My computers were connected to an UPS surge projector. Various kitchen machinery and extension sockets that was not doesn't work anymore. The neighbor's TV blew.
There was a bright white flash inside of my living room, just under an open window and directly above the my UPS surge protector and then all my devices turned off including the surge projector. The PSU in one of the computers is gone, but not the motherboard and rest.
I was sitting on the concrete floor in the middle of the room watching it happen.
I live in Thailand in the middle of a big flat coconut groove with only two houses. Except for the palm trees, my house is the tallest structure in a 200 x 200 meters (300 feet)+ area and we have frequent huge thunder storms, but this one was in a category on its own. It made my concrete walls tremble. It was so intense. Spectacular show by nature.
Only two months ago, I bought a socket outlet tester. It reported that my sockets was not grounded. I got an electricians out to fix that. I suspect this is the reason why the lightning chooses me. We have frequent big thunderstorms and haven't had this issue before, but now there is a ground connection.
I don't know if there is a proper grounding rod. There is a cable going from the house into the ground, but I don't know what it is attached too. The rest of the electric installation is amateur's business so could be connected to nothing. The house is a long-term rental and the electric installation came with it, but I can change it regardless of it's is a rental.
The electricity doesn't even come directly from the power company's cables. It goes in to the owners house, where the meter is. From there they have pulled a 200 meter cable into ours. There is a fuse box in my house.
Any suggestions on what to do next? A big metal stick somewhere in the garden?"},"title":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"partial","matchedWords":["compute"],"value":"Ask HN: My house just got hit by lightning and it fried the PSU in my computer"}},"_tags":["story","author_TowerTall","story_31270349","ask_hn"],"author":"TowerTall","children":[31270509,31270564,31270586,31270601,31270615,31270632,31270633,31270638,31270653,31270679,31270685,31270691,31270694,31270754,31270864,31270987,31271156,31271402,31271552,31271990,31272071,31274070,31274338,31279488,31280930],"created_at":"2022-05-05T06:47:29Z","created_at_i":1651733249,"num_comments":79,"objectID":"31270349","points":74,"story_id":31270349,"story_text":"If everything is wired correctly in my house, should all equipment attached to my UPS have survived this with no impact or is a direct lightning strike so powerful that even high-quality home-grade UPS must give up?
My computers were connected to an UPS surge projector. Various kitchen machinery and extension sockets that was not doesn't work anymore. The neighbor's TV blew.
There was a bright white flash inside of my living room, just under an open window and directly above the my UPS surge protector and then all my devices turned off including the surge projector. The PSU in one of the computers is gone, but not the motherboard and rest.
I was sitting on the concrete floor in the middle of the room watching it happen.
I live in Thailand in the middle of a big flat coconut groove with only two houses. Except for the palm trees, my house is the tallest structure in a 200 x 200 meters (300 feet)+ area and we have frequent huge thunder storms, but this one was in a category on its own. It made my concrete walls tremble. It was so intense. Spectacular show by nature.
Only two months ago, I bought a socket outlet tester. It reported that my sockets was not grounded. I got an electricians out to fix that. I suspect this is the reason why the lightning chooses me. We have frequent big thunderstorms and haven't had this issue before, but now there is a ground connection.
I don't know if there is a proper grounding rod. There is a cable going from the house into the ground, but I don't know what it is attached too. The rest of the electric installation is amateur's business so could be connected to nothing. The house is a long-term rental and the electric installation came with it, but I can change it regardless of it's is a rental.
The electricity doesn't even come directly from the power company's cables. It goes in to the owners house, where the meter is. From there they have pulled a 200 meter cable into ours. There is a fuse box in my house.
Any suggestions on what to do next? A big metal stick somewhere in the garden?","title":"Ask HN: My house just got hit by lightning and it fried the PSU in my computer","updated_at":"2024-09-20T11:06:31Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"kylequest"},"story_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["thunder","compute"],"value":"123456\npassword\nphpbb\nqwerty\n12345\njesus\n12345678\n1234\nabc123\nletmein\ntest\nlove\n123\npassword1\nhello\nmonkey\ndragon\ntrustno1\n111111\niloveyou\n1234567\nshadow\n123456789\nchrist\nsunshine\nmaster\ncomputer\nprincess\ntigger\nfootball\nangel\njesus1\n123123\nwhatever\nfreedom\nkiller\nasdf\nsoccer\nsuperman\nmichael\ncheese\ninternet\njoshua\nfuckyou\nblessed\nbaseball\nstarwars\n000000\npurple\njordan\nfaith\nsummer\nashley\nbuster\nheaven\npepper\n7777777\nhunter\nlovely\nandrew\nthomas\nangels\ncharlie\ndaniel\n1111\njennifer\nsingle\nhannah\nqazwsx\nhappy\nmatrix\npass\naaaaaa\n654321\namanda\nnothing\nginger\nmother\nsnoopy\njessica\nwelcome\npokemon\niloveyou1\n11111\nmustang\nhelpme\njustin\njasmine\norange\ntesting\napple\nmichelle\npeace\nsecret\n1\ngrace\nwilliam\niloveyou2\nnicole\n666666\nmuffin\ngateway\nfuckyou1\nasshole\nhahaha\npoop\nblessing\nblahblah\nmyspace1\nmatthew\ncanada\nsilver\nrobert\nforever\nasdfgh\nrachel\nrainbow\nguitar\npeanut\nbatman\ncookie\nbailey\nsoccer1\nmickey\nbiteme\nhello1\neminem\ndakota\nsamantha\ncompaq\ndiamond\ntaylor\nforum\njohn316\nrichard\nblink182\npeaches\ncool\nflower\nscooter\nbanana\njames\nasdfasdf\nvictory\nlondon\n123qwe\n123321\nstartrek\ngeorge\nwinner\nmaggie\ntrinity\nonline\n123abc\nchicken\njunior\nchris\npassw0rd\naustin\nsparky\nadmin\nmerlin\ngoogle\nfriends\nhope\nshalom\nnintendo\nlooking\nharley\nsmokey\n7777\njoseph\nlucky\ndigital\na\nthunder\nspirit\nbandit\nenter\nanthony\ncorvette\nhockey\npower\nbenjamin\niloveyou!\n1q2w3e\nviper\ngenesis\nknight\nqwerty1\ncreative\nfoobar\nadidas\nrotimi\nslayer\nwisdom\npraise\nzxcvbnm\nsamuel\nmike\ndallas\ngreen\ntesttest\nmaverick\nonelove\ndavid\nmylove\nchurch\nfriend\ngod\ndestiny\nnone\nmicrosoft\n222222\nbubbles\n11111111\ncocacola\njordan23\nilovegod\nfootball1\nloving\nnathan\nemmanuel\nscooby\nfuckoff\nsammy\nmaxwell\njason\njohn\n1q2w3e4r\nbaby\nred123\nblabla\nprince\nqwert\nchelsea\n55555\nangel1\nhardcore\ndexter\nsaved\n112233\nhallo\njasper\ndanielle\nkitten\ncassie\nstella\nprayer\nhotdog\nwindows\nmustdie\ngates\nbillgates\nghbdtn\ngfhjkm\n1234567890"},"title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Pony password stealer own password list"},"url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":""}},"_tags":["story","author_kylequest","story_6857010","ask_hn"],"author":"kylequest","created_at":"2013-12-05T20:32:27Z","created_at_i":1386275547,"num_comments":0,"objectID":"6857010","points":2,"story_id":6857010,"story_text":"123456\npassword\nphpbb\nqwerty\n12345\njesus\n12345678\n1234\nabc123\nletmein\ntest\nlove\n123\npassword1\nhello\nmonkey\ndragon\ntrustno1\n111111\niloveyou\n1234567\nshadow\n123456789\nchrist\nsunshine\nmaster\ncomputer\nprincess\ntigger\nfootball\nangel\njesus1\n123123\nwhatever\nfreedom\nkiller\nasdf\nsoccer\nsuperman\nmichael\ncheese\ninternet\njoshua\nfuckyou\nblessed\nbaseball\nstarwars\n000000\npurple\njordan\nfaith\nsummer\nashley\nbuster\nheaven\npepper\n7777777\nhunter\nlovely\nandrew\nthomas\nangels\ncharlie\ndaniel\n1111\njennifer\nsingle\nhannah\nqazwsx\nhappy\nmatrix\npass\naaaaaa\n654321\namanda\nnothing\nginger\nmother\nsnoopy\njessica\nwelcome\npokemon\niloveyou1\n11111\nmustang\nhelpme\njustin\njasmine\norange\ntesting\napple\nmichelle\npeace\nsecret\n1\ngrace\nwilliam\niloveyou2\nnicole\n666666\nmuffin\ngateway\nfuckyou1\nasshole\nhahaha\npoop\nblessing\nblahblah\nmyspace1\nmatthew\ncanada\nsilver\nrobert\nforever\nasdfgh\nrachel\nrainbow\nguitar\npeanut\nbatman\ncookie\nbailey\nsoccer1\nmickey\nbiteme\nhello1\neminem\ndakota\nsamantha\ncompaq\ndiamond\ntaylor\nforum\njohn316\nrichard\nblink182\npeaches\ncool\nflower\nscooter\nbanana\njames\nasdfasdf\nvictory\nlondon\n123qwe\n123321\nstartrek\ngeorge\nwinner\nmaggie\ntrinity\nonline\n123abc\nchicken\njunior\nchris\npassw0rd\naustin\nsparky\nadmin\nmerlin\ngoogle\nfriends\nhope\nshalom\nnintendo\nlooking\nharley\nsmokey\n7777\njoseph\nlucky\ndigital\na\nthunder\nspirit\nbandit\nenter\nanthony\ncorvette\nhockey\npower\nbenjamin\niloveyou!\n1q2w3e\nviper\ngenesis\nknight\nqwerty1\ncreative\nfoobar\nadidas\nrotimi\nslayer\nwisdom\npraise\nzxcvbnm\nsamuel\nmike\ndallas\ngreen\ntesttest\nmaverick\nonelove\ndavid\nmylove\nchurch\nfriend\ngod\ndestiny\nnone\nmicrosoft\n222222\nbubbles\n11111111\ncocacola\njordan23\nilovegod\nfootball1\nloving\nnathan\nemmanuel\nscooby\nfuckoff\nsammy\nmaxwell\njason\njohn\n1q2w3e4r\nbaby\nred123\nblabla\nprince\nqwert\nchelsea\n55555\nangel1\nhardcore\ndexter\nsaved\n112233\nhallo\njasper\ndanielle\nkitten\ncassie\nstella\nprayer\nhotdog\nwindows\nmustdie\ngates\nbillgates\nghbdtn\ngfhjkm\n1234567890","title":"Pony password stealer own password list","updated_at":"2024-09-19T20:14:13Z","url":""},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"pritambarhate"},"story_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["thunder","compute"],"value":"Hi,
While reading the BlackBlaze Compute Story I came across, Packet's ARM Offering. (https://www.packet.net/bare-metal/servers/compute/)
Their c1.large.arm offers ARM Cavium ThunderX with 96 Physical Cores running at 2.0 Ghz.
Has anybody used such a configuration for Web Application Servers? Possibly something running Go?
Since many web applications need high concurrency and wait on DB queries, I think having these large number of cores might be beneficial.
Any thoughts and inputs on this will be well appreciated."},"title":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"partial","matchedWords":["thunder"],"value":"Ask HN: ARM Cavium ThunderX (96 Physical Cores) for Web Application Servers?"}},"_tags":["story","author_pritambarhate","story_16752184","ask_hn"],"author":"pritambarhate","children":[16752453],"created_at":"2018-04-04T05:22:53Z","created_at_i":1522819373,"num_comments":1,"objectID":"16752184","points":2,"story_id":16752184,"story_text":"Hi,
While reading the BlackBlaze Compute Story I came across, Packet's ARM Offering. (https://www.packet.net/bare-metal/servers/compute/)
Their c1.large.arm offers ARM Cavium ThunderX with 96 Physical Cores running at 2.0 Ghz.
Has anybody used such a configuration for Web Application Servers? Possibly something running Go?
Since many web applications need high concurrency and wait on DB queries, I think having these large number of cores might be beneficial.
Any thoughts and inputs on this will be well appreciated.","title":"Ask HN: ARM Cavium ThunderX (96 Physical Cores) for Web Application Servers?","updated_at":"2024-09-20T02:15:22Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"flatroze"},"title":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"partial","matchedWords":["compute"],"value":"ARM Desktop Tower Computer"},"url":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"partial","matchedWords":["thunder"],"value":"https://www.avantek.co.uk/store/avantek-32-core-cavium-thunderx-arm-desktop.html"}},"_tags":["story","author_flatroze","story_16069989"],"author":"flatroze","created_at":"2018-01-04T13:00:01Z","created_at_i":1515070801,"num_comments":0,"objectID":"16069989","points":2,"story_id":16069989,"title":"ARM Desktop Tower Computer","updated_at":"2024-09-20T01:54:49Z","url":"https://www.avantek.co.uk/store/avantek-32-core-cavium-thunderx-arm-desktop.html"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"timthorn"},"title":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["thunder","compute"],"value":"ThunderX2 Arms Hyperscale and HPC Compute"},"url":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["thunder","compute"],"value":"https://www.nextplatform.com/2018/05/07/thunderx2-arms-hyperscale-and-hpc-compute/"}},"_tags":["story","author_timthorn","story_17020265"],"author":"timthorn","created_at":"2018-05-08T11:45:20Z","created_at_i":1525779920,"num_comments":0,"objectID":"17020265","points":2,"story_id":17020265,"title":"ThunderX2 Arms Hyperscale and HPC Compute","updated_at":"2024-09-20T02:22:45Z","url":"https://www.nextplatform.com/2018/05/07/thunderx2-arms-hyperscale-and-hpc-compute/"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"hcrisp"},"title":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"partial","matchedWords":["thunder"],"value":"Apple Plans Thinner, Foldable iPhones to Revive Growth"},"url":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"partial","matchedWords":["compute"],"value":"https://www.wsj.com/tech/apple-thin-iphone-foldable-computer-plans-dbb4286c"}},"_tags":["story","author_hcrisp","story_42423508"],"author":"hcrisp","children":[42423556,42424350,42424835,42438823],"created_at":"2024-12-15T14:19:20Z","created_at_i":1734272360,"num_comments":3,"objectID":"42423508","points":4,"story_id":42423508,"title":"Apple Plans Thinner, Foldable iPhones to Revive Growth","updated_at":"2024-12-19T06:39:43Z","url":"https://www.wsj.com/tech/apple-thin-iphone-foldable-computer-plans-dbb4286c"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"partial","matchedWords":["thunder"],"value":"ill_thinker"},"story_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"partial","matchedWords":["compute"],"value":"Today I was told by my manager that my arguments come across jumbled and incoherent.
This is not news to me. Since a young age I've found it incredibly difficult to reason about and form an argument for or against a topic. I first encountered this in my high school design and technology exam when I was asked to articulate why I would choose a particular material over another. No matter how much I tried, I simply could not reason about the different materials and which one would be better.
12 years on and I now have a PhD in computer science. I find software development extremely straightforward and the accompanying decision making easy. But during design discussions before development takes place, I still find it very difficult to present a reasoned argument as to why I'd design a piece of software one way over another. I mostly rely on an internal feeling that either provides positive or negative emotions (intuition). Project level decisions are also affected by this.
The absence of reasoned argument is not due to a lack of trying. When I attempt to reason about a problem I struggle to think of the questions I should be asking. Thoughts about a topic do not come naturally, and often they are very cyclic and disjointed. It is only through writing down my thoughts that my argument gains clarity. You can imagine how problematic this thought process is for active oral discussions, my discourse appears sporadic and poorly thought-out.
Is there anything I can do to improve my reasoning skills so I can participate coherently in oral discussions?"},"title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Ask HN: How do I get better at creating well-reasoned arguments?"}},"_tags":["story","author_ill_thinker","story_24703551","ask_hn"],"author":"ill_thinker","children":[24703695,24703703,24705516,24709341,24710104,24710920,24712980,24713235,24714340,24728782],"created_at":"2020-10-06T23:14:28Z","created_at_i":1602026068,"num_comments":9,"objectID":"24703551","points":16,"story_id":24703551,"story_text":"Today I was told by my manager that my arguments come across jumbled and incoherent.
This is not news to me. Since a young age I've found it incredibly difficult to reason about and form an argument for or against a topic. I first encountered this in my high school design and technology exam when I was asked to articulate why I would choose a particular material over another. No matter how much I tried, I simply could not reason about the different materials and which one would be better.
12 years on and I now have a PhD in computer science. I find software development extremely straightforward and the accompanying decision making easy. But during design discussions before development takes place, I still find it very difficult to present a reasoned argument as to why I'd design a piece of software one way over another. I mostly rely on an internal feeling that either provides positive or negative emotions (intuition). Project level decisions are also affected by this.
The absence of reasoned argument is not due to a lack of trying. When I attempt to reason about a problem I struggle to think of the questions I should be asking. Thoughts about a topic do not come naturally, and often they are very cyclic and disjointed. It is only through writing down my thoughts that my argument gains clarity. You can imagine how problematic this thought process is for active oral discussions, my discourse appears sporadic and poorly thought-out.
Is there anything I can do to improve my reasoning skills so I can participate coherently in oral discussions?","title":"Ask HN: How do I get better at creating well-reasoned arguments?","updated_at":"2025-10-06T21:07:41Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"krrishd"},"story_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["thunder","compute"],"value":"I have a friend, who has an uncanny talent for anything mathematical. He can write formulas and functions to solve the most obscure math problems, and he has the mind of an algorithmic thinker that I and probably many wish they had. Think project Euler, he's really good at those types of problems.
He doesn't actually know any code, but I feel like he would be able to accomplish so many things with it. I've talked to him about it, and he's really interested, but he doesn't know where to start. Due to financial issues, he occasionally does not have Internet, but he does have a decent and functional computer to work with. What books/tutorials/resources should I give him so that he can put his mathematical and problem-solving talent to good use?"},"title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Ask HN:Friend is math/algorithmic genius, wants to learn programming. Resources?"},"url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":""}},"_tags":["story","author_krrishd","story_6854663","ask_hn"],"author":"krrishd","children":[6854848,6856927,6856941],"created_at":"2013-12-05T15:00:25Z","created_at_i":1386255625,"num_comments":4,"objectID":"6854663","points":8,"story_id":6854663,"story_text":"I have a friend, who has an uncanny talent for anything mathematical. He can write formulas and functions to solve the most obscure math problems, and he has the mind of an algorithmic thinker that I and probably many wish they had. Think project Euler, he's really good at those types of problems.
He doesn't actually know any code, but I feel like he would be able to accomplish so many things with it. I've talked to him about it, and he's really interested, but he doesn't know where to start. Due to financial issues, he occasionally does not have Internet, but he does have a decent and functional computer to work with. What books/tutorials/resources should I give him so that he can put his mathematical and problem-solving talent to good use?","title":"Ask HN:Friend is math/algorithmic genius, wants to learn programming. Resources?","updated_at":"2024-09-19T20:13:55Z","url":""},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"palish"},"story_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["thunder","compute"],"value":"This was a post on Reddit that grew into a little essay. What do you think of it? I'm trying to find the correct answers, so if something is incorrect then please rub it in my face. :)
--
The second system effect is when a designer isn't new on the job anymore (he's made at least one system) and he has an overconfidence in his abilities. Because of that, the second system he designs is usually an overcomplicated mess. There are exceptions. Woz may not have designed an overcomplicated second system, for example. And if you understand how little you understand when you're first starting out, you're more likely to build small, stable systems instead of large, brittle systems. But history has pretty much proven that inexperience + overconfidence = mess, regardless of your profession.
The first system usually goes well because you're careful. You want your first system to go well since you will be judged by it. You keep your opinions to yourself and use proven methods that you fully understand to design your system. After you've designed this beautiful little gem (or not-so-beautiful but working, so the creator may think it is beautiful), you're left with a feeling of accomplishment. In fact, that first system wasn't really hard at all! You read the requirements and delivered a system that did exactly that. But look at how little that first system accomplished. In fact, it was even rigid; it did exactly what was needed without an eye towards extensibility. You know you can do better.
But.. It seems to take a lot of experience to correctly design a large, extensible system. I really hate to say the e-word since (being 19) I hate the idea that there's this magical quality, experience, that you'll only get after a certain amount of time has passed, regardless of anything you do to try to accelerate the process. But it seems true. It seems like to be good designers, we need to immerse ourselves in as many projects as possible; understand that we know very little; and most importantly, get things delivered, even if they are only at the 80% mark.
The Mythical Man Month is a good read. Honestly, it's extremely.. well.. boring. The advice was penned for a very different time, so a lot of it doesn't apply today (a programmer needs a personal secretary? That would be nice, but probably not required). But if you read it through the shades of, \"Wow, he is a really creative thinker!\" then you'll enjoy it a lot. He talks about why the best designers have usually created at least two systems. The first gives them experience, and the second gives them humility.
Choose two: beautiful, meets all requirements, stable.
\"Beautiful, and meets all requirements\" is the second system effect. It's okay to choose this if you're designing a small system.
\"Meets all requirements, and stable\" seems to be how most systems are designed. These types of systems are the moneymakers, so if you're doing a startup, it's probably best to choose this option. As Trevor says, it's more like a model train set instead of an elegant mathematical proof. There can be bumps on the tracks, but they won't stop the train from going 'round. Windows is a good example of this. You might think, \"Windows? Stable? What an idiot.\" But look at its size. It's humongous. It's impressive how much it has accomplished, even if it's far from perfect.
\"Beautiful, and stable\" seems to be the best choice to strive for, once you have the experience. It'll turn out that some of the features you desperately need aren't so critical after all. The Apple II is a great example of this. When it was released, everyone else thought that you needed to sell a monitor with a computer, and that a TV was inadequate. By cutting the need to design a whole monitor, Woz was able to produce something much cheaper and fabulously stable. Also, choosing \"beautiful and stable\" results in a system that \"is beautiful, is stable, and meets all requirements\", since you've just trimmed half of your requirements.
From my very limited two years of experience, this seems to be a decent design process for complicated systems:
1. Accept that you don't know as much as you need to know. Look for battle-tested components that other people have already designed, and use those. Copying is not cheating in the world of design. (Give credit where credit is due, though. If you created all your components, fabulous. That's incredibly impressive. But don't claim to have designed everything even if you've made them all work together.)
2. Cut as much from the requirements as possible, and even a little bit beyond what's comfortable. Think to yourself, \"How can I avoid designing a new monitor?\"
3. Focus on simplicity. Keep the adage \"form follows function\" in mind. If the implementation is small and simple, it will be far more stable than a big, extensible system that does a lot more. And people will probably like the smaller system better anyway.
4. These are only guidelines. Just focus on doing what makes the most sense, regardless of any rules. (For C++ programmers, this includes rules against using Boost or STL because \"it's not fast enough\". Take the time to learn your containers, then choose to not use them once you understand them.)
5. Deliver a system when it's 80% complete. (That's 80% complete, not 20% buggy.) Software is powerful because it can be improved later. Draw a sketch, don't paint a painting. The result can always be transformed into a painting later.
What do you think? It's always great to find new things that help designers, so please share your wisdom on all of this."},"title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"How to Design a System"},"url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":""}},"_tags":["story","author_palish","story_74725","ask_hn"],"author":"palish","children":[74732,74809,74868,76781],"created_at":"2007-10-31T17:27:45Z","created_at_i":1193851665,"num_comments":5,"objectID":"74725","points":5,"story_id":74725,"story_text":"This was a post on Reddit that grew into a little essay. What do you think of it? I'm trying to find the correct answers, so if something is incorrect then please rub it in my face. :)
--
The second system effect is when a designer isn't new on the job anymore (he's made at least one system) and he has an overconfidence in his abilities. Because of that, the second system he designs is usually an overcomplicated mess. There are exceptions. Woz may not have designed an overcomplicated second system, for example. And if you understand how little you understand when you're first starting out, you're more likely to build small, stable systems instead of large, brittle systems. But history has pretty much proven that inexperience + overconfidence = mess, regardless of your profession.
The first system usually goes well because you're careful. You want your first system to go well since you will be judged by it. You keep your opinions to yourself and use proven methods that you fully understand to design your system. After you've designed this beautiful little gem (or not-so-beautiful but working, so the creator may think it is beautiful), you're left with a feeling of accomplishment. In fact, that first system wasn't really hard at all! You read the requirements and delivered a system that did exactly that. But look at how little that first system accomplished. In fact, it was even rigid; it did exactly what was needed without an eye towards extensibility. You know you can do better.
But.. It seems to take a lot of experience to correctly design a large, extensible system. I really hate to say the e-word since (being 19) I hate the idea that there's this magical quality, experience, that you'll only get after a certain amount of time has passed, regardless of anything you do to try to accelerate the process. But it seems true. It seems like to be good designers, we need to immerse ourselves in as many projects as possible; understand that we know very little; and most importantly, get things delivered, even if they are only at the 80% mark.
The Mythical Man Month is a good read. Honestly, it's extremely.. well.. boring. The advice was penned for a very different time, so a lot of it doesn't apply today (a programmer needs a personal secretary? That would be nice, but probably not required). But if you read it through the shades of, \"Wow, he is a really creative thinker!\" then you'll enjoy it a lot. He talks about why the best designers have usually created at least two systems. The first gives them experience, and the second gives them humility.
Choose two: beautiful, meets all requirements, stable.
\"Beautiful, and meets all requirements\" is the second system effect. It's okay to choose this if you're designing a small system.
\"Meets all requirements, and stable\" seems to be how most systems are designed. These types of systems are the moneymakers, so if you're doing a startup, it's probably best to choose this option. As Trevor says, it's more like a model train set instead of an elegant mathematical proof. There can be bumps on the tracks, but they won't stop the train from going 'round. Windows is a good example of this. You might think, \"Windows? Stable? What an idiot.\" But look at its size. It's humongous. It's impressive how much it has accomplished, even if it's far from perfect.
\"Beautiful, and stable\" seems to be the best choice to strive for, once you have the experience. It'll turn out that some of the features you desperately need aren't so critical after all. The Apple II is a great example of this. When it was released, everyone else thought that you needed to sell a monitor with a computer, and that a TV was inadequate. By cutting the need to design a whole monitor, Woz was able to produce something much cheaper and fabulously stable. Also, choosing \"beautiful and stable\" results in a system that \"is beautiful, is stable, and meets all requirements\", since you've just trimmed half of your requirements.
From my very limited two years of experience, this seems to be a decent design process for complicated systems:
1. Accept that you don't know as much as you need to know. Look for battle-tested components that other people have already designed, and use those. Copying is not cheating in the world of design. (Give credit where credit is due, though. If you created all your components, fabulous. That's incredibly impressive. But don't claim to have designed everything even if you've made them all work together.)
2. Cut as much from the requirements as possible, and even a little bit beyond what's comfortable. Think to yourself, \"How can I avoid designing a new monitor?\"
3. Focus on simplicity. Keep the adage \"form follows function\" in mind. If the implementation is small and simple, it will be far more stable than a big, extensible system that does a lot more. And people will probably like the smaller system better anyway.
4. These are only guidelines. Just focus on doing what makes the most sense, regardless of any rules. (For C++ programmers, this includes rules against using Boost or STL because \"it's not fast enough\". Take the time to learn your containers, then choose to not use them once you understand them.)
5. Deliver a system when it's 80% complete. (That's 80% complete, not 20% buggy.) Software is powerful because it can be improved later. Draw a sketch, don't paint a painting. The result can always be transformed into a painting later.
What do you think? It's always great to find new things that help designers, so please share your wisdom on all of this.","title":"How to Design a System","updated_at":"2024-09-19T16:23:24Z","url":""},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"fullyHighlighted":true,"matchLevel":"partial","matchedWords":["thunder"],"value":"twunde"},"story_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"partial","matchedWords":["compute"],"value":"I left my last job because of burnout but now after 2 years here I'm picking up the same bad habits, checking email and doing extra work on weekends. I know one of the triggers was getting a work laptop, which I now use as my primary computer. How do you keep a balance between life and work?"},"title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"How do you keep a good work/life balance"}},"_tags":["story","author_twunde","story_11604325","ask_hn"],"author":"twunde","children":[11605423,11606238,11613692,11684464],"created_at":"2016-05-01T00:32:09Z","created_at_i":1462062729,"num_comments":4,"objectID":"11604325","points":3,"story_id":11604325,"story_text":"I left my last job because of burnout but now after 2 years here I'm picking up the same bad habits, checking email and doing extra work on weekends. I know one of the triggers was getting a work laptop, which I now use as my primary computer. How do you keep a balance between life and work?","title":"How do you keep a good work/life balance","updated_at":"2024-09-19T23:06:03Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"brian68"},"story_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["thunder","compute"],"value":"As a person with vision problems I sometimes struggle with certain documents that are difficult to read (my computer fonts are usually bold with sizes ~14). I needed to read some RFCs and discovered that the PDF versions use a font smaller and "thinner" (Courier 10?) than what I'm used to. I tried some options to modify the original plain text documents and discovered that modifying their fonts was not as easy as I thought. Finally I created a utility to convert RFCs to PDF allowing the user to change fonts and margins and I wanted to share it. There is also a utility to "bulk convert" a folder with RFCs in plain text.I have converted RFCs to PDFs with two free monospaced fonts: Liberation Mono and Ubuntu Mono, check the releases. Hope you find it useful!."},"title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Show HN: Rfc2pdf"},"url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"https://github.com/OscarMaestre/rfc2pdf"}},"_tags":["story","author_brian68","story_34700470","show_hn"],"author":"brian68","children":[34704356],"created_at":"2023-02-07T22:06:31Z","created_at_i":1675807591,"num_comments":2,"objectID":"34700470","points":3,"story_id":34700470,"story_text":"As a person with vision problems I sometimes struggle with certain documents that are difficult to read (my computer fonts are usually bold with sizes ~14). I needed to read some RFCs and discovered that the PDF versions use a font smaller and "thinner" (Courier 10?) than what I'm used to. I tried some options to modify the original plain text documents and discovered that modifying their fonts was not as easy as I thought. Finally I created a utility to convert RFCs to PDF allowing the user to change fonts and margins and I wanted to share it. There is also a utility to "bulk convert" a folder with RFCs in plain text.I have converted RFCs to PDFs with two free monospaced fonts: Liberation Mono and Ubuntu Mono, check the releases. Hope you find it useful!.","title":"Show HN: Rfc2pdf","updated_at":"2024-09-20T13:09:25Z","url":"https://github.com/OscarMaestre/rfc2pdf"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"wwwlouishinofun"},"story_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["thunder","compute"],"value":"1.safari
Frankly, I only care if the new system is faster chrome, and Safari currently has only two advantages for me:
A. Live Text is really easy to use, I think Apple's server cost is high for this OCR feature, which is not supported by Chrome on Windows or macOS (pausing to copy video text on YouTube is very useful)
B. Compact layout and UI design really increase the vertical space, it can integrate tabs, address bar, and extension icons on a single bar, which is great, I use trackpad gestures to switch and close tabs, so it doesn't increase the difficulty of operation, which I have reported to Google many times but their UI design is slow to improve, for the screen of the first resolution, I believe that Chrome's UI will take up a huge space
In addition to this, there are too many disadvantages of Safari:
The speed of switching between multiple tabs is not comparable to chrome at all,Safari will drop frames when youtube videos are played at twice the speed of 4k,Insufficient extension,I'm a senior browser enthusiast,I still chose chrome for speed,Chrome's current problem is that two-finger zoom is not sensitive
2.iphone
I've long since stopped using an iPhone, so I don't care about the phone mirroring feature that I've experienced for a long time, in essence, the wireless network they use to transmit data is always not the ultimate smooth experience
I'm using a folding screen phone, believe me, a 220G, thinner than the iPhone folding machine is the ideal Internet terminal, watching the content is very comfortable, unless you like the phone to record videos, otherwise I can't think of a reason to continue using the iPhone in 2024
3.ai features and interactions
I'm very tired of making wheels repeatedly, I believe that Apple AI 10,000% is not as good as my GPT4 is a hundred times better, but Apple's advantage is that it can be linked to the hardware of the computer, which has the potential, but it is not enough for me to pay for it at present
4. So far, Apple has few advantages left
UI and other aesthetic design, I give this one full marks
The leader of the ARM chip PC, such as the MacBookM1, the peripheral power consumption is 5W (screen and the like), and the video SOC is only 1W, so that the power consumption of the whole machine is 7-8W, and the 49Wh battery can also play 7 hours of continuous video
Below is the original document, I am afraid that the machine translation is not accurate, I am currently also studying IELTS, but English is really difficult for me, I am now working in Viet Nam, I am very much looking forward to studying in English-speaking countries, no matter what, I expect Apple to continue to improve in software and hardware, do not squeeze toothpaste1.safari
Frankly, I only care if the new system is faster chrome, and Safari currently has only two advantages for me:
A. Live Text is really easy to use, I think Apple's server cost is high for this OCR feature, which is not supported by Chrome on Windows or macOS (pausing to copy video text on YouTube is very useful)
B. Compact layout and UI design really increase the vertical space, it can integrate tabs, address bar, and extension icons on a single bar, which is great, I use trackpad gestures to switch and close tabs, so it doesn't increase the difficulty of operation, which I have reported to Google many times but their UI design is slow to improve, for the screen of the first resolution, I believe that Chrome's UI will take up a huge space
In addition to this, there are too many disadvantages of Safari:
The speed of switching between multiple tabs is not comparable to chrome at all,Safari will drop frames when youtube videos are played at twice the speed of 4k,Insufficient extension,I'm a senior browser enthusiast,I still chose chrome for speed,Chrome's current problem is that two-finger zoom is not sensitive"},"title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Let's talk in great detail about whether macOS 15 Sequoia is worth upgrading"}},"_tags":["story","author_wwwlouishinofun","story_41564250","ask_hn"],"author":"wwwlouishinofun","children":[41564270,41564561,41564568,41566889],"created_at":"2024-09-17T04:53:10Z","created_at_i":1726548790,"num_comments":7,"objectID":"41564250","points":1,"story_id":41564250,"story_text":"1.safari
Frankly, I only care if the new system is faster chrome, and Safari currently has only two advantages for me:
A. Live Text is really easy to use, I think Apple's server cost is high for this OCR feature, which is not supported by Chrome on Windows or macOS (pausing to copy video text on YouTube is very useful)
B. Compact layout and UI design really increase the vertical space, it can integrate tabs, address bar, and extension icons on a single bar, which is great, I use trackpad gestures to switch and close tabs, so it doesn't increase the difficulty of operation, which I have reported to Google many times but their UI design is slow to improve, for the screen of the first resolution, I believe that Chrome's UI will take up a huge space
In addition to this, there are too many disadvantages of Safari:
The speed of switching between multiple tabs is not comparable to chrome at all,Safari will drop frames when youtube videos are played at twice the speed of 4k,Insufficient extension,I'm a senior browser enthusiast,I still chose chrome for speed,Chrome's current problem is that two-finger zoom is not sensitive
2.iphone
I've long since stopped using an iPhone, so I don't care about the phone mirroring feature that I've experienced for a long time, in essence, the wireless network they use to transmit data is always not the ultimate smooth experience
I'm using a folding screen phone, believe me, a 220G, thinner than the iPhone folding machine is the ideal Internet terminal, watching the content is very comfortable, unless you like the phone to record videos, otherwise I can't think of a reason to continue using the iPhone in 2024
3.ai features and interactions
I'm very tired of making wheels repeatedly, I believe that Apple AI 10,000% is not as good as my GPT4 is a hundred times better, but Apple's advantage is that it can be linked to the hardware of the computer, which has the potential, but it is not enough for me to pay for it at present
4. So far, Apple has few advantages left
UI and other aesthetic design, I give this one full marks
The leader of the ARM chip PC, such as the MacBookM1, the peripheral power consumption is 5W (screen and the like), and the video SOC is only 1W, so that the power consumption of the whole machine is 7-8W, and the 49Wh battery can also play 7 hours of continuous video
Below is the original document, I am afraid that the machine translation is not accurate, I am currently also studying IELTS, but English is really difficult for me, I am now working in Viet Nam, I am very much looking forward to studying in English-speaking countries, no matter what, I expect Apple to continue to improve in software and hardware, do not squeeze toothpaste1.safari
Frankly, I only care if the new system is faster chrome, and Safari currently has only two advantages for me:
A. Live Text is really easy to use, I think Apple's server cost is high for this OCR feature, which is not supported by Chrome on Windows or macOS (pausing to copy video text on YouTube is very useful)
B. Compact layout and UI design really increase the vertical space, it can integrate tabs, address bar, and extension icons on a single bar, which is great, I use trackpad gestures to switch and close tabs, so it doesn't increase the difficulty of operation, which I have reported to Google many times but their UI design is slow to improve, for the screen of the first resolution, I believe that Chrome's UI will take up a huge space
In addition to this, there are too many disadvantages of Safari:
The speed of switching between multiple tabs is not comparable to chrome at all,Safari will drop frames when youtube videos are played at twice the speed of 4k,Insufficient extension,I'm a senior browser enthusiast,I still chose chrome for speed,Chrome's current problem is that two-finger zoom is not sensitive","title":"Let's talk in great detail about whether macOS 15 Sequoia is worth upgrading","updated_at":"2024-09-20T17:50:56Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"weakgeekinseek"},"story_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["thunder","compute"],"value":"i am an entrepreneurial sharp business mind in search of a technologically savvy counterpart. i have many ideas including a previous sold at in excess of $200 million. i am a thinker with a knack for financial gains but very limited to my software development knowledge. i am looking for a computer wiz to help develop my ideas and form partnerships for all possible ventures possible with your skills. my email is 150mikkimase@gmail.com and my cell is 6467097799. please contact me, Mikki, at any time suitable for you. i look forward to your inquiries and am excited to move forward with my new partner(s)."},"title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Entrepreneur searching for developer counterpart"},"url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":""}},"_tags":["story","author_weakgeekinseek","story_9620290","ask_hn"],"author":"weakgeekinseek","created_at":"2015-05-28T18:54:42Z","created_at_i":1432839282,"num_comments":0,"objectID":"9620290","points":1,"story_id":9620290,"story_text":"i am an entrepreneurial sharp business mind in search of a technologically savvy counterpart. i have many ideas including a previous sold at in excess of $200 million. i am a thinker with a knack for financial gains but very limited to my software development knowledge. i am looking for a computer wiz to help develop my ideas and form partnerships for all possible ventures possible with your skills. my email is 150mikkimase@gmail.com and my cell is 6467097799. please contact me, Mikki, at any time suitable for you. i look forward to your inquiries and am excited to move forward with my new partner(s).","title":"Entrepreneur searching for developer counterpart","updated_at":"2023-09-07T02:51:02Z","url":""},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"dennis_jeeves"},"story_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["thunder","compute"],"value":"\tLooking to freeload (in a manner speaking ). I'm seeking existing established businesses where the people at the helm of affairs are searching to augment their key members with level headed, non-political individuals. (Well, it's lonely up there isn't it?). Certainly I'm open to people who are wage slaves like me who would like to get off the wage slavery bandwagon for any future potential partnerships.\nI'm 43 years old, a computer programmer by profession and surrounded by regular (and younger) folks who "just don't get it". Never been an employee material, but being an entrepreneur or starting a business is fraught with risks that could leave one devastated in an irrecoverable manner, hence this post. Essentially I'm trying to ensure my long term livelihood, survival, and sanity.
What's in for you? Essentially you get a 'critical' thinker who upholds and enforces ( if I have the authority) some values that are not obvious to most people in a common workplace. For example: - Mindless pursuit of profits/sales figures at the expense of other important things, for example health and well being. - Way too many meetings. - promotion of talkers over thinkers. ( there are exceptions to this) - Frequently promoting short term fixes over long term ones. - Falling for hype and buzzwords( for example most of the "big data" topics/implementations are BS). - confusing overwork with productivity.
etc...
It is important to note that I can actually do work ( like programming) as opposed to be an armchair philosopher."},"title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Businesses looking for partners/successors?"}},"_tags":["story","author_dennis_jeeves","story_15465563","ask_hn"],"author":"dennis_jeeves","created_at":"2017-10-13T13:46:23Z","created_at_i":1507902383,"num_comments":0,"objectID":"15465563","points":1,"story_id":15465563,"story_text":"\tLooking to freeload (in a manner speaking ). I'm seeking existing established businesses where the people at the helm of affairs are searching to augment their key members with level headed, non-political individuals. (Well, it's lonely up there isn't it?). Certainly I'm open to people who are wage slaves like me who would like to get off the wage slavery bandwagon for any future potential partnerships.\nI'm 43 years old, a computer programmer by profession and surrounded by regular (and younger) folks who "just don't get it". Never been an employee material, but being an entrepreneur or starting a business is fraught with risks that could leave one devastated in an irrecoverable manner, hence this post. Essentially I'm trying to ensure my long term livelihood, survival, and sanity.
What's in for you? Essentially you get a 'critical' thinker who upholds and enforces ( if I have the authority) some values that are not obvious to most people in a common workplace. For example: - Mindless pursuit of profits/sales figures at the expense of other important things, for example health and well being. - Way too many meetings. - promotion of talkers over thinkers. ( there are exceptions to this) - Frequently promoting short term fixes over long term ones. - Falling for hype and buzzwords( for example most of the "big data" topics/implementations are BS). - confusing overwork with productivity.
etc...
It is important to note that I can actually do work ( like programming) as opposed to be an armchair philosopher.","title":"Businesses looking for partners/successors?","updated_at":"2024-09-20T01:31:25Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"fullyHighlighted":true,"matchLevel":"partial","matchedWords":["thunder"],"value":"thund"},"title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Uses for an old Android device"},"url":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"partial","matchedWords":["compute"],"value":"https://www.computerworld.com/article/2487680/20-great-uses-for-an-old-android-device.html"}},"_tags":["story","author_thund","story_32383835"],"author":"thund","children":[32384804,32395035,32395142,32395147,32395171,32395339,32395378,32395426,32395460,32395472,32395616,32395688,32395716,32395848,32395850,32395921,32396016,32396050,32396231,32396859,32397077,32397117,32397174,32397313,32399512,32399687,32400050,32400100,32400218,32401615],"created_at":"2022-08-08T10:00:08Z","created_at_i":1659952808,"num_comments":103,"objectID":"32383835","points":138,"story_id":32383835,"title":"Uses for an old Android device","updated_at":"2026-07-27T04:54:45Z","url":"https://www.computerworld.com/article/2487680/20-great-uses-for-an-old-android-device.html"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"fullyHighlighted":true,"matchLevel":"partial","matchedWords":["thunder"],"value":"thund3rp"},"story_text":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":""},"title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Al-Qaida comunications hacked.."},"url":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"partial","matchedWords":["compute"],"value":"http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9218050/Al_Qaida_communications_knocked_offline_says_expert_"}},"_tags":["story","author_thund3rp","story_2713224"],"author":"thund3rp","created_at":"2011-06-30T09:16:40Z","created_at_i":1309425400,"num_comments":0,"objectID":"2713224","points":2,"story_id":2713224,"story_text":"","title":"Al-Qaida comunications hacked..","updated_at":"2024-09-19T17:47:33Z","url":"http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9218050/Al_Qaida_communications_knocked_offline_says_expert_"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"fullyHighlighted":true,"matchLevel":"partial","matchedWords":["thunder"],"value":"thinxer"},"story_text":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":""},"title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Deep Learning vs. Big Data: Who Owns What?"},"url":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"partial","matchedWords":["compute"],"value":"http://www.computervisionblog.com/2015/05/deep-learning-vs-big-data-who-owns-what.html"}},"_tags":["story","author_thinxer","story_9568263"],"author":"thinxer","created_at":"2015-05-19T05:26:29Z","created_at_i":1432013189,"num_comments":0,"objectID":"9568263","points":1,"story_id":9568263,"story_text":"","title":"Deep Learning vs. Big Data: Who Owns What?","updated_at":"2023-09-07T02:47:03Z","url":"http://www.computervisionblog.com/2015/05/deep-learning-vs-big-data-who-owns-what.html"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"kwiens"},"story_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["thunder","compute"],"value":"After years of making screwdrivers and teaching people to repair electronics, we just made our first electronic tool. It's been a journey for us to build while hewing to our repairable principles. We're really excited about it.
It's a USB-C powered soldering iron and smart battery power hub. Super repairable, of course. Our goal is to make soldering so easy everyone can do it:\nhttps://www.ifixit.com/fixhub
We didn\u2019t want to make just another iron, so we spent years sweating the details and crafting something that met our exacting standards. This is a high-performance iron: it can output 100W of heat, gets to soldering temperature in under 5 seconds, and automatically cools off when you set it down. The accelerometer detects when you pick it up and heats it back up. Keeping the iron at a lower temperature while you\u2019re not soldering shouold prolong the life of the tip.
What\u2019s the difference between this iron and other USB-C irons on the market? Here\u2019s a quick list:
Higher power (our Smart Iron is 100W, competitors max out at 60W over USB-C, 88W over DC Supply)
Heat-resistant storage cap (you just have to try this out, it\u2019s a real game changer in day-to-day use)\nPolished user experience
A warranty and a local company to talk to (I can\u2019t find any contact information for Miniware)
Comfier / more natural grip
Shorter soldering tip length
No-tangle, heat-resistant cable
Locking ring on the cable, so it can\u2019t snag and get disconnected (this happens to me all the time on other irons)
More intuitive settings, either on the Power Station or on the computer
We used Web Serial https://caniuse.com/web-serial for the interface, which is only supported in Chromium browsers. The biggest bummer with that is that no mobile browsers support it, yet. Hopefully that changes soon.
Hardware is hard! It's been a journey for us. Happy to answer any questions about how we made it.
Schematics and repair information are online here: https://www.ifixit.com/Device/FixHub_Portable_Soldering_Stat..."},"title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Show HN: iFixit created a new USB-C, repairable soldering system"},"url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"https://hackaday.com/2024/09/12/review-ifixits-fixhub-may-be-the-last-soldering-iron-you-ever-buy/"}},"_tags":["story","author_kwiens","story_41521919","show_hn"],"author":"kwiens","children":[41521988,41521991,41522006,41522019,41522022,41522042,41522044,41522064,41522070,41522096,41522100,41522103,41522113,41522144,41522154,41522210,41522240,41522310,41522345,41522383,41522466,41522471,41522514,41522555,41522559,41522568,41522570,41522589,41522626,41522638,41522654,41522734,41522755,41522847,41522850,41522871,41522939,41522960,41522968,41523015,41523044,41523175,41523253,41523302,41523554,41524047,41524119,41524123,41524150,41524176,41524285,41524541,41524583,41524669,41524711,41524908,41525066,41525209,41525321,41525402,41525574,41525971,41526002,41526018,41526626,41526694,41526766,41527165,41527299,41527541,41528025,41529000,41531335,41537733,41555061],"created_at":"2024-09-12T15:18:43Z","created_at_i":1726154323,"num_comments":405,"objectID":"41521919","points":928,"story_id":41521919,"story_text":"After years of making screwdrivers and teaching people to repair electronics, we just made our first electronic tool. It's been a journey for us to build while hewing to our repairable principles. We're really excited about it.
It's a USB-C powered soldering iron and smart battery power hub. Super repairable, of course. Our goal is to make soldering so easy everyone can do it:\nhttps://www.ifixit.com/fixhub
We didn\u2019t want to make just another iron, so we spent years sweating the details and crafting something that met our exacting standards. This is a high-performance iron: it can output 100W of heat, gets to soldering temperature in under 5 seconds, and automatically cools off when you set it down. The accelerometer detects when you pick it up and heats it back up. Keeping the iron at a lower temperature while you\u2019re not soldering shouold prolong the life of the tip.
What\u2019s the difference between this iron and other USB-C irons on the market? Here\u2019s a quick list:
Higher power (our Smart Iron is 100W, competitors max out at 60W over USB-C, 88W over DC Supply)
Heat-resistant storage cap (you just have to try this out, it\u2019s a real game changer in day-to-day use)\nPolished user experience
A warranty and a local company to talk to (I can\u2019t find any contact information for Miniware)
Comfier / more natural grip
Shorter soldering tip length
No-tangle, heat-resistant cable
Locking ring on the cable, so it can\u2019t snag and get disconnected (this happens to me all the time on other irons)
More intuitive settings, either on the Power Station or on the computer
We used Web Serial https://caniuse.com/web-serial for the interface, which is only supported in Chromium browsers. The biggest bummer with that is that no mobile browsers support it, yet. Hopefully that changes soon.
Hardware is hard! It's been a journey for us. Happy to answer any questions about how we made it.
Schematics and repair information are online here: https://www.ifixit.com/Device/FixHub_Portable_Soldering_Stat...","title":"Show HN: iFixit created a new USB-C, repairable soldering system","updated_at":"2026-09-18T17:21:49Z","url":"https://hackaday.com/2024/09/12/review-ifixits-fixhub-may-be-the-last-soldering-iron-you-ever-buy/"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"HenryNdubuaku"},"story_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["thunder","compute"],"value":"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":{"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":"2026-09-18T00:02:31Z","url":"https://cactuscompute.com/needle"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"tanin"},"story_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["thunder","compute"],"value":"Hi HN,
I\u2019m Tanin. For about four years, I worked on the Revenue Recognition and Analytics teams at Stripe. Today, I'm open-sourcing Book of Revenue, a self-hosted revenue engine and drop-in alternative to Stripe Revenue Recognition (with optional support for Metronome).
### The Problem:
Most founders track MRR or cash collected in Stripe and assume that reflects revenue. But cash collected isn't revenue, and MRR isn't an accounting metric. Once you hit scale, raise institutional capital, or prep for an audit, ASC 606 / IFRS 15 rules kick in:
- Annual upfront subscriptions must be amortized monthly as deferred revenue.
- Mid-cycle upgrades, prorations, usage overages, refunds, and disputes quickly turn into messy manual spreadsheets.
- Finance and engineering end up arguing because Stripe dashboard numbers never match QuickBooks or NetSuite during month-end close.
### What Book of Revenue Does:
- Automated Revenue Recognition: Computes GAAP/IFRS-compliant revenue schedules from your Stripe billing and payment events out of the box.
- Unified Financial Truth: Aligns founder analytics with your accountant\u2019s ledger so both sides look at the exact same numbers.
- Full Data Ownership: Self-hosted with no vendor lock-in. You retain complete custody of your customer financial records and intermediate data models.
### Looking for Early Users:
I\u2019m looking for early design partners\u2014particularly companies processing over $100k in annual volume who dread month-end reconciliations.
I'm offering free hands-on deployment and a complimentary audit of your current Stripe/Metronome billing architecture. If you\u2019d like to test it out, drop a comment below or email me directly at tanin@bookofrevenue.com.
Website: https://bookofrevenue.com
GitHub: https://github.com/tanin47/book-of-revenue"},"title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Show HN: Open-source revenue recognition and analytics for Stripe and Metronome"}},"_tags":["story","author_tanin","story_49758181","show_hn"],"author":"tanin","created_at":"2026-09-18T18:21:06Z","created_at_i":1789755666,"num_comments":0,"objectID":"49758181","points":2,"story_id":49758181,"story_text":"Hi HN,
I\u2019m Tanin. For about four years, I worked on the Revenue Recognition and Analytics teams at Stripe. Today, I'm open-sourcing Book of Revenue, a self-hosted revenue engine and drop-in alternative to Stripe Revenue Recognition (with optional support for Metronome).
### The Problem:
Most founders track MRR or cash collected in Stripe and assume that reflects revenue. But cash collected isn't revenue, and MRR isn't an accounting metric. Once you hit scale, raise institutional capital, or prep for an audit, ASC 606 / IFRS 15 rules kick in:
- Annual upfront subscriptions must be amortized monthly as deferred revenue.
- Mid-cycle upgrades, prorations, usage overages, refunds, and disputes quickly turn into messy manual spreadsheets.
- Finance and engineering end up arguing because Stripe dashboard numbers never match QuickBooks or NetSuite during month-end close.
### What Book of Revenue Does:
- Automated Revenue Recognition: Computes GAAP/IFRS-compliant revenue schedules from your Stripe billing and payment events out of the box.
- Unified Financial Truth: Aligns founder analytics with your accountant\u2019s ledger so both sides look at the exact same numbers.
- Full Data Ownership: Self-hosted with no vendor lock-in. You retain complete custody of your customer financial records and intermediate data models.
### Looking for Early Users:
I\u2019m looking for early design partners\u2014particularly companies processing over $100k in annual volume who dread month-end reconciliations.
I'm offering free hands-on deployment and a complimentary audit of your current Stripe/Metronome billing architecture. If you\u2019d like to test it out, drop a comment below or email me directly at tanin@bookofrevenue.com.
Website: https://bookofrevenue.com
GitHub: https://github.com/tanin47/book-of-revenue","title":"Show HN: Open-source revenue recognition and analytics for Stripe and Metronome","updated_at":"2026-09-18T18:25:20Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"ksubedi"},"story_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["thunder","compute"],"value":"Hi hacker news, I am Kaushal, founder of echowin and also the guy creating TurnPanel.
It began as an internally developed tool because my team and I were so sick of having to constantly bounce context around between ai chats, coding agents engines terminals, browsers files scripts,
TurnPanel is a local-first workspace in which an agent can operate throughout your computer, orchestrate other agents and tools, and preserve valuable context over time. Its background maintenance processes transform commonly-used knowledge and tasks into reusable memories and skills stored locally - that's what I mean by self-evolving: it becomes more helpful through tasks finished, but cannot change its own permissions.
It further includes a visible browser with DOM and CDP access, and it does a benchmark of your machine to suggest and set up appropriate local models. You may alternatively connect to codex openrouter opencode or another openai compatible provider, change models between different jobs, and run different models for helper agents.
It is capable of monitoring conversational harnesses like kod and codex, keeping their terminals displayed, and responding to simple queries based on pre-existing contextual information in the workspace.
Also, for constructing persistent dashboard track review queues, and other small utilities, the mini-app SDK is available that eliminate the need of creating a new project and deploying stack. Spaces form a safety boundary by taking care of what memories files services, browser sessions, models, and actions are accessible to each job, and agents are not able to add capacity to the grants. Logins payment destructive actions, and follow-up confirmations hand control back to the user. Complete workspace like jobs terminals browser streams, applications, and long-run processes can also be used via browser or PWA remotely.
Its in public beta for mac and PC, with linux in the works. The basic local version is free, pro adds remote access and higher hosted-service limits. I'll be available to answer questions on how it works."},"title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Show HN: Turnpanel is a local first AI workspace"},"url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"https://turnpanel.com"}},"_tags":["story","author_ksubedi","story_49757975","show_hn"],"author":"ksubedi","created_at":"2026-09-18T18:03:32Z","created_at_i":1789754612,"num_comments":0,"objectID":"49757975","points":1,"story_id":49757975,"story_text":"Hi hacker news, I am Kaushal, founder of echowin and also the guy creating TurnPanel.
It began as an internally developed tool because my team and I were so sick of having to constantly bounce context around between ai chats, coding agents engines terminals, browsers files scripts,
TurnPanel is a local-first workspace in which an agent can operate throughout your computer, orchestrate other agents and tools, and preserve valuable context over time. Its background maintenance processes transform commonly-used knowledge and tasks into reusable memories and skills stored locally - that's what I mean by self-evolving: it becomes more helpful through tasks finished, but cannot change its own permissions.
It further includes a visible browser with DOM and CDP access, and it does a benchmark of your machine to suggest and set up appropriate local models. You may alternatively connect to codex openrouter opencode or another openai compatible provider, change models between different jobs, and run different models for helper agents.
It is capable of monitoring conversational harnesses like kod and codex, keeping their terminals displayed, and responding to simple queries based on pre-existing contextual information in the workspace.
Also, for constructing persistent dashboard track review queues, and other small utilities, the mini-app SDK is available that eliminate the need of creating a new project and deploying stack. Spaces form a safety boundary by taking care of what memories files services, browser sessions, models, and actions are accessible to each job, and agents are not able to add capacity to the grants. Logins payment destructive actions, and follow-up confirmations hand control back to the user. Complete workspace like jobs terminals browser streams, applications, and long-run processes can also be used via browser or PWA remotely.
Its in public beta for mac and PC, with linux in the works. The basic local version is free, pro adds remote access and higher hosted-service limits. I'll be available to answer questions on how it works.","title":"Show HN: Turnpanel is a local first AI workspace","updated_at":"2026-09-18T18:25:20Z","url":"https://turnpanel.com"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"darius88"},"story_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["thunder","compute"],"value":"A paper claiming to solve one Clay Millennium Problem would be extraordinary. A paper claiming to solve all six with one quantum-computing pipeline sounds almost designed to trigger disbelief.
That is what Denise Holt and Denis Ovseyenko of AIX Global report in \u201cDemonstrating Quantum Value by Solving the Six Remaining Clay Millennium Problems.\u201d They say IBM Heron computations produced certificates carried into Lean 4, yielding 27 theorems from 10 hours 24 minutes of QPU time.
I have not verified those claims, and the Clay Mathematics Institute still treats the six problems as unsolved. I am not asking you to accept the proofs. I am asking why the same architecture appears to have surfaced twice.
More than two months before the AIX preprint, my Six Birds Theory paper \u201cOne Meta-Theory, Three Clay-Problem Closures\u201d reached a related structural conclusion from the opposite direction. It compared Navier\u2013Stokes, the Riemann Hypothesis, and P versus NP and argued that they share a grammar: representation, residual obstruction, missing content, bridge, and audit.
One program started with a theory of emergence and moved toward hard problems. The other says it started with the problems separately and found one computational pipeline.
They do not offer the same proof. They appear to have found the same kind of bottleneck.
In software terms, think of a mathematical layer as an API. It exposes certain objects and operations. You can optimize forever inside that interface, but you cannot recover a distinction it never exposes. If two states produce the same log but need different responses, more log processing will not fix the observability problem. You need a new sensor, richer representation, or theorem showing the distinction does not matter.
Six Birds Theory formalizes this through saturation and residuals. Repeating a fixed completion rule is not the same as gaining new access. A residual measures the part of the target not accounted for by the layer\u2019s native probes. A useful extension constrains that residual, then returns only what the original question needs.
That resembles the architecture AIX claims to implement:
native problem -> problem-specific operator -> governed quantum computation -> compact certificate -> classical proof checker
The quantum state need not be reconstructed classically. The receiving layer needs a sufficient certificate and a valid bridge to the theorem.
There is one exact point of contact. In the Hodge section, AIX constructs a defect object measuring what remains after algebraic cycles account for the Hodge-class space. My earlier paper \u201cAdequacy Residuals and Blind-Spot Currency\u201d generalizes the same job: remove what the available probes explain and measure the remainder. Under the Hodge choices, the constructions have the same operator form.
That does not mean AIX used my work; I have no evidence of that. The mathematics is classical. It means two programs, with different vocabularies, built a tool for the same structural job.
\u201cOne mechanism\u201d should not mean \u201cone equation.\u201d Riemann and Yang\u2013Mills concern confinement. Hodge and BSD compare presentations. Navier\u2013Stokes asks for global control. P versus NP asks whether an obstruction persists against every efficient procedure. Same grammar, different polarity.
The developer lesson is broader. AI systems, theorem provers, and scientific workflows increasingly perform opaque searches. The right design target may be the smallest independently checkable artifact that preserves why the answer is true.
I wrote the full comparison, chronology, and caveats in Two Roads to the Same Bottleneck.
Disclosure: I developed Six Birds Theory and lead Automorph. This is a structural comparison, not validation of AIX\u2019s claims."},"title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Why Six Millennium Problems May Be Hard for the Same Reason"}},"_tags":["story","author_darius88","story_49724391","ask_hn"],"author":"darius88","children":[49751985],"created_at":"2026-09-16T10:25:38Z","created_at_i":1789554338,"num_comments":1,"objectID":"49724391","points":1,"story_id":49724391,"story_text":"A paper claiming to solve one Clay Millennium Problem would be extraordinary. A paper claiming to solve all six with one quantum-computing pipeline sounds almost designed to trigger disbelief.
That is what Denise Holt and Denis Ovseyenko of AIX Global report in \u201cDemonstrating Quantum Value by Solving the Six Remaining Clay Millennium Problems.\u201d They say IBM Heron computations produced certificates carried into Lean 4, yielding 27 theorems from 10 hours 24 minutes of QPU time.
I have not verified those claims, and the Clay Mathematics Institute still treats the six problems as unsolved. I am not asking you to accept the proofs. I am asking why the same architecture appears to have surfaced twice.
More than two months before the AIX preprint, my Six Birds Theory paper \u201cOne Meta-Theory, Three Clay-Problem Closures\u201d reached a related structural conclusion from the opposite direction. It compared Navier\u2013Stokes, the Riemann Hypothesis, and P versus NP and argued that they share a grammar: representation, residual obstruction, missing content, bridge, and audit.
One program started with a theory of emergence and moved toward hard problems. The other says it started with the problems separately and found one computational pipeline.
They do not offer the same proof. They appear to have found the same kind of bottleneck.
In software terms, think of a mathematical layer as an API. It exposes certain objects and operations. You can optimize forever inside that interface, but you cannot recover a distinction it never exposes. If two states produce the same log but need different responses, more log processing will not fix the observability problem. You need a new sensor, richer representation, or theorem showing the distinction does not matter.
Six Birds Theory formalizes this through saturation and residuals. Repeating a fixed completion rule is not the same as gaining new access. A residual measures the part of the target not accounted for by the layer\u2019s native probes. A useful extension constrains that residual, then returns only what the original question needs.
That resembles the architecture AIX claims to implement:
native problem -> problem-specific operator -> governed quantum computation -> compact certificate -> classical proof checker
The quantum state need not be reconstructed classically. The receiving layer needs a sufficient certificate and a valid bridge to the theorem.
There is one exact point of contact. In the Hodge section, AIX constructs a defect object measuring what remains after algebraic cycles account for the Hodge-class space. My earlier paper \u201cAdequacy Residuals and Blind-Spot Currency\u201d generalizes the same job: remove what the available probes explain and measure the remainder. Under the Hodge choices, the constructions have the same operator form.
That does not mean AIX used my work; I have no evidence of that. The mathematics is classical. It means two programs, with different vocabularies, built a tool for the same structural job.
\u201cOne mechanism\u201d should not mean \u201cone equation.\u201d Riemann and Yang\u2013Mills concern confinement. Hodge and BSD compare presentations. Navier\u2013Stokes asks for global control. P versus NP asks whether an obstruction persists against every efficient procedure. Same grammar, different polarity.
The developer lesson is broader. AI systems, theorem provers, and scientific workflows increasingly perform opaque searches. The right design target may be the smallest independently checkable artifact that preserves why the answer is true.
I wrote the full comparison, chronology, and caveats in Two Roads to the Same Bottleneck.
Disclosure: I developed Six Birds Theory and lead Automorph. This is a structural comparison, not validation of AIX\u2019s claims.","title":"Why Six Millennium Problems May Be Hard for the Same Reason","updated_at":"2026-09-18T09:33:18Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"niklas_anzinger"},"story_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["thunder","compute"],"value":"Montana passed a law called SB535. It builds on right-to-try (pre-approval access with informed consent, Phase 1 safety data etc.) but goes much further, fixing problems with those laws.
Alex Tabarrok called it "the most important regulatory innovation in drug approval in my lifetime" (https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/06/mo...). Was posted here but died in /new (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48559525). The mods suggested this post.
I contributed ideas to the law and am now implementing it through my company. I invested in biotech for years and watched companies struggle. I built the biotech ecosystem in Prospera as an alternative, concluded it was too early, and now think Montana is the best place to prove this.
Why this exists: When FDA approves a bad drug, heads roll. When it delays a good one, the deaths are statistical and nobody gets blamed ("invisible graveyard"). So the incentive is overcaution, which is why the cost per approved drug has roughly doubled every 9 years for decades ("Eroom's Law"). Founders are in the "Valley of Death" around Phase 1: grants are no longer available, and commercial money wants assurance the drug will pass the next trial. Only ~10% of post-Phase 1 drugs get approved, but 68% of failed trials don\u2019t stop because they found lack of safety or efficacy but commercial reasons (Williams et al., PLOS ONE 2015). Federal Right to Try and Expanded Access haven't fixed this. Federal reform is super-hard.
What Montana allows: A physician can give an experimental treatment outside a trial if: it completed FDA Phase 1 under an active IND; a state-registered private review board (ETRB) approved the protocol; it's delivered at a state-licensed clinic; consent exceeds the federal standard & adverse events need to be reported. The key is: sponsors and clinics can charge.
Why this time it's different: The risk-reward ratio is what's broken. Right to Try and Expanded Access don't let sponsors charge, so treating a patient is risk plus expense. Montana is the first state law where sponsors of IND-stage drugs can price in that risk. Trial recruitment today is a price-control system: per-patient cost is around $50-100k, typically has a ceiling upward on what it can pay patients ("undue inducement") and a floor downward (no profit, only at cost in RTT / EA). Montana removes both (I know this will lead to lots of debate, let\u2019s have it.)
So this is not a free for all, the additional liberties come with tough oversight. An ETRB is Montana's version of an IRB: safety review, consent, mandatory outcome reporting, and you can't withhold safety information from patients. That\u2019s the truth-funding mechanism.
What companies can do now: If you have a Phase 1 asset stuck in the Valley of Death: treat patients, negotiate payment, get real-world data, use it to sharpen your Phase 2/3 design.
Disclosure: my company formed the first ETRB. The model is review fees, like an IRB; no equity in applicants, no payment by outcome; COI policy and board bios public; decision letters published with applicant consent; annual outcome report required.
Objections:
- Someone gets hurt? Same as trials and ordinary care: US legal system, legal recourse.
- FDA shuts it down? They haven't said they won't, but historically FDA goes after grey-market clinics, not state laws; we're asking for safe harbor, but some companies aren't waiting.
- Snake oil? Bad actors want to fly under the radar, and Montana makes that hard.
What's needed: Biotechs with Phase 1+ assets willing to move before full FDA assurance, to build the evidence that gets the agency on board - the point is not to skip FDA, but to reduce the cost of data. And ex-FDA reviewers, IND operators, IRB members telling us where this breaks.
Happy to answer anything."},"title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Tell HN: An inside view of Montana's new biotech law"}},"_tags":["story","author_niklas_anzinger","story_49731216","ask_hn"],"author":"niklas_anzinger","children":[49732923,49732939,49732951,49732957,49733176,49733881],"created_at":"2026-09-16T18:43:57Z","created_at_i":1789584237,"num_comments":25,"objectID":"49731216","points":34,"story_id":49731216,"story_text":"Montana passed a law called SB535. It builds on right-to-try (pre-approval access with informed consent, Phase 1 safety data etc.) but goes much further, fixing problems with those laws.
Alex Tabarrok called it "the most important regulatory innovation in drug approval in my lifetime" (https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/06/mo...). Was posted here but died in /new (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48559525). The mods suggested this post.
I contributed ideas to the law and am now implementing it through my company. I invested in biotech for years and watched companies struggle. I built the biotech ecosystem in Prospera as an alternative, concluded it was too early, and now think Montana is the best place to prove this.
Why this exists: When FDA approves a bad drug, heads roll. When it delays a good one, the deaths are statistical and nobody gets blamed ("invisible graveyard"). So the incentive is overcaution, which is why the cost per approved drug has roughly doubled every 9 years for decades ("Eroom's Law"). Founders are in the "Valley of Death" around Phase 1: grants are no longer available, and commercial money wants assurance the drug will pass the next trial. Only ~10% of post-Phase 1 drugs get approved, but 68% of failed trials don\u2019t stop because they found lack of safety or efficacy but commercial reasons (Williams et al., PLOS ONE 2015). Federal Right to Try and Expanded Access haven't fixed this. Federal reform is super-hard.
What Montana allows: A physician can give an experimental treatment outside a trial if: it completed FDA Phase 1 under an active IND; a state-registered private review board (ETRB) approved the protocol; it's delivered at a state-licensed clinic; consent exceeds the federal standard & adverse events need to be reported. The key is: sponsors and clinics can charge.
Why this time it's different: The risk-reward ratio is what's broken. Right to Try and Expanded Access don't let sponsors charge, so treating a patient is risk plus expense. Montana is the first state law where sponsors of IND-stage drugs can price in that risk. Trial recruitment today is a price-control system: per-patient cost is around $50-100k, typically has a ceiling upward on what it can pay patients ("undue inducement") and a floor downward (no profit, only at cost in RTT / EA). Montana removes both (I know this will lead to lots of debate, let\u2019s have it.)
So this is not a free for all, the additional liberties come with tough oversight. An ETRB is Montana's version of an IRB: safety review, consent, mandatory outcome reporting, and you can't withhold safety information from patients. That\u2019s the truth-funding mechanism.
What companies can do now: If you have a Phase 1 asset stuck in the Valley of Death: treat patients, negotiate payment, get real-world data, use it to sharpen your Phase 2/3 design.
Disclosure: my company formed the first ETRB. The model is review fees, like an IRB; no equity in applicants, no payment by outcome; COI policy and board bios public; decision letters published with applicant consent; annual outcome report required.
Objections:
- Someone gets hurt? Same as trials and ordinary care: US legal system, legal recourse.
- FDA shuts it down? They haven't said they won't, but historically FDA goes after grey-market clinics, not state laws; we're asking for safe harbor, but some companies aren't waiting.
- Snake oil? Bad actors want to fly under the radar, and Montana makes that hard.
What's needed: Biotechs with Phase 1+ assets willing to move before full FDA assurance, to build the evidence that gets the agency on board - the point is not to skip FDA, but to reduce the cost of data. And ex-FDA reviewers, IND operators, IRB members telling us where this breaks.
Happy to answer anything.","title":"Tell HN: An inside view of Montana's new biotech law","updated_at":"2026-09-18T22:31:20Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"kisjovan"},"story_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["thunder","compute"],"value":"Hi everybody, we post-trained Qwen 3.8 27B to be more efficient by figuring out which tokens were linked to overthinking and penalizing them without "attacking" the reasoning length directly then fixed the accuracy with a bit of secret sauce (hint On-Policy Distillation) and achieved great results (-58% length, 1.95x speed up, <1% accuracy loss) so we wanted to open-source it and hear the feedback of the community.
This is the link to the model: https://huggingface.co/ukisai/Swift-Qwen3.8-27b / It's at 80k downloads in 3 days with independent evals here: https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1wg7dd5/ukisai_...
We are also providing a Free Research Purpose API (OpenAI compatible), courtesy of Nvidia who were kind enough to provide us with the GPUs. It's limited at 5RPM. https://ukisai.com/api/swift/v1/models
We also made a GGUF (Q1-Q8): https://huggingface.co/ukisai/Swift-Qwen3.8-27B-GGUF and there's also a few nice community quants with even lower/higher precision (Bartowski: https://huggingface.co/bartowski/ukisai_Swift-Qwen3.8-27b-GG...). The community also created amazing MLX, NVFP4, W4A16 and Uncensored versions you can find on Huggingface.
IMPORTANT: Our training approach is not a replacement for the reasoning effort settings, chat templates or token caps but is complementary and targets a completely separate issue (overthinking and "anxiety-like" reasoning loops prior seen in PTQ, but as far as we identified also prominent in BF16 of this size class LLMs as well). Contrary to popular belief, these specific patterns do not contribute to answer quality when properly targeted. (our thesis being: reasoning length IS extremely important and should NOT be shortened by force, but rather optimized). This is also demonstrated bellow in our xhigh vs medium effort benchmark. The goal is to keep xhigh accuracy while reducing only the unnecessary part of thinking.
The TLDR of our thought process, research, training and a link to the Meta paper that inspired us is in the first comment.
The benchmarks:
Swift-27B vs Qwen3.8-27B (BF16, all benchmarks ran x5, thinking effort xhigh)
GPQA-Diamond: 88.4% -> 88.3%, 58% fewer median tokens
LiveCodeBench v6: 76.8% -> 81.6% (+4.8pp, due to default truncation in LCB it is not performance gain), 46% fewer median thinking tokens
Terminal-Bench 2.1: 66.7% -> 65.8%, 39% fewer median tokens
MMLU-Pro: 85.5% -> 85.0%, 28% fewer median tokens
C-Eval: 90.0% -> 90.6%, 19% fewer median tokens
IFBench: 73.5% -> 71.8%, 51% fewer median tokens
AIME 2026: 98.7% -> 94.0%, 50% fewer median tokens
HMMT (Nov 2025): 99.3% -> 96.0%, 46% fewer median tokens
ERQA (vision): 67.5% -> 66.3%, 55% fewer median tokens
Token savings hold at every reasoning effort (mean thinking reduction): xhigh 41%, medium 23%, low 26% (albeit with accuracy loses of 1-4% on medium and 1-2% on low which we need further testing for)
Swift at xhigh vs the base's own effort settings on GPQA-Diamond (198 questions x 5 seeds):
Base xhigh: 88.4%, 6,642 median tokens
Swift xhigh: 88.3%, 2,771 median tokens
Base medium: 84.1%, 1,753 median tokens
So Swift keeps xhigh accuracy at under half the tokens, and beats base-medium by 4pp at roughly 1.6x its tokens.
End note:
While we are keen on complete open-source, we still need to keep a part of our training and data private, being a new lab. The license is not Apache 2.0, but it only affects companies >$1M. We hope this does not pose a problem for the community and are open to feedback on it.
We want to contribute as much as possible to the community and would really appreciate feedback on our work, quantization or Swift model requests. We are working on Swift 3.8 Flash Next and have so far gotten up to -53% thinking token usage. We have strong indicators our methodology is reproducible on other model families as well and are asking the community which ones you want us to optimize next."},"title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Show HN: Swift-Qwen3.8-27B, -58.3% thinking, x1.95 speed, accuracy of xhigh"},"url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"https://huggingface.co/ukisai/Swift-Qwen3.8-27b"}},"_tags":["story","author_kisjovan","story_49727511","show_hn"],"author":"kisjovan","children":[49727566,49727625,49727669,49730090,49733372,49737335],"created_at":"2026-09-16T14:24:05Z","created_at_i":1789568645,"num_comments":17,"objectID":"49727511","points":29,"story_id":49727511,"story_text":"Hi everybody, we post-trained Qwen 3.8 27B to be more efficient by figuring out which tokens were linked to overthinking and penalizing them without "attacking" the reasoning length directly then fixed the accuracy with a bit of secret sauce (hint On-Policy Distillation) and achieved great results (-58% length, 1.95x speed up, <1% accuracy loss) so we wanted to open-source it and hear the feedback of the community.
This is the link to the model: https://huggingface.co/ukisai/Swift-Qwen3.8-27b / It's at 80k downloads in 3 days with independent evals here: https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1wg7dd5/ukisai_...
We are also providing a Free Research Purpose API (OpenAI compatible), courtesy of Nvidia who were kind enough to provide us with the GPUs. It's limited at 5RPM. https://ukisai.com/api/swift/v1/models
We also made a GGUF (Q1-Q8): https://huggingface.co/ukisai/Swift-Qwen3.8-27B-GGUF and there's also a few nice community quants with even lower/higher precision (Bartowski: https://huggingface.co/bartowski/ukisai_Swift-Qwen3.8-27b-GG...). The community also created amazing MLX, NVFP4, W4A16 and Uncensored versions you can find on Huggingface.
IMPORTANT: Our training approach is not a replacement for the reasoning effort settings, chat templates or token caps but is complementary and targets a completely separate issue (overthinking and "anxiety-like" reasoning loops prior seen in PTQ, but as far as we identified also prominent in BF16 of this size class LLMs as well). Contrary to popular belief, these specific patterns do not contribute to answer quality when properly targeted. (our thesis being: reasoning length IS extremely important and should NOT be shortened by force, but rather optimized). This is also demonstrated bellow in our xhigh vs medium effort benchmark. The goal is to keep xhigh accuracy while reducing only the unnecessary part of thinking.
The TLDR of our thought process, research, training and a link to the Meta paper that inspired us is in the first comment.
The benchmarks:
Swift-27B vs Qwen3.8-27B (BF16, all benchmarks ran x5, thinking effort xhigh)
GPQA-Diamond: 88.4% -> 88.3%, 58% fewer median tokens
LiveCodeBench v6: 76.8% -> 81.6% (+4.8pp, due to default truncation in LCB it is not performance gain), 46% fewer median thinking tokens
Terminal-Bench 2.1: 66.7% -> 65.8%, 39% fewer median tokens
MMLU-Pro: 85.5% -> 85.0%, 28% fewer median tokens
C-Eval: 90.0% -> 90.6%, 19% fewer median tokens
IFBench: 73.5% -> 71.8%, 51% fewer median tokens
AIME 2026: 98.7% -> 94.0%, 50% fewer median tokens
HMMT (Nov 2025): 99.3% -> 96.0%, 46% fewer median tokens
ERQA (vision): 67.5% -> 66.3%, 55% fewer median tokens
Token savings hold at every reasoning effort (mean thinking reduction): xhigh 41%, medium 23%, low 26% (albeit with accuracy loses of 1-4% on medium and 1-2% on low which we need further testing for)
Swift at xhigh vs the base's own effort settings on GPQA-Diamond (198 questions x 5 seeds):
Base xhigh: 88.4%, 6,642 median tokens
Swift xhigh: 88.3%, 2,771 median tokens
Base medium: 84.1%, 1,753 median tokens
So Swift keeps xhigh accuracy at under half the tokens, and beats base-medium by 4pp at roughly 1.6x its tokens.
End note:
While we are keen on complete open-source, we still need to keep a part of our training and data private, being a new lab. The license is not Apache 2.0, but it only affects companies >$1M. We hope this does not pose a problem for the community and are open to feedback on it.
We want to contribute as much as possible to the community and would really appreciate feedback on our work, quantization or Swift model requests. We are working on Swift 3.8 Flash Next and have so far gotten up to -53% thinking token usage. We have strong indicators our methodology is reproducible on other model families as well and are asking the community which ones you want us to optimize next.","title":"Show HN: Swift-Qwen3.8-27B, -58.3% thinking, x1.95 speed, accuracy of xhigh","updated_at":"2026-09-18T17:28:51Z","url":"https://huggingface.co/ukisai/Swift-Qwen3.8-27b"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"0x63_Problems"},"story_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["thunder","compute"],"value":"I'm the co-founder of Gauge, and I built ax-check.com to quickly test how well coding agents can onboard to your product.
You'll get a scorecard, specific suggested fixes, and three full coding sessions that show how agents read your site and use your product.
I built this because similar checks were too noisy. Most suggested obscure technical changes that don't actually make a difference in agent experience (or AX, hence ax-check.com).
This check starts by using DeepSeek 4.1 Flash to try to find key information about your product, starting from the homepage. In actual agent traffic data, we've seen that the key pages are the homepage, llms.txt, pricing, and the docs site (by traffic volume, and by influence), so we focus on those and ignore the rest. We also find that content negotiation for Markdown is legitimately helpful for agents to complete tasks faster and find what they're looking for, so the scan tests that your key pages can serve Markdown.
The other key piece is that we run actual coding agents in sandboxes, and have them try to onboard to your product. You can see the full trace and watch it happen live (we kick it off fresh when you enter a new site). We surface interesting findings like hallucinated URLs, inaccurate docs instructions, or product confusion.
It also detects whether the agents could complete a fully working onboarding autonomously, without being blocked by a login wall. This is still controversial, but I think finding ways to let agents safely onboard autonomously is going to be table stakes within a year for developer tools in particular.
The whole site is agent-friendly itself! You can generally just talk to your coding agent about ax-check.com and it can do the rest. Would really appreciate any feedback to make this useful."},"title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Show HN: Ax-check.com \u2013 Can agents use your product?"},"url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"https://www.ax-check.com/"}},"_tags":["story","author_0x63_Problems","story_49744416","show_hn"],"author":"0x63_Problems","children":[49758411,49758451,49758472,49758478,49758479,49758495,49759040,49759235,49759700,49760769],"created_at":"2026-09-17T18:08:02Z","created_at_i":1789668482,"num_comments":31,"objectID":"49744416","points":27,"story_id":49744416,"story_text":"I'm the co-founder of Gauge, and I built ax-check.com to quickly test how well coding agents can onboard to your product.
You'll get a scorecard, specific suggested fixes, and three full coding sessions that show how agents read your site and use your product.
I built this because similar checks were too noisy. Most suggested obscure technical changes that don't actually make a difference in agent experience (or AX, hence ax-check.com).
This check starts by using DeepSeek 4.1 Flash to try to find key information about your product, starting from the homepage. In actual agent traffic data, we've seen that the key pages are the homepage, llms.txt, pricing, and the docs site (by traffic volume, and by influence), so we focus on those and ignore the rest. We also find that content negotiation for Markdown is legitimately helpful for agents to complete tasks faster and find what they're looking for, so the scan tests that your key pages can serve Markdown.
The other key piece is that we run actual coding agents in sandboxes, and have them try to onboard to your product. You can see the full trace and watch it happen live (we kick it off fresh when you enter a new site). We surface interesting findings like hallucinated URLs, inaccurate docs instructions, or product confusion.
It also detects whether the agents could complete a fully working onboarding autonomously, without being blocked by a login wall. This is still controversial, but I think finding ways to let agents safely onboard autonomously is going to be table stakes within a year for developer tools in particular.
The whole site is agent-friendly itself! You can generally just talk to your coding agent about ax-check.com and it can do the rest. Would really appreciate any feedback to make this useful.","title":"Show HN: Ax-check.com \u2013 Can agents use your product?","updated_at":"2026-09-18T23:26:50Z","url":"https://www.ax-check.com/"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"thisisjedr"},"story_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["thunder","compute"],"value":"Hey HN, I\u2019m the author of the https://github.com/eigenpal/docx-editor, it\u2019s an SDK that implements Word-compatible layout engine in Typescript.
Today, we are releasing Word to markdown converter library. It\u2019s open source and published under Apache 2.0 license. It uses our layout engine, so it can return accurate, per-page markdown blocks (with headers, footers, and image references). We also handle fonts (Google fonts as fallback) or let you pass your font files upfront for accurate content measurement.
To our surprise, Word to per-page Markdown conversion is not a solved problem even in 2026! We initially faced this friction when preprocessing Word documents for agentic workflows. For our use case, it was important to represent per-page content in markdown. Initially, we ended up using LibreOffice sidecar to convert to PDF and then using .pdf -> .md library. This was not ideal given that LibreOffice sidecar that was sitting idle most of the time.
This issue is addressed with docx-to-markdown library. it can be used directly in your Typescript ingestion pipeline. Try with your docs at https://www.docx-editor.dev/solutions/word-to-markdown.
(if you catch any bugs please let us know in the comments / or file gh issues)"},"title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Show HN: Docx-to-Markdown \u2013 layout-aware Word to Markdown converter"},"url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"https://www.docx-editor.dev/solutions/word-to-markdown"}},"_tags":["story","author_thisisjedr","story_49728477","show_hn"],"author":"thisisjedr","children":[49728554,49729405],"created_at":"2026-09-16T15:24:31Z","created_at_i":1789572271,"num_comments":5,"objectID":"49728477","points":5,"story_id":49728477,"story_text":"Hey HN, I\u2019m the author of the https://github.com/eigenpal/docx-editor, it\u2019s an SDK that implements Word-compatible layout engine in Typescript.
Today, we are releasing Word to markdown converter library. It\u2019s open source and published under Apache 2.0 license. It uses our layout engine, so it can return accurate, per-page markdown blocks (with headers, footers, and image references). We also handle fonts (Google fonts as fallback) or let you pass your font files upfront for accurate content measurement.
To our surprise, Word to per-page Markdown conversion is not a solved problem even in 2026! We initially faced this friction when preprocessing Word documents for agentic workflows. For our use case, it was important to represent per-page content in markdown. Initially, we ended up using LibreOffice sidecar to convert to PDF and then using .pdf -> .md library. This was not ideal given that LibreOffice sidecar that was sitting idle most of the time.
This issue is addressed with docx-to-markdown library. it can be used directly in your Typescript ingestion pipeline. Try with your docs at https://www.docx-editor.dev/solutions/word-to-markdown.
(if you catch any bugs please let us know in the comments / or file gh issues)","title":"Show HN: Docx-to-Markdown \u2013 layout-aware Word to Markdown converter","updated_at":"2026-09-18T16:31:36Z","url":"https://www.docx-editor.dev/solutions/word-to-markdown"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"ReeseEJ"},"story_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["thunder","compute"],"value":"TLDR: Curious if YC startup requests are a valid take, so I built freeform in a weekend.
Storytime: I\u2019ve been working on a startup for a while (another context layer startup) and one night while I had One Piece playing in the background and I was going through YCs request for startups list. I was watching the videos and reading the transcripts when two of them particularly stood out to me: cloud for small apps and shareable apps. Specifically the quote \u201cAI hasn't had its multiplayer moment yet\u201d. I had an idea floating in my head for a collaborative app which I thought would be nice to have and haven\u2019t seen anyone implement anything like it yet (maybe so, I live under a rock). So having a free weekend and a claude pro subscription I started building Freeform. I didn\u2019t count how many hours it took overall but it was about ~4.5 days total. I figured I should post about it since I\u2019m curious if YCs startup direction is\u2026 well.. market driven. Anyway, this isn\u2019t a reflection of YCs predictions obviously but more so a loose experiment of my interpretation and implementation of said ideas.
Application: Freeform. What is it? I\u2019d loosely describe it as an ai canva since a lot of the direct output is design driven and based on what you see. However, I think the functionality exceeds that as each applet is its own sandboxed environment with persistent storage. This and being able to inject your own api keys or just random links from the web (ie unsplash) results in some pretty interesting creations. The core component I wanted was sharing and collaboration, so I designed the entire idea around sharing links, previewing, and simultaneous prompt based collaboration with versioning. Anyway, try it out I hope you like it :)
Try it here: https://sharefreeform.com \nSome stuff I made:
A product page with stripe integration on checkout: \nhttps://sharefreeform.com/a/d0e55aff-8aec-45dc-9874-5dc1b943...
A record player that plays midi and itunes music:\nhttps://sharefreeform.com/a/661d308e-1751-49c3-bd68-f7a58c05...
A brainrot card I\u2019m sending to my friends:\nhttps://sharefreeform.com/a/e31a5954-dcd4-4821-8cdf-c1dc6d2f...
PS: I didn\u2019t put a lot of credits to the llm or sandbox pool so if you run into any issues (or bugs) just shoot me an email here: hello@sharefreeform.com\nAlso if you decide to make something feel free to email it to me or post it in the thread Thanks!"},"title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Show HN: Freeform \u2013 One click shareable AI generated apps"},"url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"https://sharefreeform.com"}},"_tags":["story","author_ReeseEJ","story_49725268","show_hn"],"author":"ReeseEJ","children":[49725372,49725745,49725794,49734871],"created_at":"2026-09-16T11:43:17Z","created_at_i":1789558997,"num_comments":3,"objectID":"49725268","points":3,"story_id":49725268,"story_text":"TLDR: Curious if YC startup requests are a valid take, so I built freeform in a weekend.
Storytime: I\u2019ve been working on a startup for a while (another context layer startup) and one night while I had One Piece playing in the background and I was going through YCs request for startups list. I was watching the videos and reading the transcripts when two of them particularly stood out to me: cloud for small apps and shareable apps. Specifically the quote \u201cAI hasn't had its multiplayer moment yet\u201d. I had an idea floating in my head for a collaborative app which I thought would be nice to have and haven\u2019t seen anyone implement anything like it yet (maybe so, I live under a rock). So having a free weekend and a claude pro subscription I started building Freeform. I didn\u2019t count how many hours it took overall but it was about ~4.5 days total. I figured I should post about it since I\u2019m curious if YCs startup direction is\u2026 well.. market driven. Anyway, this isn\u2019t a reflection of YCs predictions obviously but more so a loose experiment of my interpretation and implementation of said ideas.
Application: Freeform. What is it? I\u2019d loosely describe it as an ai canva since a lot of the direct output is design driven and based on what you see. However, I think the functionality exceeds that as each applet is its own sandboxed environment with persistent storage. This and being able to inject your own api keys or just random links from the web (ie unsplash) results in some pretty interesting creations. The core component I wanted was sharing and collaboration, so I designed the entire idea around sharing links, previewing, and simultaneous prompt based collaboration with versioning. Anyway, try it out I hope you like it :)
Try it here: https://sharefreeform.com \nSome stuff I made:
A product page with stripe integration on checkout: \nhttps://sharefreeform.com/a/d0e55aff-8aec-45dc-9874-5dc1b943...
A record player that plays midi and itunes music:\nhttps://sharefreeform.com/a/661d308e-1751-49c3-bd68-f7a58c05...
A brainrot card I\u2019m sending to my friends:\nhttps://sharefreeform.com/a/e31a5954-dcd4-4821-8cdf-c1dc6d2f...
PS: I didn\u2019t put a lot of credits to the llm or sandbox pool so if you run into any issues (or bugs) just shoot me an email here: hello@sharefreeform.com\nAlso if you decide to make something feel free to email it to me or post it in the thread Thanks!","title":"Show HN: Freeform \u2013 One click shareable AI generated apps","updated_at":"2026-09-18T03:09:03Z","url":"https://sharefreeform.com"}],"hitsPerPage":50,"nbHits":30,"nbPages":1,"page":0,"params":"query=Thunder+Compute&tags=story&hitsPerPage=50&advancedSyntax=true&analyticsTags=backend","processingTimeMS":18,"processingTimingsMS":{"_request":{"roundTrip":19},"afterFetch":{"format":{"highlighting":7,"total":7},"merge":{"mergeLoop":{"prepareNextHit":1,"total":2},"total":2},"total":2},"fetch":{"query":13,"scanning":2,"total":16},"total":19},"query":"Thunder Compute","serverTimeMS":27}