a perpetual franchise specifying a syrup price frozen forever at its starting level.
Being unable to get a patent or copyright on our super important flavor, we will work obsessively to keep our formula secret. We will make a big hoopla over our secrecy, which will enhance Pavlovian effects. Eventually food-chemical engineering will advance so that our flavor can be copied with near exactitude. But, by that time, we will be so far ahead, with such strong trademarks and complete, \u201calways available\u201d worldwide distribution, that good flavor copying won\u2019t bar us from our objective. Moreover, the advances in food chemistry that help competitors will almost surely be accompanied by technological advances that will help us, including refrigeration, better transportation, and, for dieters, ability to insert a sugar taste without inserting sugar\u2019s calories. Also, there will be related beverage opportunities we will seize.
This brings us to a final reality check for our business plan. We will, once more, think in reverse like Jacobi. What must we avoid because we don\u2019t want it? Four answers seem clear:
First, we must avoid the protective, cloying, stop-consumption effects of aftertaste that are a standard part of physiology, developed through Darwinian evolution to enhance the replication of man\u2019s genes by forcing a generally helpful moderation on the gene carrier. To serve our ends, on hot days a consumer must be able to drink container after container of our product with almost no impediment from aftertaste. We will find a wonderful no-aftertaste flavor by trial and error and will thereby solve this problem.
Second, we must avoid ever losing even half of our powerful trademarked name. It will cost us mightily, for instance, if our sloppiness should ever allow sale of any other kind of \u201ccola,\u201d for instance, a \u201cpeppy cola.\u201d If there is ever a \u201cpeppy cola,\u201d we will be the proprietor of the brand.
Third, with so much success coming, we must avoid bad effects from envy, given a prominent place in the Ten Commandments because envy is so much a part of human nature. The best way to avoid envy, recognized by Aristotle, is to plainly deserve the success we get. We will be fanatic about product quality, quality of product presentation, and reasonableness of prices, considering the harmless pleasure it will provide.
Fourth, after our trademarked flavor dominates our new market, we must avoid making any huge and sudden change in our flavor. Even if a new flavor performs better in blind taste tests, changing to that new flavor would be a foolish thing to do. This follows because, under such conditions, our old flavor will be so entrenched in consumer preference by psychological effects that a big flavor change would do us little good. And it would do immense harm by triggering in consumers the standard deprival super-reaction syndrome that makes \u201ctake-aways\u201d so hard to get in any type of negotiation and helps make most gamblers so irrational. Moreover, such a large flavor change would allow a competitor, by copying our old flavor, to take advantage of both (1) the hostile consumer super-reaction to deprival and (2) the huge love of our original flavor created by our previous work.
Well, that is my solution to my own problem of turning $2 million into $2 trillion, even after paying out billions of dollars in dividends. I think it would have won with Glotz in 1884 and should convince you more than you expected at the outset. After all, the correct strategies are clear after being related to elementary academic ideas brought into play by the helpful notions.
How consistent is my solution with the history of the real Coca-Cola company? Well, as late as 1896, twelve years after the fictional Glotz was to start vigorously with $2 million, the real Coca-Cola company had a net worth under $150 thousand and earnings of about zero. And thereafter the real Coca-Cola company did lose half its trademark and did grant perpetual bottling franchises at fixed syrup prices. And some of the bottlers were not very effective and couldn\u2019t easily be changed. And the real Coca-Cola company, with this system, did lose much pricing control that would have improved results, had it been retained. Yet, even so, the real Coca-Cola company followed so much of the plan given to Glotz that it is now worth about $125 billion and will have to increase its value at only 8 percent per year until 2034 to reach a value of $2 trillion. And it can hit an annual physical volume target of 2.92 trillion servings if servings grow until 2034 at only 6 percent per year, a result consistent with much past experience and leaving plenty of plain-water ingestion for Coca-Cola to replace after 2034. So I would guess that the fictional Glotz, starting earlier and stronger and avoiding the worst errors, would have easily hit his $2 trillion target. And he would have done it well before 2034.
This brings me, at last, to the main purpose of my talk. Large educational implications exist, if my answer to Glotz\u2019s problem is roughly right and you make one more assumption I believe true \u2013 that most Ph.D. educators, even psychology professors and business school deans, would not have given the same simple answer I did. And, if I am right in these two ways, this would indicate that our civilization now keeps in place a great many educators who can\u2019t satisfactorily explain Coca-Cola, even in retrospect, and even after watching it closely all their lives. This is not a satisfactory state of affairs.
Moreover \u2013 and this result is even more extreme \u2013 the brilliant and effect executives who, surrounded by business school and law school graduates, have run the Coca-Cola company with glorious success in recent years, also did not understand elementary psychology well enough to predict and avoid the \u201cNew Coke\u201d fiasco, which dangerously threatened their company. That people so talented, surrounded by professional advisers from the best universities, should thus demonstrate a huge gap in their education is also not a satisfactory state of affairs.
Such extreme ignorance, in both the high reaches of academia and the high reaches of business, is a lollapalooza effect of a negative sort, demonstrating grave defects in academia. Because the bad effect is a lollapalooza, we should expect to find intertwined, multiple academic causes. I suspect at least two such causes.
First, academic psychology, while it is admirable and useful as a list of ingenious and important experiments, lacks intradisciplinary synthesis. In particular, not enough attention is given to lollapalooza effects coming from combinations of psychological tendencies. This creates a situation reminding one of a rustic teacher who tries to simplify school work by rounding pi to an even three. And it violates Einstein\u2019s injunction that \u201ceverything should be made as simple as possible \u2013 but no more simple.\u201d In general, psychology is laid out and misunderstood as electromagnetism would now be misunderstood if physics had produced many brilliant experimenters like Michael Faraday and no grand synthesizer like James Clerk Maxwell.
And, second, there is a truly horrible lack of synthesis blending psychology and other academic subjects. But only an interdisciplinary approach will correctly deal with reality \u2013 in academia as with the Coca-Cola company.
In short, academic psychology departments are immensely more important and useful than other academic departments think. And, at the same time, the psychology departments are immensely worse than more of their inhabitants think. It is, of course, normal for self-appraisal to be more positive than external appraisal. Indeed, a problem of this sort may have given you your speaker today. But the size of this psychology-department gap is preposterously large. In fact, the gap is so enormous that one very eminent university (Chicago) simply abolished its psychology department, perhaps with an undisclosed hope of later creating a better vision.
In such a state of affairs, many years ago and with much that was plainly wrong already present, the \u201cNew Coke\u201d fiasco occurred, wherein Coke\u2019s executives came to the brink of destroying the most valuable trademark in the world. The academically correct reaction to this immense and well-publicized fiasco would have been the sort of reaction Boeing would display if three of its new airplanes crashed in a single week. After all, product integrity is involved in each case, and the plain educational failure was immense.
But almost no such responsible, Boeing-like reaction has come from academia. Instead academia, by and large, continues in its balkanized way to tolerate psychology professors who mis-teach psychology, non-psychology professors who fail to consider psychological effects obviously crucial in their subject matter, and professional schools that carefully preserve psychological ignorance coming in with each entering class and are proud of their inadequacies."},"title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Charlie Munger: Turning $2 Million Into $2 Trillion "}},"_tags":["story","author_jakarta","story_1804743","ask_hn"],"author":"jakarta","created_at":"2010-10-18T19:17:55Z","created_at_i":1287429475,"num_comments":0,"objectID":"1804743","points":3,"story_id":1804743,"story_text":"via Appendix D in Damn Right: Behind the Scenes with Berkshire Hathaway Billionaire Charlie Munger
It is 1884 in Atlanta. You are brought, along with twenty others like you, before a rich and eccentric Atlanta citizen named Glotz. Both you and Glotz share two characteristics: first, you routinely use in problem solving the five helpful notions, and, second, you know all the elementary ideas in all the basic college courses, as taught in 1996. However, all discoverers and all examples demonstrating these elementary ideas come from dates transposed back before 1884. Neither you nor Glotz knows anything about anything that has happened after 1884.\nGlotz offers to invest $2 million, yet take only half the equity, for a Glotz charitable foundation, in a new corporation organized to go into the non-alcoholic beverage business and remain in that business only, forever. Glotz wants to use a name that has somehow charmed him: Coca-Cola.
The other half of the new corporation\u2019s equity will go to the man who most plausibly demonstrates that his business plan will cause Glotz\u2019s foundation to be worth a trillion dollars 150 years later, in the money of that later time, 2034, despite paying out a large part of its earnings each year as a dividend. This will make the whole new corporation worth $2 trillion, even after paying out many billions of dollars in dividends.
You have fifteen minutes to make your pitch. What do you say to Glotz?
And here is my solution, my pitch to Glotz, using only the helpful notions and what every bright college sophomore should know.
Well Glotz, the big \u201cno-brainer\u201d decisions that, to simplify our problem, should be made first are as follows: first, we are never going to create something worth $2 trillion by selling some generic beverage. Therefore we must make your name, \u201cCoca-Cola,\u201d into a strong, legally protected trademark. Second, we can get to $2 trillion only by starting in Atlanta, then succeeding in the rest of the United States, then rapidly succeeding with our new beverage all over the world. This will require developing a product having universal appeal because it harnesses powerful elemental forces. And the right place to find such powerful elemental forces is in the subject matter of elementary academic courses.
We will next use numerical fluency to ascertain what our target implies. We can guess reasonably that by 2034 there will be about eight billion beverage consumers around the world. On average, each of these consumers will be much more prosperous in real terms than the average consumer of 1884. Each consumer is composed mostly of water and must ingest about 64 ounces of water per day. This is eight eight-ounce servings. Thus, if our new beverage, and other imitative beverages in our new market, can flavor and otherwise improve only 25 percent of ingested water worldwide, and we can occupy half of the new world market, we can sell 2.92 trillion eight-ounce servings in 2034. And if we can then net four cents per serving, we will earn $117 billion. This will be enough, if our business is still growing at a good rate, to make it easily worth two trillion dollars.
A big question, of course, is whether four cents per serving is a reasonable profit target for 2034. And the answer is yes, if we can create a beverage with strong universal appeal. One hundred fifty years is a long time. The dollar, like the roman drachma, will almost surely suffer monetary depreciation. Concurrently, real purchasing power of the average beverage consumer in the world will go way up. His proclivity to inexpensively improve his experience while ingesting water will go up considerably faster. Meanwhile, as technology improves, the cost of our simple product, in units of constant purchasing power, will go down. All four factors will work together in favor of our four-cents-per-serving profit target. Worldwide beverage-purchasing power in dollars will probably multiply by a factor of at least forty over 150 years. Thinking in reverse, this makes our profit-per-serving target, under 1884 conditions, a mere one fortieth of four cents or one tenth of a cent per serving. This is an easy-to-exceed target as we start out if our new product has universal appeal.
That decided, we must next solve the problem of invention to create universal appeal. There are two intertwined challenges of large scale: first, over 150 years we must cause a new-beverage market to assimilate about one fourth of the world\u2019s water ingestion. Second, we must so operate that half the new market is ours, while all our competitors combined are left to share the remaining half. These results are lollapalooza results. Accordingly, we must attack our problem by causing every favorable factor we can think of to work for us. Plainly, only a powerful combination of many factors is likely to cause the lollapalooza consequences we desire. Fortunately, the solution to these intertwined problems turns out to be fairly easy, if one has stayed awake in all the freshman courses.
Let us start by exploring the consequences of our simplifying \u201cno-brainer\u201d decision that we must rely on a strong trademark. This conclusion automatically leads to an understanding of the essence of our business in proper elementary academic terms. We can see from the introductory course in psychology that, in essence, we are going into the business of creating and maintaining conditioned reflexes. The \u201cCoca-Cola\u201d trade name and trade dress will act as the stimuli, and the purchase and ingestion of our beverage will be the desired responses.
And how does one create and maintain conditioned reflexes? Well, the psychology text gives two answers: by operant conditioning, and (2) by classical conditioning, often called Pavlovian conditioning to honor the great Russian scientist. And, since we want a lollapalooza result, we must use both conditioning techniques \u2013 and all we can invent to enhance effects from each technique.
The operant-conditioning part of our problem is easy to solve. We need only (1) maximize rewards of our beverage\u2019s ingestion, and (2) minimize possibilities that desired reflexes, once created by us, will be extinguished through operant conditioning by proprietors of competing products.
For operant conditioning rewards, there are only a few categories we will find practical:
Food value in calories or other inputs;\nFlavor, texture, and aroma acting as stimuli to consumption under neural preprogramming of a man through Darwinian natural selection;\nStimulus, as by sugar or caffeine;\nCooling effect when man is too hot or warming effect when man is too cool.\nWanting a lollapalooza result, we will naturally include rewards in all the categories.\nTo start out, it is easy to decide to design our beverage for consumption cold. There is much less opportunity, without ingesting beverage, to counteract excessive heat, compared with excessive cold. Moreover, with excessive heat, much liquid must be consumed, and the reverse is not true. It is also easy to decide to include both sugar and caffeine. After all, tea, coffee, and lemonade are already widely consumed. And it is also clear that we must be fanatic about determining, through trial and error, flavor and other characteristics that will maximize human pleasure while taking in the sugared water and caffeine we will provide. And, to counteract possibilities that desired operant-conditioned reflexes, once created by us will be extinguished by operant conditioning employing competing products, there is also an obvious answer: we will make it a permanent obsession in our company that our beverage, as fast as practicable, will at all times be available everywhere throughout the world. After all, a competing product, if it is never tried, can\u2019t act as a reward creating a conflicting habit. Every spouse knows that.
We must next consider the Pavlovian conditioning we must also use. In Pavlovian conditioning powerful effects come from mere association. The neural system of Pavlov\u2019s dog causes it to salivate at the bell it can\u2019t eat. And the brain of man yearns for the type of beverage held by the pretty woman he can\u2019t have. And so, Glotz, we must use every sort of decent, honorable Pavlovian conditioning we can think of. For as long as we are in business, our beverage and its promotion must be associated in consumer minds with all other thing consumers like or admire.
Such extensive Pavlovian conditioning will cost a lot of money, particularly for advertising. We will spend big money as far ahead as we can imagine. But the money will be effectively spent. As we expand fast in our new-beverage market, our competitors will face gross disadvantages of scale in buying advertising to create the Pavlovian conditioning they need. And this outcome, along with other volume-creates-power effects, should help us gain and hold at least 50 percent of the new market everywhere. Indeed, provided buyers are scattered, our higher volumes will give us very extreme cost advantages in distribution.
Moreover, Pavlovian effects from mere association will help us choose the flavor, texture, and color of our new beverage. Considering Pavlovian effects, we will have wisely chosen the exotic and expensive-sounding name \u201cCoca-Cola,\u201d instead of a pedestrian name like \u201cGlotz\u2019s sugared, caffeinated water.\u201d For similar Pavlovian reasons, it will be wise to have our beverage look pretty much like wine, instead of sugared water. And so we will artificially color our beverage if it comes out clear. And we will carbonate our water, making our product seem like champagne, or some other expensive beverage, while also making its flavor better and imitation harder to arrange for competing products. And, because we are going to attach so many expensive psychological effects to our flavor, that flavor should be different from any other standard flavor so that we maximize difficulties for competitors and give no accidental same-flavor benefit to any existing product.
What else, from the psychology textbook, can help our new business? Well, there is that powerful \u201cmonkey-see, monkey-do\u201d aspect of human nature that psychologists often call \u201csocial proof.\u201d Social proof, imitative consumption triggered by mere sight of consumption, will not only help induce trial of our beverage. It will also bolster perceived rewards from consumption. We will always take this powerful social-proof factor into account as we design advertising and sales promotion and as we forego present profit to enhance present and future consumption. More than with most other products, increased selling power will come from each increase in sales.
We can now see, Glotz, that by combining (1) much Pavlovian conditioning, (2) powerful social-proof effects, and (3) wonderful-tasting, energy-giving, stimulating and desirably-cold beverage that causes much operant conditioning, we are going to get sales that speed up for a long time by reason of the huge mixture of factors we have chosen. Therefore, we are going to start something like an autocatalytic reaction in chemistry, precisely the sort of multi-factor-triggered lollapalooza effect we need.
The logistics and the distribution strategy of our business will be simple. There are only two practical ways to sell our beverage: (1) as a syrup to fountains and restaurants, and (2) as a complete carbonated-water product in containers. Wanting lollapalooza results, we will naturally do it both ways. And, wanting huge Pavlovian and social-proof effects we will always spend on advertising and sales promotion, per serving, over 40 percent of the fountain price for syrup needed to make the serving.
A few syrup-making plants can serve the world. However, to avoid needless shipping of mere space and water, we will need many bottling plants scattered over the world. We will maximize profits if (like early General Electric with light bulbs) we always set the first-sale price, either (1) for fountain syrup, or (2) for any container of our complete product. The best way to arrange this desirable profit-maximizing control is to make any independent bottler we need a subcontractor, not a vendee of syrup, and certainly not a vendee of syrup under a perpetual franchise specifying a syrup price frozen forever at its starting level.
Being unable to get a patent or copyright on our super important flavor, we will work obsessively to keep our formula secret. We will make a big hoopla over our secrecy, which will enhance Pavlovian effects. Eventually food-chemical engineering will advance so that our flavor can be copied with near exactitude. But, by that time, we will be so far ahead, with such strong trademarks and complete, \u201calways available\u201d worldwide distribution, that good flavor copying won\u2019t bar us from our objective. Moreover, the advances in food chemistry that help competitors will almost surely be accompanied by technological advances that will help us, including refrigeration, better transportation, and, for dieters, ability to insert a sugar taste without inserting sugar\u2019s calories. Also, there will be related beverage opportunities we will seize.
This brings us to a final reality check for our business plan. We will, once more, think in reverse like Jacobi. What must we avoid because we don\u2019t want it? Four answers seem clear:
First, we must avoid the protective, cloying, stop-consumption effects of aftertaste that are a standard part of physiology, developed through Darwinian evolution to enhance the replication of man\u2019s genes by forcing a generally helpful moderation on the gene carrier. To serve our ends, on hot days a consumer must be able to drink container after container of our product with almost no impediment from aftertaste. We will find a wonderful no-aftertaste flavor by trial and error and will thereby solve this problem.
Second, we must avoid ever losing even half of our powerful trademarked name. It will cost us mightily, for instance, if our sloppiness should ever allow sale of any other kind of \u201ccola,\u201d for instance, a \u201cpeppy cola.\u201d If there is ever a \u201cpeppy cola,\u201d we will be the proprietor of the brand.
Third, with so much success coming, we must avoid bad effects from envy, given a prominent place in the Ten Commandments because envy is so much a part of human nature. The best way to avoid envy, recognized by Aristotle, is to plainly deserve the success we get. We will be fanatic about product quality, quality of product presentation, and reasonableness of prices, considering the harmless pleasure it will provide.
Fourth, after our trademarked flavor dominates our new market, we must avoid making any huge and sudden change in our flavor. Even if a new flavor performs better in blind taste tests, changing to that new flavor would be a foolish thing to do. This follows because, under such conditions, our old flavor will be so entrenched in consumer preference by psychological effects that a big flavor change would do us little good. And it would do immense harm by triggering in consumers the standard deprival super-reaction syndrome that makes \u201ctake-aways\u201d so hard to get in any type of negotiation and helps make most gamblers so irrational. Moreover, such a large flavor change would allow a competitor, by copying our old flavor, to take advantage of both (1) the hostile consumer super-reaction to deprival and (2) the huge love of our original flavor created by our previous work.
Well, that is my solution to my own problem of turning $2 million into $2 trillion, even after paying out billions of dollars in dividends. I think it would have won with Glotz in 1884 and should convince you more than you expected at the outset. After all, the correct strategies are clear after being related to elementary academic ideas brought into play by the helpful notions.
How consistent is my solution with the history of the real Coca-Cola company? Well, as late as 1896, twelve years after the fictional Glotz was to start vigorously with $2 million, the real Coca-Cola company had a net worth under $150 thousand and earnings of about zero. And thereafter the real Coca-Cola company did lose half its trademark and did grant perpetual bottling franchises at fixed syrup prices. And some of the bottlers were not very effective and couldn\u2019t easily be changed. And the real Coca-Cola company, with this system, did lose much pricing control that would have improved results, had it been retained. Yet, even so, the real Coca-Cola company followed so much of the plan given to Glotz that it is now worth about $125 billion and will have to increase its value at only 8 percent per year until 2034 to reach a value of $2 trillion. And it can hit an annual physical volume target of 2.92 trillion servings if servings grow until 2034 at only 6 percent per year, a result consistent with much past experience and leaving plenty of plain-water ingestion for Coca-Cola to replace after 2034. So I would guess that the fictional Glotz, starting earlier and stronger and avoiding the worst errors, would have easily hit his $2 trillion target. And he would have done it well before 2034.
This brings me, at last, to the main purpose of my talk. Large educational implications exist, if my answer to Glotz\u2019s problem is roughly right and you make one more assumption I believe true \u2013 that most Ph.D. educators, even psychology professors and business school deans, would not have given the same simple answer I did. And, if I am right in these two ways, this would indicate that our civilization now keeps in place a great many educators who can\u2019t satisfactorily explain Coca-Cola, even in retrospect, and even after watching it closely all their lives. This is not a satisfactory state of affairs.
Moreover \u2013 and this result is even more extreme \u2013 the brilliant and effect executives who, surrounded by business school and law school graduates, have run the Coca-Cola company with glorious success in recent years, also did not understand elementary psychology well enough to predict and avoid the \u201cNew Coke\u201d fiasco, which dangerously threatened their company. That people so talented, surrounded by professional advisers from the best universities, should thus demonstrate a huge gap in their education is also not a satisfactory state of affairs.
Such extreme ignorance, in both the high reaches of academia and the high reaches of business, is a lollapalooza effect of a negative sort, demonstrating grave defects in academia. Because the bad effect is a lollapalooza, we should expect to find intertwined, multiple academic causes. I suspect at least two such causes.
First, academic psychology, while it is admirable and useful as a list of ingenious and important experiments, lacks intradisciplinary synthesis. In particular, not enough attention is given to lollapalooza effects coming from combinations of psychological tendencies. This creates a situation reminding one of a rustic teacher who tries to simplify school work by rounding pi to an even three. And it violates Einstein\u2019s injunction that \u201ceverything should be made as simple as possible \u2013 but no more simple.\u201d In general, psychology is laid out and misunderstood as electromagnetism would now be misunderstood if physics had produced many brilliant experimenters like Michael Faraday and no grand synthesizer like James Clerk Maxwell.
And, second, there is a truly horrible lack of synthesis blending psychology and other academic subjects. But only an interdisciplinary approach will correctly deal with reality \u2013 in academia as with the Coca-Cola company.
In short, academic psychology departments are immensely more important and useful than other academic departments think. And, at the same time, the psychology departments are immensely worse than more of their inhabitants think. It is, of course, normal for self-appraisal to be more positive than external appraisal. Indeed, a problem of this sort may have given you your speaker today. But the size of this psychology-department gap is preposterously large. In fact, the gap is so enormous that one very eminent university (Chicago) simply abolished its psychology department, perhaps with an undisclosed hope of later creating a better vision.
In such a state of affairs, many years ago and with much that was plainly wrong already present, the \u201cNew Coke\u201d fiasco occurred, wherein Coke\u2019s executives came to the brink of destroying the most valuable trademark in the world. The academically correct reaction to this immense and well-publicized fiasco would have been the sort of reaction Boeing would display if three of its new airplanes crashed in a single week. After all, product integrity is involved in each case, and the plain educational failure was immense.
But almost no such responsible, Boeing-like reaction has come from academia. Instead academia, by and large, continues in its balkanized way to tolerate psychology professors who mis-teach psychology, non-psychology professors who fail to consider psychological effects obviously crucial in their subject matter, and professional schools that carefully preserve psychological ignorance coming in with each entering class and are proud of their inadequacies.","title":"Charlie Munger: Turning $2 Million Into $2 Trillion ","updated_at":"2024-09-19T17:16:04Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"thisisit"},"title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"AirSwap, a decentralized exchange could undermine China\u2019s efforts to crack down"},"url":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["act","trade"],"value":"https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-28/upending-digital-currency-market-is-next-act-for-ex-virtu-trader"}},"_tags":["story","author_thisisit","story_15357572"],"author":"thisisit","created_at":"2017-09-28T15:02:08Z","created_at_i":1506610928,"num_comments":0,"objectID":"15357572","points":3,"story_id":15357572,"title":"AirSwap, a decentralized exchange could undermine China\u2019s efforts to crack down","updated_at":"2024-09-20T01:26:55Z","url":"https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-28/upending-digital-currency-market-is-next-act-for-ex-virtu-trader"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"iafrikan"},"title":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"partial","matchedWords":["trade"],"value":"Making sense of South Africa\u2019s new copyright bill and the USA's trade threats"},"url":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["act","trade"],"value":"https://www.iafrikan.com/2019/12/27/south-africa-new-copyright-bill-act-law-usa-america-world-trade-organization-wto/"}},"_tags":["story","author_iafrikan","story_21890362"],"author":"iafrikan","created_at":"2019-12-27T10:12:25Z","created_at_i":1577441545,"num_comments":0,"objectID":"21890362","points":1,"story_id":21890362,"title":"Making sense of South Africa\u2019s new copyright bill and the USA's trade threats","updated_at":"2024-09-20T05:24:54Z","url":"https://www.iafrikan.com/2019/12/27/south-africa-new-copyright-bill-act-law-usa-america-world-trade-organization-wto/"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"hhs"},"title":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["act","trade"],"value":"Beyond trade secrecy: Confidentiality agreements that act like noncompetes"},"url":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["act","trade"],"value":"https://www.yalelawjournal.org/article/beyond-trade-secrecy-confidentiality-agreements-that-act-like-noncompetes"}},"_tags":["story","author_hhs","story_39351430"],"author":"hhs","created_at":"2024-02-12T22:31:36Z","created_at_i":1707777096,"num_comments":0,"objectID":"39351430","points":2,"story_id":39351430,"title":"Beyond trade secrecy: Confidentiality agreements that act like noncompetes","updated_at":"2024-09-20T16:26:11Z","url":"https://www.yalelawjournal.org/article/beyond-trade-secrecy-confidentiality-agreements-that-act-like-noncompetes"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"mhb"},"story_text":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":""},"title":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["act","trade"],"value":"Germany Is Expected to Act to Increase Limits on High-Speed Trades"},"url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/26/business/global/germany-wants-rules-on-superfast-stock-trading.html?_r=1&hpw"}},"_tags":["story","author_mhb","story_4574093"],"author":"mhb","created_at":"2012-09-26T03:55:05Z","created_at_i":1348631705,"num_comments":0,"objectID":"4574093","points":1,"story_id":4574093,"story_text":"","title":"Germany Is Expected to Act to Increase Limits on High-Speed Trades","updated_at":"2024-09-19T18:58:57Z","url":"http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/26/business/global/germany-wants-rules-on-superfast-stock-trading.html?_r=1&hpw"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"fpgajoe"},"story_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["act","trade"],"value":"I am looking at a consulting contract with language that sounds like I'd be doing two things if signed:
1- Give away the rights to anything I come up with --even ideas, which I take to be stuff in my brain that I don't even talk about-- in the course of a limited time contract that isn't even that lucrative.
2- The mere act of using any of my own trade secrets or proprietary information automatically grants them a non-exclusive, royalty-free, fully paid,\nirrevocable, perpetual, (...etc) license to the IP
In other words, for the "benefit" of taking on a short (about 5 months) contract with reasonable but not incredible pay I would risk giving away anything in my brain and anything I've created in the last 15 years of my career.
How do you guys deal with such contracts?
I there language I can present that is more benign for all involved?
Have you ever negotiated such changes? How does it go?
I understand that if these guys hire me to design something for them they need to own it. That makes sense. However, to extend that to owning my ideas, perhaps things I thought about but never put into the design and go beyond that. Frankly, not sure how to process this.
Then there's the part of owning any of my IP that I might put into the design. To me that means I could not use it for my next client. How would that work?
Just looking for some feedback on how to handle such things.
Thanks!"},"title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Ask HN: If you work for us we own everything you come up with?"}},"_tags":["story","author_fpgajoe","story_10275649","ask_hn"],"author":"fpgajoe","children":[10275671,10275760,10275909],"created_at":"2015-09-25T00:03:06Z","created_at_i":1443139386,"num_comments":6,"objectID":"10275649","points":4,"story_id":10275649,"story_text":"I am looking at a consulting contract with language that sounds like I'd be doing two things if signed:
1- Give away the rights to anything I come up with --even ideas, which I take to be stuff in my brain that I don't even talk about-- in the course of a limited time contract that isn't even that lucrative.
2- The mere act of using any of my own trade secrets or proprietary information automatically grants them a non-exclusive, royalty-free, fully paid,\nirrevocable, perpetual, (...etc) license to the IP
In other words, for the "benefit" of taking on a short (about 5 months) contract with reasonable but not incredible pay I would risk giving away anything in my brain and anything I've created in the last 15 years of my career.
How do you guys deal with such contracts?
I there language I can present that is more benign for all involved?
Have you ever negotiated such changes? How does it go?
I understand that if these guys hire me to design something for them they need to own it. That makes sense. However, to extend that to owning my ideas, perhaps things I thought about but never put into the design and go beyond that. Frankly, not sure how to process this.
Then there's the part of owning any of my IP that I might put into the design. To me that means I could not use it for my next client. How would that work?
Just looking for some feedback on how to handle such things.
Thanks!","title":"Ask HN: If you work for us we own everything you come up with?","updated_at":"2024-09-19T22:23:16Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"teugent"},"story_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["act","trade"],"value":"We recently completed validation of SIGMA Runtime v0.3.7 \u2014 a cognitive architecture for LLM identity stabilization.\nAcross 550 cycles on GPT-5.2 (five runs \u00d7 110 cycles), the system maintained 100% persona coherence with an average 33% token reduction and 13% latency improvement.
The key finding: runtime parameters act as cognitive control levers, enabling dynamic trade-offs between semantic depth and efficiency.
Discussion welcome \u2014 especially from those working on long-horizon coherence, cognitive attractors, and multi-cycle LLM stability."},"title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Show HN: Sigma Runtime \u2013 550-cycle identity stability benchmark on GPT-5.2"},"url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"https://github.com/sigmastratum/documentation/blob/main/sigma-runtime/SR-EI-037/SIGMA_Runtime_0_3_7_CVR.md"}},"_tags":["story","author_teugent","story_46337392","show_hn"],"author":"teugent","created_at":"2025-12-20T16:39:37Z","created_at_i":1766248777,"num_comments":0,"objectID":"46337392","points":2,"story_id":46337392,"story_text":"We recently completed validation of SIGMA Runtime v0.3.7 \u2014 a cognitive architecture for LLM identity stabilization.\nAcross 550 cycles on GPT-5.2 (five runs \u00d7 110 cycles), the system maintained 100% persona coherence with an average 33% token reduction and 13% latency improvement.
The key finding: runtime parameters act as cognitive control levers, enabling dynamic trade-offs between semantic depth and efficiency.
Discussion welcome \u2014 especially from those working on long-horizon coherence, cognitive attractors, and multi-cycle LLM stability.","title":"Show HN: Sigma Runtime \u2013 550-cycle identity stability benchmark on GPT-5.2","updated_at":"2026-03-05T23:15:12Z","url":"https://github.com/sigmastratum/documentation/blob/main/sigma-runtime/SR-EI-037/SIGMA_Runtime_0_3_7_CVR.md"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"stooderrr"},"story_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["act","trade"],"value":"Hi HN! I'm Matt, founder of Frontend Mentor (https://www.frontendmentor.io). We provide front-end and full-stack coding challenges with professional Figma designs, enabling developers to build real projects and grow their skills.
The problem: AI coding tools are great, but they can work against you when you're learning. Ask Copilot or Cursor to help with a beginner project, and they'll happily write the whole thing for you. You ship the project, but you didn't really learn anything.
What we did: We added AGENTS.md (and CLAUDE.md) files to every challenge's starter code. These files tell AI tools how to help based on the challenge's difficulty level, so the AI becomes a learning partner rather than an answer machine.
The idea is simple: AI guidance should scale with the learner.
- Newbie: AI acts as a patient mentor. Breaks problems into tiny steps, uses analogies, and gives multiple hints before showing an approach. Won't hand you a complete solution.
- Junior: AI becomes a supportive guide. Introduces debugging, encourages DevTools usage, and explains the "why," not just the "what."
- Intermediate: AI acts like an experienced colleague. Presents trade-offs, shows multiple approaches, and lets you make decisions.
- Advanced: AI acts like a senior dev. Challenges your thinking, plays devil's advocate, gives honest feedback.
- Guru: AI acts like a peer. Debates approaches, references specs, brings different viewpoints.
The core principle across all levels: guide thinking, don't replace it.
Since tools like Cursor and Copilot already look for AGENTS.md in project directories, this works out of the box with no setup.
We don't think anyone has fully figured out AI-assisted learning yet, and the landscape is shifting so quickly. This is our first attempt at making AI tools better by default for people who are trying to build foundational coding skills, not just ship projects.
Would love to hear your thoughts, especially from anyone considering how AI tools and skill development can work together."},"title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Show HN: We added AGENTS.md to 120 challenges so AI teaches instead of codes"},"url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"https://www.frontendmentor.io/articles/agents-md-files-in-every-challenge"}},"_tags":["story","author_stooderrr","story_46946215","show_hn"],"author":"stooderrr","created_at":"2026-02-09T15:22:32Z","created_at_i":1770650552,"num_comments":0,"objectID":"46946215","points":1,"story_id":46946215,"story_text":"Hi HN! I'm Matt, founder of Frontend Mentor (https://www.frontendmentor.io). We provide front-end and full-stack coding challenges with professional Figma designs, enabling developers to build real projects and grow their skills.
The problem: AI coding tools are great, but they can work against you when you're learning. Ask Copilot or Cursor to help with a beginner project, and they'll happily write the whole thing for you. You ship the project, but you didn't really learn anything.
What we did: We added AGENTS.md (and CLAUDE.md) files to every challenge's starter code. These files tell AI tools how to help based on the challenge's difficulty level, so the AI becomes a learning partner rather than an answer machine.
The idea is simple: AI guidance should scale with the learner.
- Newbie: AI acts as a patient mentor. Breaks problems into tiny steps, uses analogies, and gives multiple hints before showing an approach. Won't hand you a complete solution.
- Junior: AI becomes a supportive guide. Introduces debugging, encourages DevTools usage, and explains the "why," not just the "what."
- Intermediate: AI acts like an experienced colleague. Presents trade-offs, shows multiple approaches, and lets you make decisions.
- Advanced: AI acts like a senior dev. Challenges your thinking, plays devil's advocate, gives honest feedback.
- Guru: AI acts like a peer. Debates approaches, references specs, brings different viewpoints.
The core principle across all levels: guide thinking, don't replace it.
Since tools like Cursor and Copilot already look for AGENTS.md in project directories, this works out of the box with no setup.
We don't think anyone has fully figured out AI-assisted learning yet, and the landscape is shifting so quickly. This is our first attempt at making AI tools better by default for people who are trying to build foundational coding skills, not just ship projects.
Would love to hear your thoughts, especially from anyone considering how AI tools and skill development can work together.","title":"Show HN: We added AGENTS.md to 120 challenges so AI teaches instead of codes","updated_at":"2026-03-05T23:33:10Z","url":"https://www.frontendmentor.io/articles/agents-md-files-in-every-challenge"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"oellegaard"},"title":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"partial","matchedWords":["trade"],"value":"No free trade agreement if charges of espionage are true, warns EU Commissioner"},"url":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"partial","matchedWords":["act"],"value":"http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=da&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dr.dk%2FNyheder%2FUdland%2F2013%2F06%2F30%2F0630185422.htm&act=url"}},"_tags":["story","author_oellegaard","story_5966837"],"author":"oellegaard","children":[5967021,5967312,5967314,5967327,5967356,5967444,5967445,5967487,5967512,5967828,5967915,5968199,5968308,5968528],"created_at":"2013-06-30T19:22:19Z","created_at_i":1372620139,"num_comments":143,"objectID":"5966837","points":143,"story_id":5966837,"title":"No free trade agreement if charges of espionage are true, warns EU Commissioner","updated_at":"2023-09-06T21:51:46Z","url":"http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=da&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dr.dk%2FNyheder%2FUdland%2F2013%2F06%2F30%2F0630185422.htm&act=url"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"walterbell"},"title":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"partial","matchedWords":["trade"],"value":"NAFTA: Don\u2019t Trade Away the Internet"},"url":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"partial","matchedWords":["act"],"value":"https://act.openmedia.org/DontTradeAwayTheInternet"}},"_tags":["story","author_walterbell","story_17889088"],"author":"walterbell","children":[17889437,17889656,17891534,17891688],"created_at":"2018-08-31T22:52:40Z","created_at_i":1535755960,"num_comments":2,"objectID":"17889088","points":121,"story_id":17889088,"title":"NAFTA: Don\u2019t Trade Away the Internet","updated_at":"2024-09-20T03:02:10Z","url":"https://act.openmedia.org/DontTradeAwayTheInternet"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"adamnemecek"},"story_text":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":""},"title":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["act","trade"],"value":"China must act, but Africa needs to take the lead to stop ivory trade"},"url":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["act","trade"],"value":"http://www.theguardian.com/environment/africa-wild/2014/dec/09/china-must-act-but-africa-take-the-lead-in-stopping-ivory-trade"}},"_tags":["story","author_adamnemecek","story_8769448"],"author":"adamnemecek","children":[8770078,8770130,8770334],"created_at":"2014-12-18T20:23:51Z","created_at_i":1418934231,"num_comments":9,"objectID":"8769448","points":34,"story_id":8769448,"story_text":"","title":"China must act, but Africa needs to take the lead to stop ivory trade","updated_at":"2023-09-06T23:05:20Z","url":"http://www.theguardian.com/environment/africa-wild/2014/dec/09/china-must-act-but-africa-take-the-lead-in-stopping-ivory-trade"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"hippich"},"story_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["act","trade"],"value":"I wrote email saying that registering Bitcoin trademark is incorrect. See below answer and decide yourself what kind of person we deal with.
Dear Sir, I disagree with your stated position. The USA and other common law countries utilize a first to use doctrine whereas the civil law countries like France use a first to file doctrine. As far as I can tell, here in the USA the transactions which you refer to are untraceable & anonymous. Ergo, what evidence will be introduced in federal court supporting any prior use? Articles? I think not, a literary work is not use in commerce in the Nice classification. Who is going to prove that he/she utilized a bitcoin (trademark pending with USPTO) and transferred it to Mr A in interstate commerce with any degree of proof. He said/ she said/ you all said/ will not carry the day in a federal court. The very nature of the crypto transaction renders it impossible to trace and prove a completed transaction in interstate commerce. There will always be the need for some trust me in the purported proof. That will not carry the day in federal court.\nYou should further consider the first to file countries where prior use is irrelevant. My client is in the process of filing in numerous civil law countries such as Japan where whining about first to use is of no moment. One can sue in a US federal court for tortious acts committed overseas so long as the defendant has minimum contacts with the US. Food for thought.
Very truly yours,\nMichael S. Pascazi, Esq.\nPascazi Law Offices PLLC\n1065 Main Street, Ste. D\nFishkill, New York 12524 U.S.A. \nPh: +1 845.897.4219\nFax: +1 845.468.7117*\nE-mail:Info@pascazilaw.com*\nWeb:www.pascazilaw.com\n*Service Not Accepted"},"title":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"partial","matchedWords":["trade"],"value":"Response from lawyer applied for Bitcoin trademark"},"url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":""}},"_tags":["story","author_hippich","story_2737435","ask_hn"],"author":"hippich","children":[2737463,2737474,2737497,2737517,2737534,2737537,2740097,2746813],"created_at":"2011-07-07T06:17:52Z","created_at_i":1310019472,"num_comments":7,"objectID":"2737435","points":19,"story_id":2737435,"story_text":"I wrote email saying that registering Bitcoin trademark is incorrect. See below answer and decide yourself what kind of person we deal with.
Dear Sir, I disagree with your stated position. The USA and other common law countries utilize a first to use doctrine whereas the civil law countries like France use a first to file doctrine. As far as I can tell, here in the USA the transactions which you refer to are untraceable & anonymous. Ergo, what evidence will be introduced in federal court supporting any prior use? Articles? I think not, a literary work is not use in commerce in the Nice classification. Who is going to prove that he/she utilized a bitcoin (trademark pending with USPTO) and transferred it to Mr A in interstate commerce with any degree of proof. He said/ she said/ you all said/ will not carry the day in a federal court. The very nature of the crypto transaction renders it impossible to trace and prove a completed transaction in interstate commerce. There will always be the need for some trust me in the purported proof. That will not carry the day in federal court.\nYou should further consider the first to file countries where prior use is irrelevant. My client is in the process of filing in numerous civil law countries such as Japan where whining about first to use is of no moment. One can sue in a US federal court for tortious acts committed overseas so long as the defendant has minimum contacts with the US. Food for thought.
Very truly yours,\nMichael S. Pascazi, Esq.\nPascazi Law Offices PLLC\n1065 Main Street, Ste. D\nFishkill, New York 12524 U.S.A. \nPh: +1 845.897.4219\nFax: +1 845.468.7117*\nE-mail:Info@pascazilaw.com*\nWeb:www.pascazilaw.com\n*Service Not Accepted","title":"Response from lawyer applied for Bitcoin trademark","updated_at":"2024-09-19T17:49:49Z","url":""},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"alirsgp"},"story_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["act","trade"],"value":"I own the app called 'Cuff' on the app store. Cuff is a popular 1 on 1 video chatting app, and it has many competitors. One of the competitors is a Chinese owned app called 'Monkey'.
They don't like how I rank for the search term 'Monkey', and demand a monopoly on the search results for the term.
I don't have the term in my keywords or anywhere in my app meta-data. But my app still ranks for the keyword. It ranks for a lot of keywords I don't have directly in my meta-data. I guess because of its overall popularity?
Anyways, they are saying I am infringing on their trademark, and I have no clue what action to take. Apple says they can remove my app if I don't act, but there's literally no action to take.
Do I have legal grounds here? I am thinking if Apple removes my app, I can take them to small claims court to try to make a case for reinstatement, since I am a one-man shop for the app.
It really sucks this is happening. I hate how some random Chinese shadow tech company can make Apple do their bidding in the US, so that American individuals/companies can't fight back. Since they are in China, I don't even know how I can take action against them for bogus trademark claims.
The only action I can think of is to take against Apple."},"title":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"partial","matchedWords":["trade"],"value":"Apple is threatening to take down my app because of a bogus trademark claim"}},"_tags":["story","author_alirsgp","story_27817238","ask_hn"],"author":"alirsgp","children":[27817270,27817385,27817719,27817785,27818975,27827251],"created_at":"2021-07-13T02:54:06Z","created_at_i":1626144846,"num_comments":15,"objectID":"27817238","points":16,"story_id":27817238,"story_text":"I own the app called 'Cuff' on the app store. Cuff is a popular 1 on 1 video chatting app, and it has many competitors. One of the competitors is a Chinese owned app called 'Monkey'.
They don't like how I rank for the search term 'Monkey', and demand a monopoly on the search results for the term.
I don't have the term in my keywords or anywhere in my app meta-data. But my app still ranks for the keyword. It ranks for a lot of keywords I don't have directly in my meta-data. I guess because of its overall popularity?
Anyways, they are saying I am infringing on their trademark, and I have no clue what action to take. Apple says they can remove my app if I don't act, but there's literally no action to take.
Do I have legal grounds here? I am thinking if Apple removes my app, I can take them to small claims court to try to make a case for reinstatement, since I am a one-man shop for the app.
It really sucks this is happening. I hate how some random Chinese shadow tech company can make Apple do their bidding in the US, so that American individuals/companies can't fight back. Since they are in China, I don't even know how I can take action against them for bogus trademark claims.
The only action I can think of is to take against Apple.","title":"Apple is threatening to take down my app because of a bogus trademark claim","updated_at":"2024-09-20T08:55:14Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"feross"},"story_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["act","trade"],"value":"A few months ago I built a network security tool with a few friends at a hackathon. We won 1st place and I put the code up on Github under some throwaway name that we came up with while hacking. We didn't bother to check if the name was used by anyone else, because it's just the name of my own personal Github repo, right?
A week later, the developer of an open source project with the same name asked me to remove or rename my repo. He doesn't have a registered trademark, but he's been using the same name for a few years so he claims a \"common law\" right to it, which seems legit. But, I can't believe that someone would care about the name of someone else's repo.
He messaged me and my friends several more times. We ignored him since we had no intention to turn the code into a real product.
But today, he had an attorney send us this:
\"...under the rights afforded to him under 1125(a) of the Lanham Act, Mr. ____ requests that you either rename or remove your project from Github, as well as any other places which use the trademark _____ to describe the project. Having another piece of open source software use this term creates unnecessary confusion in marketplace with Mr. _____'s prior use.\"
It's not like we can get sued for the name of our Github repo, can we?"},"title":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"partial","matchedWords":["trade"],"value":"Ask HN: Get sued for trademark infringement over Github repo name?"},"url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":""}},"_tags":["story","author_feross","story_3800456","ask_hn"],"author":"feross","children":[3800620,3800686,3800821,3801078],"created_at":"2012-04-04T23:31:54Z","created_at_i":1333582314,"num_comments":12,"objectID":"3800456","points":8,"story_id":3800456,"story_text":"A few months ago I built a network security tool with a few friends at a hackathon. We won 1st place and I put the code up on Github under some throwaway name that we came up with while hacking. We didn't bother to check if the name was used by anyone else, because it's just the name of my own personal Github repo, right?
A week later, the developer of an open source project with the same name asked me to remove or rename my repo. He doesn't have a registered trademark, but he's been using the same name for a few years so he claims a \"common law\" right to it, which seems legit. But, I can't believe that someone would care about the name of someone else's repo.
He messaged me and my friends several more times. We ignored him since we had no intention to turn the code into a real product.
But today, he had an attorney send us this:
\"...under the rights afforded to him under 1125(a) of the Lanham Act, Mr. ____ requests that you either rename or remove your project from Github, as well as any other places which use the trademark _____ to describe the project. Having another piece of open source software use this term creates unnecessary confusion in marketplace with Mr. _____'s prior use.\"
It's not like we can get sued for the name of our Github repo, can we?","title":"Ask HN: Get sued for trademark infringement over Github repo name?","updated_at":"2023-09-06T21:25:28Z","url":""},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"bengo"},"story_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"partial","matchedWords":["act"],"value":"I am a 19 year-old enigma.
Two years ago, at the end of high school, I appeared to most as a stereotypical, midwestern, suburban, teenage pupil. My GPA was well over 4.0, I was taking 5 AP courses, I'd just scored a 35 on my ACT and a 2240/1500 on the SAT. I was the founder of a robotics club and officer in several more. I was hardly nerdy. Perhaps geeky was a better word. My decent looks, charisma, and probably unwarranted confidence meant I got along with everyone, including the 'popular kids' and mentored a lot the younger 'not-so-popular' ones. Things were looking up. I applied to Harvard, MIT, Stanford, etc. Competition is tough these days, so I honestly wasn't surprised to not be accepted. I went to the nearby big state University.
Perhaps because of the drudgery of this environment, or (more likely) because of the hatred of arbitrariness and general behavioral oddities that I share with many hacker-types, I did not thrive academically in this environment. In short, I fucked up and dropped out.
In the third grade, I was the one setting up the school's computers. Freshman year of high school, a friend introduced me to Linux. With the previously mentioned robotics club, I was introduced to programming (Java, bleh). Like many others, I got caught up in the big Ruby on Rails growth around 2005ish. My first year of college, I worked as a sysadmin under some very skilled, if old-school, folks. I spent last Summer traveling the world and thinking hard. Eventually I took another job as a Django web developer. I went to PyCon this year and it was heavenly.
I have an engineer's brain, but a romantic poet's heart. I'm not religious in any way. In fact, I'm a devout rationalist. As such, it's sometimes hard for me to find motivation in anything other than learning cool stuff and, more commonly, making other people happy. Even in development or entrepreneurship, my kick comes almost exclusively from sitting down next to a user and just seeing the glint in his or her eye as I ask \"If you could have this site/process/system/experience be any way you wanted it to be, what would you do?\". Most people are so used to annoying, convoluted user experiences and it honestly fucking kills me. Anyway, that's how I operate.
I want to move to the bay area. Partly because I have good friends from my worldwide trip there. Partly because my older, more successful, managerial-type sister is soon moving there to get into VC. Mostly because there's no hope of anything other than a dead-end corporate sysadmin job where I'm from. I want to build awesome things that help people in ways they didn't even know they could be helped. I want to dump all my time into something just so the occasional person says, \"Oh man, you built blahblahblah. Dude. Thanks. Good job.\" and then make it a thousand times better.
I'm young, debtless, and, unlike the rest of my family, I have no real interest in material things. All I want is a safe place to live, the ability to buy groceries to cook awesome food with, and the occasional cool gadget or book. Friends and knowledge provide me with more happiness than a shopping spree ever could.
So my question is: Are there any startups or hopeful founders that would like to kick ass together in SF? I will pour everything I have into building something awesome that makes the lives of others even slightly better. I love the idea living in the same place as my teammates, always bouncing ideas off of each other, learning new things, and creating something great. If you or your startup can provide me with a room/couch or a fair enough wage that I can sleep, eat, and slowly save up a bit to go back to school, these are the technical skills I can contribute:\n* Linux/Windows/Mac proficiency and administration\n* Familiarity with C++, Ruby, Python, Java, PHP, HTML, CSS, Javascript (incl but not limited to jQuery)\n* Spent some time learning Actionscript (meh) and Objective-C (would like to do more with iOS if given opportunity)\n* Decent design eye and familiarity with Adobe CS\n* Most importantly, I know how to learn new things stupidly fast. I'm of at least average intelligence (see test scores above), and simply don't hit conceptual or mental barriers. I feel like this is pretty useful. If I'm not sufficiently good at something above now, I can be within a week or two.
I'm also great with nontechnical things. My writing skills shouldn't be lacking. My mother, a legal writing professor, made sure of that. Perhaps more than anything else, I'm good with people. I have a history in sales. I'm straightforward, honest, and a great listener (giving a damn about others helps). People respect me because I respect them. I take constructive criticism with enthusiasm, and dish it out with understanding and tact. Public speaking has never been a problem with me. I have a lot to say, and I know how to say it.
I think I can significantly help some young startup or group of people with high aspirations. I'm probably more qualified on paper to do technical things, but I'd like to help all over the place. I want to add features, talk to users, schmooz investors, and tell others how fucking awesome what I'm working on is, and I want to make sure it really is that excellent.
So. Does this sound appealing to anyone? Would anyone just like to tell me how crazy I am?
Go for it."},"title":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"partial","matchedWords":["trade"],"value":"Ask HN: Any SF startups care to trade housing for as much help as I can provide?"},"url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":""}},"_tags":["story","author_bengo","story_1415460","ask_hn"],"author":"bengo","children":[1415714,1416061],"created_at":"2010-06-08T22:35:01Z","created_at_i":1276036501,"num_comments":5,"objectID":"1415460","points":7,"story_id":1415460,"story_text":"I am a 19 year-old enigma.
Two years ago, at the end of high school, I appeared to most as a stereotypical, midwestern, suburban, teenage pupil. My GPA was well over 4.0, I was taking 5 AP courses, I'd just scored a 35 on my ACT and a 2240/1500 on the SAT. I was the founder of a robotics club and officer in several more. I was hardly nerdy. Perhaps geeky was a better word. My decent looks, charisma, and probably unwarranted confidence meant I got along with everyone, including the 'popular kids' and mentored a lot the younger 'not-so-popular' ones. Things were looking up. I applied to Harvard, MIT, Stanford, etc. Competition is tough these days, so I honestly wasn't surprised to not be accepted. I went to the nearby big state University.
Perhaps because of the drudgery of this environment, or (more likely) because of the hatred of arbitrariness and general behavioral oddities that I share with many hacker-types, I did not thrive academically in this environment. In short, I fucked up and dropped out.
In the third grade, I was the one setting up the school's computers. Freshman year of high school, a friend introduced me to Linux. With the previously mentioned robotics club, I was introduced to programming (Java, bleh). Like many others, I got caught up in the big Ruby on Rails growth around 2005ish. My first year of college, I worked as a sysadmin under some very skilled, if old-school, folks. I spent last Summer traveling the world and thinking hard. Eventually I took another job as a Django web developer. I went to PyCon this year and it was heavenly.
I have an engineer's brain, but a romantic poet's heart. I'm not religious in any way. In fact, I'm a devout rationalist. As such, it's sometimes hard for me to find motivation in anything other than learning cool stuff and, more commonly, making other people happy. Even in development or entrepreneurship, my kick comes almost exclusively from sitting down next to a user and just seeing the glint in his or her eye as I ask \"If you could have this site/process/system/experience be any way you wanted it to be, what would you do?\". Most people are so used to annoying, convoluted user experiences and it honestly fucking kills me. Anyway, that's how I operate.
I want to move to the bay area. Partly because I have good friends from my worldwide trip there. Partly because my older, more successful, managerial-type sister is soon moving there to get into VC. Mostly because there's no hope of anything other than a dead-end corporate sysadmin job where I'm from. I want to build awesome things that help people in ways they didn't even know they could be helped. I want to dump all my time into something just so the occasional person says, \"Oh man, you built blahblahblah. Dude. Thanks. Good job.\" and then make it a thousand times better.
I'm young, debtless, and, unlike the rest of my family, I have no real interest in material things. All I want is a safe place to live, the ability to buy groceries to cook awesome food with, and the occasional cool gadget or book. Friends and knowledge provide me with more happiness than a shopping spree ever could.
So my question is: Are there any startups or hopeful founders that would like to kick ass together in SF? I will pour everything I have into building something awesome that makes the lives of others even slightly better. I love the idea living in the same place as my teammates, always bouncing ideas off of each other, learning new things, and creating something great. If you or your startup can provide me with a room/couch or a fair enough wage that I can sleep, eat, and slowly save up a bit to go back to school, these are the technical skills I can contribute:\n* Linux/Windows/Mac proficiency and administration\n* Familiarity with C++, Ruby, Python, Java, PHP, HTML, CSS, Javascript (incl but not limited to jQuery)\n* Spent some time learning Actionscript (meh) and Objective-C (would like to do more with iOS if given opportunity)\n* Decent design eye and familiarity with Adobe CS\n* Most importantly, I know how to learn new things stupidly fast. I'm of at least average intelligence (see test scores above), and simply don't hit conceptual or mental barriers. I feel like this is pretty useful. If I'm not sufficiently good at something above now, I can be within a week or two.
I'm also great with nontechnical things. My writing skills shouldn't be lacking. My mother, a legal writing professor, made sure of that. Perhaps more than anything else, I'm good with people. I have a history in sales. I'm straightforward, honest, and a great listener (giving a damn about others helps). People respect me because I respect them. I take constructive criticism with enthusiasm, and dish it out with understanding and tact. Public speaking has never been a problem with me. I have a lot to say, and I know how to say it.
I think I can significantly help some young startup or group of people with high aspirations. I'm probably more qualified on paper to do technical things, but I'd like to help all over the place. I want to add features, talk to users, schmooz investors, and tell others how fucking awesome what I'm working on is, and I want to make sure it really is that excellent.
So. Does this sound appealing to anyone? Would anyone just like to tell me how crazy I am?
Go for it.","title":"Ask HN: Any SF startups care to trade housing for as much help as I can provide?","updated_at":"2023-09-06T19:35:29Z","url":""},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"howard941"},"title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Sanders Vows to Revive Criminal Prosecutions of CEOs for Unfair Trade Practices"},"url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"https://theintercept.com/2019/10/23/bernie-sanders-sherman-antitrust-act-monopolies/"}},"_tags":["story","author_howard941","story_21356102"],"author":"howard941","created_at":"2019-10-25T15:42:37Z","created_at_i":1572018157,"num_comments":0,"objectID":"21356102","points":3,"story_id":21356102,"title":"Sanders Vows to Revive Criminal Prosecutions of CEOs for Unfair Trade Practices","updated_at":"2024-09-20T05:09:38Z","url":"https://theintercept.com/2019/10/23/bernie-sanders-sherman-antitrust-act-monopolies/"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"av500"},"story_text":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":""},"title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Apple is being sued over \"Memory\" game trademark in Germany"},"url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.chip.de%2Fnews%2FMemory-Namensstreit-Ravensburger-verklagt-Apple_52873057.html&act=url"}},"_tags":["story","author_av500","story_3243234"],"author":"av500","created_at":"2011-11-16T14:40:39Z","created_at_i":1321454439,"num_comments":0,"objectID":"3243234","points":2,"story_id":3243234,"story_text":"","title":"Apple is being sued over \"Memory\" game trademark in Germany","updated_at":"2024-09-19T18:05:43Z","url":"http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.chip.de%2Fnews%2FMemory-Namensstreit-Ravensburger-verklagt-Apple_52873057.html&act=url"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"DocFeind"},"title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"At Least 182 Top Capitol Hill Staff Late Reporting Personal Stock Trades"},"url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"https://www.businessinsider.com/congress-staff-violated-stock-act-conflicts-of-interest-possible-2021-12"}},"_tags":["story","author_DocFeind","story_29540145"],"author":"DocFeind","created_at":"2021-12-13T15:00:26Z","created_at_i":1639407626,"num_comments":0,"objectID":"29540145","points":2,"story_id":29540145,"title":"At Least 182 Top Capitol Hill Staff Late Reporting Personal Stock Trades","updated_at":"2024-09-20T10:03:10Z","url":"https://www.businessinsider.com/congress-staff-violated-stock-act-conflicts-of-interest-possible-2021-12"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"radishroar"},"story_text":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Here's a letter being sent by Sen. Dianne Feinstein that tows the lobby-line on PROTECT IP.
With all the recent state-legislation (e.g. tax implication on associates and requirements on payment providers) California is trying it's best to make it harder and harder for tech companies to setup and thrive here. So what would she have said to YouTube in the beginning?
Dear XXX:
I received your letter expressing your opposition to the \"Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act,\" commonly known as the \"PROTECT IP Act.\" I appreciate knowing your views on this matter.
America's copyright industry is an important economic engine, and I believe copyright owners should be able to prevent their works from being illegally duplicated and stolen. The protection of intellectual property is particularly important to California's thriving film, music, and high-technology industries.
The \"PROTECT IP Act\" (S. 968) would give both copyright and trademark owners and the U.S. Department of Justice the authority to take action against websites that are \"dedicated to infringing activities.\" These are websites that have \"no significant use other than engaging in, enabling, or facilitating\" copyright infringement, the sale of goods with a counterfeit trademark, or the evasion of technological measures designed to protect against copying. The bill would not violate Internet users' First Amendment right to free speech because copyright piracy is not speech. On May 26, 2011, this legislation was reported favorably out of the Senate Judiciary Committee for consideration by the full Senate.
I understand that you oppose the \"PROTECT IP Act.\" While I supported reporting the bill to the full Senate, please know that, prior to the close of the 111th Congress, I worked with California high-technology businesses and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) to improve upon language from previous versions of the bill and to address the concerns of legitimate high-tech businesses, public interest groups, and others. However, I recognize that the bill needs further work to prevent it from imposing undue burdens on legitimate businesses and activities, and I will be working to make the improvements, either by working in cooperation with Chairman Leahy or by offering amendments on the floor of the Senate. Please know I will keep your concerns and thoughts in mind should the full Senate consider the \"PROTECT IP Act.\"
Once again, thank you for sharing your views. I hope you will continue to keep me informed on issues of importance to you. If you have any additional questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact my Washington, D.C. office at (202) 224-3841.
Sincerely yours,
Dianne Feinstein\n United States SenatorWith all the recent state-legislation (e.g. tax implication on associates and requirements on payment providers) California is trying it's best to make it harder and harder for tech companies to setup and thrive here. So what would she have said to YouTube in the beginning?
Dear XXX:
I received your letter expressing your opposition to the \"Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act,\" commonly known as the \"PROTECT IP Act.\" I appreciate knowing your views on this matter.
America's copyright industry is an important economic engine, and I believe copyright owners should be able to prevent their works from being illegally duplicated and stolen. The protection of intellectual property is particularly important to California's thriving film, music, and high-technology industries.
The \"PROTECT IP Act\" (S. 968) would give both copyright and trademark owners and the U.S. Department of Justice the authority to take action against websites that are \"dedicated to infringing activities.\" These are websites that have \"no significant use other than engaging in, enabling, or facilitating\" copyright infringement, the sale of goods with a counterfeit trademark, or the evasion of technological measures designed to protect against copying. The bill would not violate Internet users' First Amendment right to free speech because copyright piracy is not speech. On May 26, 2011, this legislation was reported favorably out of the Senate Judiciary Committee for consideration by the full Senate.
I understand that you oppose the \"PROTECT IP Act.\" While I supported reporting the bill to the full Senate, please know that, prior to the close of the 111th Congress, I worked with California high-technology businesses and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) to improve upon language from previous versions of the bill and to address the concerns of legitimate high-tech businesses, public interest groups, and others. However, I recognize that the bill needs further work to prevent it from imposing undue burdens on legitimate businesses and activities, and I will be working to make the improvements, either by working in cooperation with Chairman Leahy or by offering amendments on the floor of the Senate. Please know I will keep your concerns and thoughts in mind should the full Senate consider the \"PROTECT IP Act.\"
Once again, thank you for sharing your views. I hope you will continue to keep me informed on issues of importance to you. If you have any additional questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact my Washington, D.C. office at (202) 224-3841.
Sincerely yours,
Dianne Feinstein\n United States SenatorHenry from Cactus here!
We previously released Cactus Needle, a 14MB agentic LLM for tool call, device use, and structured extraction for phones, wearables, smart homes, small robots and microcontrollers. We got really great feedback here, and have now incorporated the suggestions to release Needle 2.
The whole model is a single 14MB binary that runs a full session in 28MB of RAM; 45m parameters at 2bit compression. Needle hits 500 tokens/sec decode speed on a Raspberry Pi 5, sits between 400-1,500 tokens/sec on VR devices like Meta Quest 3S and Apple Vision Pro, and ranges 300-700 on sub-$200 phones such as the Samsung A-Series.
On the tool call and mobile device use benchmarks, Needle 2 trades wins with closest small models like LFM2.5 230M and Apple Foundation Model, at 5x to 70x smaller, both at f16 vs Needle 2 at 2bit. Needle is based on Simple Attention Networks from our paper (https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.18363).
Edge AI has lately meant Macs and PCs, but that is just 1.5 billion of over 21 billion connected IoT devices in the world today, and in emerging markets most phones ship under $200, no NPU, cheap GPUs. These include budget phones, Raspberry Pis, microcontrollers, wearables, small robots like Reachy Mini, and connected home devices.
A conventional transformer of Needle's width and depth spends 164 MFLOPs per token, and even one squeezed down to Needle's parameter count spends 87, Needle spends 70. Even on a high-end phone, an always-on assistant lives inside a power budget; every MFLOP is milliwatt-hours, and Needle spends 7x to 85x fewer of them per token than the smallest performant LLMs. More about the architecture in the link.
When we structure intelligence for consumer devices as functions with typed parameters, the only hard part is mapping a messy sentence onto them; which function, with which values. Our research found that when framed that way, the problem needs no world knowledge and no open-ended prose, which is why 45M parameters suffice.
Needle 2 expands to structured extraction where the schema can be passed in-place of tools and the model returns structured output. You can use Needle as a text-classification model with an enum field, as a summarization model by providing a schema that extracts key fields, everything but free-range decode.
Every product has its own tool vocabulary and fine-tuning needle helps it achieve frontier-level performance on custom tasks, so using the python package (https://github.com/cactus-compute/needle), Needle can be fine-tuned Needle on a Mac/PC in minutes to a few hours, with automated data-generation pipeline, just pass a couple samples.
Nonetheless, every response carries a learned confidence score based our Cactus Hybrid technique. If above your threshold, act, below it, escalate to the cloud or bigger model. Combining Needle 2 with a private DeepSeek-v4-Flash deployment works particularly well for enterprise-level tasks at barely any cost, we can help with this setup.
We have put a lot of thoughts into Needle 2 but might still be missing quite a lot, please use the playground in the provided link to test Needle and share your thoughts, always appreciated!"},"title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Show HN: Needle2: 14MB agentic LLM for phones, wearables, smart home and robots"},"url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"https://cactuscompute.com/needle"}},"_tags":["story","author_HenryNdubuaku","story_49246804","show_hn"],"author":"HenryNdubuaku","children":[49249620,49249736,49249933,49249984,49250026,49250052,49250157,49250264,49250276,49250291,49250294,49250406,49250437,49250447,49250546,49250768,49250779,49250969,49251177,49251458,49251459,49251539,49251741,49251773,49251894,49252062,49252514,49252637,49252823,49252845,49253132,49253298,49253716,49253792,49253903,49254081,49254231,49254460,49254464,49254887,49255027,49255891,49256002,49256849,49257122,49257357,49257433,49257944,49258129,49258479,49258609,49258858,49259314,49259533,49260980,49261130,49261288,49261681,49263674,49263820,49264280,49267802,49270789,49271852,49277470,49278567,49284531,49284535,49324335,49370518],"created_at":"2026-08-10T17:22:07Z","created_at_i":1786382527,"num_comments":185,"objectID":"49246804","points":537,"story_id":49246804,"story_text":"Hey HN,
Henry from Cactus here!
We previously released Cactus Needle, a 14MB agentic LLM for tool call, device use, and structured extraction for phones, wearables, smart homes, small robots and microcontrollers. We got really great feedback here, and have now incorporated the suggestions to release Needle 2.
The whole model is a single 14MB binary that runs a full session in 28MB of RAM; 45m parameters at 2bit compression. Needle hits 500 tokens/sec decode speed on a Raspberry Pi 5, sits between 400-1,500 tokens/sec on VR devices like Meta Quest 3S and Apple Vision Pro, and ranges 300-700 on sub-$200 phones such as the Samsung A-Series.
On the tool call and mobile device use benchmarks, Needle 2 trades wins with closest small models like LFM2.5 230M and Apple Foundation Model, at 5x to 70x smaller, both at f16 vs Needle 2 at 2bit. Needle is based on Simple Attention Networks from our paper (https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.18363).
Edge AI has lately meant Macs and PCs, but that is just 1.5 billion of over 21 billion connected IoT devices in the world today, and in emerging markets most phones ship under $200, no NPU, cheap GPUs. These include budget phones, Raspberry Pis, microcontrollers, wearables, small robots like Reachy Mini, and connected home devices.
A conventional transformer of Needle's width and depth spends 164 MFLOPs per token, and even one squeezed down to Needle's parameter count spends 87, Needle spends 70. Even on a high-end phone, an always-on assistant lives inside a power budget; every MFLOP is milliwatt-hours, and Needle spends 7x to 85x fewer of them per token than the smallest performant LLMs. More about the architecture in the link.
When we structure intelligence for consumer devices as functions with typed parameters, the only hard part is mapping a messy sentence onto them; which function, with which values. Our research found that when framed that way, the problem needs no world knowledge and no open-ended prose, which is why 45M parameters suffice.
Needle 2 expands to structured extraction where the schema can be passed in-place of tools and the model returns structured output. You can use Needle as a text-classification model with an enum field, as a summarization model by providing a schema that extracts key fields, everything but free-range decode.
Every product has its own tool vocabulary and fine-tuning needle helps it achieve frontier-level performance on custom tasks, so using the python package (https://github.com/cactus-compute/needle), Needle can be fine-tuned Needle on a Mac/PC in minutes to a few hours, with automated data-generation pipeline, just pass a couple samples.
Nonetheless, every response carries a learned confidence score based our Cactus Hybrid technique. If above your threshold, act, below it, escalate to the cloud or bigger model. Combining Needle 2 with a private DeepSeek-v4-Flash deployment works particularly well for enterprise-level tasks at barely any cost, we can help with this setup.
We have put a lot of thoughts into Needle 2 but might still be missing quite a lot, please use the playground in the provided link to test Needle and share your thoughts, always appreciated!","title":"Show HN: Needle2: 14MB agentic LLM for phones, wearables, smart home and robots","updated_at":"2026-09-02T09:59:43Z","url":"https://cactuscompute.com/needle"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"hekike"},"story_text":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Hi HN! I\u2019m Peter, the co-founder of OpenMeter (http://openmeter.io). We are building an open-source project to help engineers to meter and attribute AI and compute usage for billing and analytics use cases. Our GitHub is at https://github.com/openmeterio/openmeter, and there\u2019s a demo video here: https://www.loom.com/share/bc1cfa1b7ed94e65bd3a82f9f0334d04.
Why? Companies are increasingly adopting usage-based pricing models, requiring accurate metering. In addition, many SaaS products are expected to offer AI capabilities. To effectively cover costs and stay profitable, these companies must meter AI usage and attribute it to their customers.
When I worked at Stripe, my job was to price and attribute database usage to product teams. You can think about it like internal usage-based pricing to keep teams accountable and the business in the margins. This was when I realized that it\u2019s challenging to extract usage data from various cloud infrastructure components (execution time, bytes stored, query complexity, backup size, etc.), meter it accurately, and handle failure scenarios like backfills and meter resets. I was frustrated that no standard exists to meter cloud infrastructure, and we had to do this on our own.
Usage metering requires accurately processing large volumes of events in real-time to power billing use cases and modern data-intensive applications. Imagine you want to meter and bill workload execution on a per-second granularity or meter the number of API calls you make to a third party and act instantly on events like a user hitting a billing threshold. The real-time aspect requires instant aggregations and queries; scalability means to able to ingest and process millions of usage events per second; it must be accurate\u2014billing requires precise metering; and it must be fault tolerant, with built-in idempotency, event backfills, and meter resets.
This is challenging to build out, and the obvious approaches don\u2019t work well: writing to a database for each usage event is expensive; monitoring systems are cheaper but inaccurate and lack idempotency (distributed systems use at-least-once delivery); batch processing in the data warehouse has unacceptable latency.
Companies also need to extract usage data from cloud infrastructure (Kubernetes, AWS, etc.), vendors (OpenAI, Twilio, etc.), and hardware components to attribute metered usage to their customers. Collecting usage in many cases requires writing custom code like measuring execution duration, listening to lifecycle events, scraping APIs periodically, parsing log streams, and attributing usage of shared and multi-tenant resources.
OpenMeter leverages stream processing to be able to update meters in real-time while processing large volumes of events simultaneously. The core is written in Go and uses the CloudEvents format to describe usage, Kafka to ingest events, and ksqlDB to dedupe and aggregate meters. We are also working on a Postgres sink for long-term storage. Check out our GitHub to learn more: https://github.com/openmeterio/openmeter
Other companies in the usage-based billing space are focused on payments and basically want to be Stripe replacements. With OpenMeter, we\u2019re focusing instead on the engineering challenge of collecting usage data from cloud infrastructure and balancing tradeoffs between cost, scale, accuracy, and staleness. We\u2019re not trying to be a payment platform\u2014rather, we want to empower engineers to provide fresh and accurate usage data to Product, Sales, and Finance, helping them with billing, analytics, and revenue use cases.
We\u2019re building OpenMeter as an open-source project (Apache 2.0), with the goal of making it the standard to collect and share usage across many solutions and providers. In the future, we\u2019ll offer a hosted / cloud version of OpenMeter with high availability guarantees and easy integrations to payment, CRM, and analytics solutions.
What usage metering issues or experiences do you have? We would love to hear your feedback on OpenMeter and to learn from which sources you need to extract usage and how the metered data is leveraged. Looking forward to your comments!"},"title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Launch HN: OpenMeter (YC W23) \u2013 Real-Time, Open Source Usage Metering"}},"_tags":["story","author_hekike","story_36431004","launch_hn"],"author":"hekike","children":[36431979,36432218,36432528,36432662,36433060,36435394,36435725,36436176,36436624,36436867,36438537,36439670,36442287,36442853,36442893,36443118,36445199],"created_at":"2023-06-22T12:19:44Z","created_at_i":1687436384,"num_comments":42,"objectID":"36431004","points":174,"story_id":36431004,"story_text":"Hi HN! I\u2019m Peter, the co-founder of OpenMeter (http://openmeter.io). We are building an open-source project to help engineers to meter and attribute AI and compute usage for billing and analytics use cases. Our GitHub is at https://github.com/openmeterio/openmeter, and there\u2019s a demo video here: https://www.loom.com/share/bc1cfa1b7ed94e65bd3a82f9f0334d04.
Why? Companies are increasingly adopting usage-based pricing models, requiring accurate metering. In addition, many SaaS products are expected to offer AI capabilities. To effectively cover costs and stay profitable, these companies must meter AI usage and attribute it to their customers.
When I worked at Stripe, my job was to price and attribute database usage to product teams. You can think about it like internal usage-based pricing to keep teams accountable and the business in the margins. This was when I realized that it\u2019s challenging to extract usage data from various cloud infrastructure components (execution time, bytes stored, query complexity, backup size, etc.), meter it accurately, and handle failure scenarios like backfills and meter resets. I was frustrated that no standard exists to meter cloud infrastructure, and we had to do this on our own.
Usage metering requires accurately processing large volumes of events in real-time to power billing use cases and modern data-intensive applications. Imagine you want to meter and bill workload execution on a per-second granularity or meter the number of API calls you make to a third party and act instantly on events like a user hitting a billing threshold. The real-time aspect requires instant aggregations and queries; scalability means to able to ingest and process millions of usage events per second; it must be accurate\u2014billing requires precise metering; and it must be fault tolerant, with built-in idempotency, event backfills, and meter resets.
This is challenging to build out, and the obvious approaches don\u2019t work well: writing to a database for each usage event is expensive; monitoring systems are cheaper but inaccurate and lack idempotency (distributed systems use at-least-once delivery); batch processing in the data warehouse has unacceptable latency.
Companies also need to extract usage data from cloud infrastructure (Kubernetes, AWS, etc.), vendors (OpenAI, Twilio, etc.), and hardware components to attribute metered usage to their customers. Collecting usage in many cases requires writing custom code like measuring execution duration, listening to lifecycle events, scraping APIs periodically, parsing log streams, and attributing usage of shared and multi-tenant resources.
OpenMeter leverages stream processing to be able to update meters in real-time while processing large volumes of events simultaneously. The core is written in Go and uses the CloudEvents format to describe usage, Kafka to ingest events, and ksqlDB to dedupe and aggregate meters. We are also working on a Postgres sink for long-term storage. Check out our GitHub to learn more: https://github.com/openmeterio/openmeter
Other companies in the usage-based billing space are focused on payments and basically want to be Stripe replacements. With OpenMeter, we\u2019re focusing instead on the engineering challenge of collecting usage data from cloud infrastructure and balancing tradeoffs between cost, scale, accuracy, and staleness. We\u2019re not trying to be a payment platform\u2014rather, we want to empower engineers to provide fresh and accurate usage data to Product, Sales, and Finance, helping them with billing, analytics, and revenue use cases.
We\u2019re building OpenMeter as an open-source project (Apache 2.0), with the goal of making it the standard to collect and share usage across many solutions and providers. In the future, we\u2019ll offer a hosted / cloud version of OpenMeter with high availability guarantees and easy integrations to payment, CRM, and analytics solutions.
What usage metering issues or experiences do you have? We would love to hear your feedback on OpenMeter and to learn from which sources you need to extract usage and how the metered data is leveraged. Looking forward to your comments!","title":"Launch HN: OpenMeter (YC W23) \u2013 Real-Time, Open Source Usage Metering","updated_at":"2024-09-20T14:24:40Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"fuelingcurious"},"story_text":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Hi HN,\nI\u2019m a chemical engineer and I manage logistics at a refinery down in Texas. Whenever I try to explain downstream operations to people outside the industry (including my kids), I usually get blank stares. I wanted to build something that visualizes the concepts and chemistry of a plant without completely dumbing down the science, so I put together this 5-minute browser game.
Here's a simple runthrough: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=is-moBz6upU. I pushed to get through a full product pathway to show the V-804 replay.
I am not a software developer by trade, so I relied heavily on LLMs (Claude, Copilot, Gemini) to help write the code. What started as a simple concept turned into a 9,000-line single-page app built with vanilla HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. I used Matter.js for the 2D physics minigames.
A few technical takeaways from building this as a non-dev:\n * Managing the LLM workflow: Once the script.js file got large, letting the models output full file rewrites was a disaster (truncations, hallucinations, invisible curly-quote replacements that broke the JS). I started forcing them to act like patch files, strictly outputting "Find this exact block" and "Replace with this exact block." This was the only way to maintain improvements without breaking existing logic.
* Mapping physics to CSS: I wanted the minigames to visually sit inside circular CSS containers (border-radius: 50%). Matter.js doesn't natively care about your CSS. Getting the rigid body physics to respect a dynamic, responsive DOM boundary across different screen sizes required running an elliptical boundary equation (dx * dx) / (rx * rx) + (dy * dy) / (ry * ry) > 1 on every single frame. Maybe this was overkill to try to handle the resizing between phones and PCs.
* Mobile browser events: Forcing iOS Safari to ignore its default behaviors (double-tap zoom, swipe-to-scroll) while still allowing the user to tap and drag Matter.js objects required a ridiculous amount of custom event listener management and CSS (touch-action: manipulation; user-select: none;). I also learned that these actions very easily kill the mouse scroll making it very frustrating for PC users. I am hoping I hit a good middle ground.
* State management: Since I didn't use React or any frameworks, I had to rely on a global state object. Because the game jumps between different phases/minigames, I ran into massive memory leaks from old setInterval loops and Matter.js bodies stacking up. I had to build strict teardown functions to wipe the slate clean on every map transition.
The game walks through electrostatic desalting, fractional distillation, hydrotreating, catalytic cracking, and gasoline blending (hitting specific Octane and RVP specs).
It\u2019s completely free, runs client-side, and has zero ads or sign-ups. I'd appreciate any feedback on the mechanics, or let me know if you manage to break the physics engine. Happy to answer any questions about the chemical engineering side of things as well.
For some reason the URL box is not getting recognized, maybe someone can help me feel less dumb there too. \nhttps://fuelingcuriosity.com/game"},"title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Show HN: I built a refinery simulator game to explain job to my kids"},"url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"https://fuelingcuriosity.com/game.html"}},"_tags":["story","author_fuelingcurious","story_47338091","show_hn"],"author":"fuelingcurious","children":[47338159,47338322,47338409,47338464,47338499,47338677,47339387,47339608,47340057,47340139,47340450,47340593,47340814,47340844,47341584,47343616,47343662,47344570,47346621,47390656,47450363],"created_at":"2026-03-11T16:56:51Z","created_at_i":1773248211,"num_comments":55,"objectID":"47338091","points":127,"story_id":47338091,"story_text":"Hi HN,\nI\u2019m a chemical engineer and I manage logistics at a refinery down in Texas. Whenever I try to explain downstream operations to people outside the industry (including my kids), I usually get blank stares. I wanted to build something that visualizes the concepts and chemistry of a plant without completely dumbing down the science, so I put together this 5-minute browser game.
Here's a simple runthrough: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=is-moBz6upU. I pushed to get through a full product pathway to show the V-804 replay.
I am not a software developer by trade, so I relied heavily on LLMs (Claude, Copilot, Gemini) to help write the code. What started as a simple concept turned into a 9,000-line single-page app built with vanilla HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. I used Matter.js for the 2D physics minigames.
A few technical takeaways from building this as a non-dev:\n * Managing the LLM workflow: Once the script.js file got large, letting the models output full file rewrites was a disaster (truncations, hallucinations, invisible curly-quote replacements that broke the JS). I started forcing them to act like patch files, strictly outputting "Find this exact block" and "Replace with this exact block." This was the only way to maintain improvements without breaking existing logic.
* Mapping physics to CSS: I wanted the minigames to visually sit inside circular CSS containers (border-radius: 50%). Matter.js doesn't natively care about your CSS. Getting the rigid body physics to respect a dynamic, responsive DOM boundary across different screen sizes required running an elliptical boundary equation (dx * dx) / (rx * rx) + (dy * dy) / (ry * ry) > 1 on every single frame. Maybe this was overkill to try to handle the resizing between phones and PCs.
* Mobile browser events: Forcing iOS Safari to ignore its default behaviors (double-tap zoom, swipe-to-scroll) while still allowing the user to tap and drag Matter.js objects required a ridiculous amount of custom event listener management and CSS (touch-action: manipulation; user-select: none;). I also learned that these actions very easily kill the mouse scroll making it very frustrating for PC users. I am hoping I hit a good middle ground.
* State management: Since I didn't use React or any frameworks, I had to rely on a global state object. Because the game jumps between different phases/minigames, I ran into massive memory leaks from old setInterval loops and Matter.js bodies stacking up. I had to build strict teardown functions to wipe the slate clean on every map transition.
The game walks through electrostatic desalting, fractional distillation, hydrotreating, catalytic cracking, and gasoline blending (hitting specific Octane and RVP specs).
It\u2019s completely free, runs client-side, and has zero ads or sign-ups. I'd appreciate any feedback on the mechanics, or let me know if you manage to break the physics engine. Happy to answer any questions about the chemical engineering side of things as well.
For some reason the URL box is not getting recognized, maybe someone can help me feel less dumb there too. \nhttps://fuelingcuriosity.com/game","title":"Show HN: I built a refinery simulator game to explain job to my kids","updated_at":"2026-04-16T16:22:48Z","url":"https://fuelingcuriosity.com/game.html"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"EGreg"},"story_text":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"I\u2019ve been meaning to write this up because it\u2019s been surprisingly repeatable, and I wish someone had described it to me earlier.
Over the last year or so, my development speed relative to my own baseline from ~2019 is easily 20x, sometimes more. Not because I type faster, or because I cut corners, but because I changed how I use AI.
The short version: I don\u2019t use AI inside my editor. I use two AIs in parallel, in the browser, with full context.
Here\u2019s the setup.
I keep two tabs open:
One AI that acts as a \u201cbuilder\u201d. It gets a lot of context and does the heavy lifting.
One AI that acts as a reviewer. It only sees diffs and tries to find mistakes.
That\u2019s it. No plugins, no special tooling. Just browser tabs and a terminal.
The important part is context. Instead of asking for snippets, I paste entire files or modules and explain the goal. I ask the AI to explain the approach first, including tradeoffs, before it writes code. That forces me to stay in control of architecture instead of accepting a blob I don\u2019t understand.
A typical flow looks like this:
1. Paste several related files (often across languages).
2. Describe the change I want and ask for an explanation of options. Read and summarize concepts, wikipedia, etc.
3. Pick an approach. Have extensive conversations about trade-offs, concepts, adversarial security etc. Find ways to do things that the OS allows.
4. Let the AI implement it across all files.
5. Copy the diff into the second AI and ask it to look for regressions, missing arguments, or subtle breakage.
6. Fix whatever it finds.
Ship.
The second AI catches a lot of things I would otherwise miss when moving fast. Things like \u201cyou changed this call signature but didn\u2019t update one caller\u201d or \u201cthis default value subtly changed behavior\u201d.
What surprised me is how much faster cross-stack work gets. Stuff that used to stall because it crossed boundaries (Swift \u2192 Obj-C \u2192 JS, or backend \u2192 frontend) becomes straightforward because the AI can reason across all of it at once.
I\u2019m intentionally strict about \u201csurgical edits\u201d. I don\u2019t let the AI rewrite files unless that\u2019s explicitly the task. I ask for exact lines to add or change. That keeps diffs small and reviewable.
This is very different from autocomplete-style tools. Those are great for local edits, but they still keep you as the integrator across files. This approach flips that: you stay the architect and reviewer, the AI does the integration work, and a second AI sanity-checks it.
Costs me about $40/month total. The real cost is discipline: always providing context, always reviewing diffs, and never pasting code you don\u2019t understand.
I\u2019m sharing this because it\u2019s been a genuine step-change for me, not a gimmick. Happy to answer questions about limits, failure modes, or where this breaks down.
Here is a wiki-type overview I put together for our developers on our team:\nhttps://community.intercoin.app/t/ai-assisted-development-playbook-how-we-ship-faster-without-breaking-things/2950"},"title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Tell HN: I write and ship code ~20\u201350x faster than I did 5 years ago"}},"_tags":["story","author_EGreg","story_46436872","ask_hn"],"author":"EGreg","children":[46437251,46510694,46512890,46512936,46512943,46512961,46512977,46513014,46513027,46513076,46513086,46513118,46513167,46513235,46514203,46514952,46516726,46516828,46516941,46516952,46516973,46517057,46517169,46517228,46517366,46517388,46517411,46517759,46518283,46519668,46520116,46521136,46521235,46572851],"created_at":"2025-12-30T19:19:55Z","created_at_i":1767122395,"num_comments":103,"objectID":"46436872","points":64,"story_id":46436872,"story_text":"I\u2019ve been meaning to write this up because it\u2019s been surprisingly repeatable, and I wish someone had described it to me earlier.
Over the last year or so, my development speed relative to my own baseline from ~2019 is easily 20x, sometimes more. Not because I type faster, or because I cut corners, but because I changed how I use AI.
The short version: I don\u2019t use AI inside my editor. I use two AIs in parallel, in the browser, with full context.
Here\u2019s the setup.
I keep two tabs open:
One AI that acts as a \u201cbuilder\u201d. It gets a lot of context and does the heavy lifting.
One AI that acts as a reviewer. It only sees diffs and tries to find mistakes.
That\u2019s it. No plugins, no special tooling. Just browser tabs and a terminal.
The important part is context. Instead of asking for snippets, I paste entire files or modules and explain the goal. I ask the AI to explain the approach first, including tradeoffs, before it writes code. That forces me to stay in control of architecture instead of accepting a blob I don\u2019t understand.
A typical flow looks like this:
1. Paste several related files (often across languages).
2. Describe the change I want and ask for an explanation of options. Read and summarize concepts, wikipedia, etc.
3. Pick an approach. Have extensive conversations about trade-offs, concepts, adversarial security etc. Find ways to do things that the OS allows.
4. Let the AI implement it across all files.
5. Copy the diff into the second AI and ask it to look for regressions, missing arguments, or subtle breakage.
6. Fix whatever it finds.
Ship.
The second AI catches a lot of things I would otherwise miss when moving fast. Things like \u201cyou changed this call signature but didn\u2019t update one caller\u201d or \u201cthis default value subtly changed behavior\u201d.
What surprised me is how much faster cross-stack work gets. Stuff that used to stall because it crossed boundaries (Swift \u2192 Obj-C \u2192 JS, or backend \u2192 frontend) becomes straightforward because the AI can reason across all of it at once.
I\u2019m intentionally strict about \u201csurgical edits\u201d. I don\u2019t let the AI rewrite files unless that\u2019s explicitly the task. I ask for exact lines to add or change. That keeps diffs small and reviewable.
This is very different from autocomplete-style tools. Those are great for local edits, but they still keep you as the integrator across files. This approach flips that: you stay the architect and reviewer, the AI does the integration work, and a second AI sanity-checks it.
Costs me about $40/month total. The real cost is discipline: always providing context, always reviewing diffs, and never pasting code you don\u2019t understand.
I\u2019m sharing this because it\u2019s been a genuine step-change for me, not a gimmick. Happy to answer questions about limits, failure modes, or where this breaks down.
Here is a wiki-type overview I put together for our developers on our team:\nhttps://community.intercoin.app/t/ai-assisted-development-playbook-how-we-ship-faster-without-breaking-things/2950","title":"Tell HN: I write and ship code ~20\u201350x faster than I did 5 years ago","updated_at":"2026-05-26T01:27:22Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"arcb"},"story_text":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Hi HN! We\u2019re Connor and Ambar, and we\u2019re working on BitBoard (https://bitboard.work). We build AI agents that handle repetitive administrative tasks in healthcare clinics like filling out intake forms, prepping charts, or managing referrals.
We were early employees at Forward, which provided primary care across the US. To scale this, we relied on thousands of remote contractors to do repetitive administrative work like reconciling patient records, and scheduling follow-ups based on care plans. It was a huge bottleneck\u2014expensive, error-prone, and always pulling attention away from clinical care. Our software solutions were always too brittle, never managing to handle the variance of clinical data we oversaw.
AI, when applied well, is capable of performing a lot of the tasks we manually did. So we decided to take another crack at the problem by building today what we would have liked to have back then, and to help clinics use it.
Clinics send us their SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures\u2014for example, \u201cprep a patient chart from these records before a visit\u201d), and we turn them into AI agents that do the work. These agents act like remote contractors: they log into EHRs, navigate internal tools, and do the work in the background. Unlike classical RPA, we build in verification and deterministic checks, so customers can confirm it was done right. \nUnlike low-code tools, there\u2019s nothing new to learn. Customers don\u2019t have to touch a UI or maintain logic. They just hand us the task, and we do it. Clinicians don\u2019t want more screens! They erode attention and cause weird bottlenecks in operations because someone has to drive them. Our product is built to address this.
Here\u2019s a demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_tQ0fYo85g. We\u2019re not self-serve yet, but we deploy with customers in days after onboarding them. We\u2019re working on speeding that up.
One of our early customers is a fast-growing obesity medicine group. Their MAs were spending 15 to 20 minutes per patient just entering intake form data into the EHR. That one task was taking up 30% of their MA time. We took it over in a week. It\u2019s now fully automated, and they\u2019ve cleared the backlog and sped up visits.
A few technical problems are specifically relevant to building healthcare agents:
- Unreliable interfaces: many EHRs and clinic tools don\u2019t follow modern web standards, making automation brittle. We\u2019ve forked browser-use to solve some of these challenges. We\u2019re working on analogous infrastructure to let agents operate on desktops and across a wide range of APIs.
- Verification: in healthcare, tasks need to be provably correct. We embed deterministic checks into each workflow so agents can confirm the task was completed as expected and the output is accurate.
- Workflow generation: clinic SOPs are written in natural language and vary widely, yet still describe the actual process that works for clinics.
We charge per task, based on complexity. We\u2019re HIPAA compliant, audit-logged, and operate in a zero-retention environment unless auditing requires otherwise.
A meaningful part is building trust in a high-stakes environment like healthcare. Part of that is making the product reliable. But another educational part is learning how to introduce a new concept like \u201cagents\u201d to clinics. We\u2019re working on the right ways to describe them, to onboard them, to measure them. Endearingly, one of our customers\u2019 agents is named \u201cRobert Ott\u201d, and they refer to him by name in their weekly updates like he\u2019s a member of the team :) We\u2019re learning a lot and have a long way to go.
We\u2019d love to meet other folks who 1. work in medical groups or health systems and want to offload repetitive work, and 2. are building in this space and want to trade notes. We\u2019re happy to share everything we\u2019ve learned so far.
And this is a big space, with a lot of learnings from personal stories, from clinicians, technologists, administrators, and more. What do you make of it? We\u2019d love to hear from you."},"title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Launch HN: BitBoard (YC P25) \u2013 AI agents for healthcare back-offices"}},"_tags":["story","author_arcb","story_44237769","launch_hn"],"author":"arcb","children":[44237991,44238634,44239573,44239604,44239681,44243982,44244711,44244861,44244995,44249854],"created_at":"2025-06-10T15:09:30Z","created_at_i":1749568170,"num_comments":29,"objectID":"44237769","points":63,"story_id":44237769,"story_text":"Hi HN! We\u2019re Connor and Ambar, and we\u2019re working on BitBoard (https://bitboard.work). We build AI agents that handle repetitive administrative tasks in healthcare clinics like filling out intake forms, prepping charts, or managing referrals.
We were early employees at Forward, which provided primary care across the US. To scale this, we relied on thousands of remote contractors to do repetitive administrative work like reconciling patient records, and scheduling follow-ups based on care plans. It was a huge bottleneck\u2014expensive, error-prone, and always pulling attention away from clinical care. Our software solutions were always too brittle, never managing to handle the variance of clinical data we oversaw.
AI, when applied well, is capable of performing a lot of the tasks we manually did. So we decided to take another crack at the problem by building today what we would have liked to have back then, and to help clinics use it.
Clinics send us their SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures\u2014for example, \u201cprep a patient chart from these records before a visit\u201d), and we turn them into AI agents that do the work. These agents act like remote contractors: they log into EHRs, navigate internal tools, and do the work in the background. Unlike classical RPA, we build in verification and deterministic checks, so customers can confirm it was done right. \nUnlike low-code tools, there\u2019s nothing new to learn. Customers don\u2019t have to touch a UI or maintain logic. They just hand us the task, and we do it. Clinicians don\u2019t want more screens! They erode attention and cause weird bottlenecks in operations because someone has to drive them. Our product is built to address this.
Here\u2019s a demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_tQ0fYo85g. We\u2019re not self-serve yet, but we deploy with customers in days after onboarding them. We\u2019re working on speeding that up.
One of our early customers is a fast-growing obesity medicine group. Their MAs were spending 15 to 20 minutes per patient just entering intake form data into the EHR. That one task was taking up 30% of their MA time. We took it over in a week. It\u2019s now fully automated, and they\u2019ve cleared the backlog and sped up visits.
A few technical problems are specifically relevant to building healthcare agents:
- Unreliable interfaces: many EHRs and clinic tools don\u2019t follow modern web standards, making automation brittle. We\u2019ve forked browser-use to solve some of these challenges. We\u2019re working on analogous infrastructure to let agents operate on desktops and across a wide range of APIs.
- Verification: in healthcare, tasks need to be provably correct. We embed deterministic checks into each workflow so agents can confirm the task was completed as expected and the output is accurate.
- Workflow generation: clinic SOPs are written in natural language and vary widely, yet still describe the actual process that works for clinics.
We charge per task, based on complexity. We\u2019re HIPAA compliant, audit-logged, and operate in a zero-retention environment unless auditing requires otherwise.
A meaningful part is building trust in a high-stakes environment like healthcare. Part of that is making the product reliable. But another educational part is learning how to introduce a new concept like \u201cagents\u201d to clinics. We\u2019re working on the right ways to describe them, to onboard them, to measure them. Endearingly, one of our customers\u2019 agents is named \u201cRobert Ott\u201d, and they refer to him by name in their weekly updates like he\u2019s a member of the team :) We\u2019re learning a lot and have a long way to go.
We\u2019d love to meet other folks who 1. work in medical groups or health systems and want to offload repetitive work, and 2. are building in this space and want to trade notes. We\u2019re happy to share everything we\u2019ve learned so far.
And this is a big space, with a lot of learnings from personal stories, from clinicians, technologists, administrators, and more. What do you make of it? We\u2019d love to hear from you.","title":"Launch HN: BitBoard (YC P25) \u2013 AI agents for healthcare back-offices","updated_at":"2026-08-27T22:01:00Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"clouded"},"story_text":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"First post here. It's 2 AM and can't sleep. I'm 40 and the majority of my experience has been in Java. Spring, Spring Boot, Hibernate, what you'd expect. I'm pretty much at the top of my game (which I know is specifically Java, but bare with me).
We all know technology constantly changes and progresses, and I've always thought that's fine, I'll be happy to learn whatever replaces Java because it will be better, right? I've seen Go coming along, Kotlin too. But I've been hit like a brick in the face to realize where we're headed. AWS. The cloud. I'll get to the point. I hate it. I've seen it happen personally at two companies now. The transition to the cloud. Where we throw away everything we've spent years learning to reinvent the wheel. We throw away relational databases for MongoDB. I love SQL. I'm good at it. But no one cares. MongoDB is "in" now. I'm good at Java. Years of experience and I finally feel good in my abilities and speed with the frameworks, ORM's, best practices, etc. We're just throwing it out like it's nothing. For AWS products. Lambdas written in Typescript (why Typescript, I don't know, the same reason I don't know why MongoDB). Files of YAML configuration, and Kubernetes and a lot of other things I don't care about, just to create the same CRUD apps we've always been creating.
I've been buying power tools and learning how to use them. I've started taping and patching drywall. I've cut down trees. I want tools that won't change every 5 years. I want tools that I can master and will be relevant in 50 years. Maybe I'm too old to be a carpenter, or tradesman. I just need some advice. The worst thing is, developers are embracing this AWS trend and seem to love it. No one seems to mind. Software engineers are cursed. Just when we've established a best practice and it's a solved problem, we throw it out and reinvent a new way to do it.
Please let me know if I'm not alone, or if it's just me and I need to adapt or get out of the way. I will predict this though: AWS is a mistake. It's not fun. It's not "software engineering" and it won't be here in 10, 15, 20 years. All your mastery of Kubernetes will be for nothing. It will be tossed aside like trash. And the worst part is when that day comes everyone will act like it was never that great all along. They'll also embrace the next trend like it's the greatest thing ever. Because software engineers are cursed."},"title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Need some advice, feeling depressed about the direction of our industry"}},"_tags":["story","author_clouded","story_31820677","ask_hn"],"author":"clouded","children":[31820934,31820936,31820993,31821060,31821065,31821072,31821082,31821091,31821101,31821111,31821127,31821128,31821132,31821144,31821192,31821211,31821213,31821225,31821228,31821229,31821239,31821251,31821259,31821266,31821281,31821289,31821307,31821313,31821314,31821321,31821360,31821365,31821366,31821381,31821386,31821425,31821427,31821436,31821460,31821477,31821491,31821558,31821562,31821622,31821697,31821838,31821888,31822307,31822452,31823309,31825455,31826149,31826735,31828566,31829213,31832344],"created_at":"2022-06-21T06:40:31Z","created_at_i":1655793631,"num_comments":131,"objectID":"31820677","points":61,"story_id":31820677,"story_text":"First post here. It's 2 AM and can't sleep. I'm 40 and the majority of my experience has been in Java. Spring, Spring Boot, Hibernate, what you'd expect. I'm pretty much at the top of my game (which I know is specifically Java, but bare with me).
We all know technology constantly changes and progresses, and I've always thought that's fine, I'll be happy to learn whatever replaces Java because it will be better, right? I've seen Go coming along, Kotlin too. But I've been hit like a brick in the face to realize where we're headed. AWS. The cloud. I'll get to the point. I hate it. I've seen it happen personally at two companies now. The transition to the cloud. Where we throw away everything we've spent years learning to reinvent the wheel. We throw away relational databases for MongoDB. I love SQL. I'm good at it. But no one cares. MongoDB is "in" now. I'm good at Java. Years of experience and I finally feel good in my abilities and speed with the frameworks, ORM's, best practices, etc. We're just throwing it out like it's nothing. For AWS products. Lambdas written in Typescript (why Typescript, I don't know, the same reason I don't know why MongoDB). Files of YAML configuration, and Kubernetes and a lot of other things I don't care about, just to create the same CRUD apps we've always been creating.
I've been buying power tools and learning how to use them. I've started taping and patching drywall. I've cut down trees. I want tools that won't change every 5 years. I want tools that I can master and will be relevant in 50 years. Maybe I'm too old to be a carpenter, or tradesman. I just need some advice. The worst thing is, developers are embracing this AWS trend and seem to love it. No one seems to mind. Software engineers are cursed. Just when we've established a best practice and it's a solved problem, we throw it out and reinvent a new way to do it.
Please let me know if I'm not alone, or if it's just me and I need to adapt or get out of the way. I will predict this though: AWS is a mistake. It's not fun. It's not "software engineering" and it won't be here in 10, 15, 20 years. All your mastery of Kubernetes will be for nothing. It will be tossed aside like trash. And the worst part is when that day comes everyone will act like it was never that great all along. They'll also embrace the next trend like it's the greatest thing ever. Because software engineers are cursed.","title":"Need some advice, feeling depressed about the direction of our industry","updated_at":"2025-10-06T20:51:16Z"}],"hitsPerPage":50,"nbHits":256,"nbPages":6,"page":0,"params":"query=Act+Trade&tags=story&hitsPerPage=50&advancedSyntax=true&analyticsTags=backend","processingTimeMS":8,"processingTimingsMS":{"_request":{"roundTrip":26},"afterFetch":{"format":{"highlighting":4,"total":5},"merge":{"mergeLoop":{"prepareNextHit":1,"total":1},"total":1},"total":1},"fetch":{"query":3,"scanning":2,"total":6},"total":8},"query":"Act Trade","serverTimeMS":14}