Genuinely love this. I've sort of done this by hand before the advent of good coding agents [1]. But now, it is even more enjoyavle, as development time is even less an issue.
I'd love to see more people realize this and use that new power to build things that don't necessarily scale on their own, but might trigger changes for sizeable groups, either socially, or politically.
Building things for yourself is fun -- I do it. But the original article was written for startup founders, building companies.
salomonk_mur · 7h ago
Building a particular type of company - a tech startup.
I'd argue that we need to apply this to companies too. Stop building startups (which start losing money and may never ever make a profit in the process of scaling) and start creating companies (which make a profit ASAP and may never scale).
timr · 5h ago
"Tech startups" that make enough money to be interesting [1], but do not have the property of being a winner-take-all market, are the truly magical unicorns of software. If you have one, you should covet it and guard it viciously, because otherwise someone with more money is coming to eat your lunch [2][3].
OP wasn't talking about this kind of thing, of course. The phenomenon of hobby projects being "startups" has always been a weird fit.
[1] I define this at least as "supports more than one person's salary in perpetuity," but would probably add some things like margin requirements if I thought about it more. Obviously you can exist as a consultant charging by the hour, and that's not what either of us is talking about.
[2] The only examples of this I've personally ever seen have been dominant players in niche markets with high bars to entry. So they weren't hyper-growth unicorns, but weren't really your definition of "companies", either. You don't get to these kinds of businesses by aiming to be one - you get there by trying for something bigger and topping out the market.
[3] Consider the phenomenon of the small vet clinic, which is rapidly ceasing to exist. Private equity has been steadily hoovering up these relatively high-margin, low-regulation businesses for the same economic reasons that software companies get big. If you try to create a vet clinic, you will be assimilated or crushed by a bigger player with a brand and the ability to undercut your prices.
dghlsakjg · 3h ago
Is the vet clinic thing a lasting phenomenon? Are independent vet clinics not economically viable or is there just a VC/PE market imbalance where capital is overbidding for a business that doesn't really have a great moat. I would be perfectly willing to believe that if you knock on the door of a perfectly viable business and offer them more than it's worth as well as a salaried position at the new business, (almost) no one says no.
I think the cash merry go round will stop eventually because the moat, in as much as there is one, is the vet themselves, not the business. If my vet leaves and opens a new practice, I will follow the person. Vet services don't really scale either, you can hit efficiencies with admin, but I'm sure a software company is willing to eat the PE firm's lunch there. With software, costs are heavily weighted to the fixed side. With vets, seeing twice the number of dogs takes twice the number of vet hours, vet tech hours, etc.
timr · 3h ago
Vet clinics have a moat (exactly as you're implying): the customer relationship. That relationship, plus optimization on the fixed costs, gives an incentive to acquire the practice, maintain the staff as employees, and collect the operating margin. It's not like you really care if your favored pet doctor works for Brand A or Brand B, and -- let's be honest -- you're price sensitive. No matter what you say, there's a limit to how much you'll pay in order to follow your favorite vet, because veterinary services are a commodity, and your pet doesn't know the difference. So there's price pressure as well.
You're right that vet clinics aren't like software in the variable cost structure, but that just makes the software business more attractive for consolidation, not less. Bigger players will have the customer relationship, lower fixed costs, and high margins, with little threat of competition.
marcosdumay · 3h ago
> I think the cash merry go round will stop eventually because the moat, in as much as there is one, is the vet themselves, not the business.
The moat is the land. It doesn't even matter if it self-owned or a lease.
The vet just can't walk away and open a new practice nearby.
shooker435 · 5h ago
There's probably a middle ground here. Making a profit ASAP is only really possible if you're selling expertise, such as consulting. I really like the emerging term, "seed strapping" which aims to address this conundrum in the startup world: raise just enough to build the first iteration, then act like a bootstrapped business.
derwiki · 10h ago
Yep, totally — the OG advice was founder-focused. I just couldn’t resist twisting it a bit, because the line itself is too good not to repurpose.
netcan · 6h ago
Yeah... i think that's pretty clear right from your title.
j45 · 9h ago
It's also possible to build things to solve your own problems, that might be problems other people have too, which they also try to solve but fail at, which are problems that are painful enough that they would spend on.
They're harder to find in B2C than B2B. Individual problems can sometimes map to B2B.
chrisweekly · 5h ago
"Startup" is often defined as "small company designed to grow quickly".
jpgleeson · 4h ago
Robin Sloan wrote about something similar a few years back. I think this is one of the most positive things to come out of the current cycle - even if things turn out less revolutionary than sold, enabling regular people to produce something small that sparks joy without having to know a language
Haha funny timing! I wrote this post last weekend and haven’t checked HN much this week
quuxplusone · 6h ago
I agree it would be nice to put the source of the quote in your own post. It's so easy to Google before quoting.
On another note: did you just tell a bunch of strangers on the internet how to snail-mail arbitrary photos to your mom? Or does that email thing only activate if the email comes from your own address? (Guess you'll find out! :))
derwiki · 6h ago
The postcard app is gated by a verification queue. FWIW, so far no one has tried to sign up. Also there’s an address book so it’s not just for mom :-)
tlhunter · 8h ago
It's definitely the first result on Google and sort of ruins any credibility of the article.
mekoka · 8h ago
Anyone who was part of the HN/YCombinator scene at the time PG wrote that piece (and many years later) would know what the title alludes to. Why would it ruin this article's credibility?
loumf · 7h ago
Because when you quote someone, you should credit them. It's not believable that they don't know the source of the quote because it's trivial to find.
topaz0 · 5h ago
It would be one thing if the post was arguing for or against the substance of that essay, but it's really not -- it's about a different thing you can do, in a different context.
pimlottc · 8h ago
I agree that not everything has to go huge. I don’t see how ChatGPT has anything to do with this though.
bravesoul2 · 6h ago
It's like we have a 3D printer where before there was only injection molding.
topaz0 · 5h ago
This was my first thought as well -- even some of the examples in the post are pre-llm.
j3th9n · 8h ago
Than you probably never used ChatGPT for coding.
aetherson · 8h ago
I use Claude Code to hack together a little webapp that allows me to make hex-maps for use in roleplaying games.
There are a lot of sites on the web that let you make a hex map. A lot of them are even free. Many of them have features that my little webapp doesn't have.
But mine works the way I want it. I wanted rivers and forest to be modifiers on top of the base terrain of the tile. I wanted to have a few different settlement icons. I wanted to have more variations of hills and mountains than most of the other sites do.
And if I'm ever missing a feature on this thing, I can just add it, rather than just sort of saying, "Oh well."
Because it's an app that's just for me, I don't need to worry about scale or security or monetization or anything.
It took me about an hour to two hours of my attention (spread out over two calendar days) to have the AI code it.
lionkor · 3h ago
Is it easy to modify, or do you think it will eventually become unmaintainable? What level of experience/software development seniority do you have?
aetherson · 45m ago
It's a rails app with a JavaScript frontend. I know rails pretty well and feel like I can just take over manual coding if I want to or the AI gets in over its head. But I'm very out of date on JS frameworks and would have a big pile of learning if I had to take over the FE.
I assume it will eventually become unmaintainable if I add a bunch to it.
I feel like the main takeaway here is that if you want your personal project to last, you should run it on your own server.
sdenton4 · 7h ago
It'll last until you lose interest or die. Shrug emoji.
j45 · 9h ago
Also making it easy to host and maintain. The more custom or esoteric libraries, the better.
If you do build it with boring tech in a simple way, you can just rely on it.
iancmceachern · 7h ago
Check out the book "Small Giants, companies that choose to be great not big"
tomasphan · 5h ago
This is absolutely true and the reason I left a job in software consulting.
The future is asking an LLM to write anything for you. It will figure out the tech stack, hosting, integrations etc.
“I am looking for an alternative to Discord” is now “make me a Discord clone for my friends and I”.
Quality of the code aside because now it doesn’t have to support millions of users anymore.
101008 · 4h ago
I disagree. This existed way before LLM. Open source alternatives to most products are already available. And install them and deploy them is much easier than do it with LLMs, and you get updates, etc.
People don't want the responsability to keep them updated, secured, deployed, etc. Paying a small amount will always be more convenient than to maintain it yourself. The issue was never coding it.
ChrisMarshallNY · 6h ago
We have published an iOS app that is a utility for a relatively small demographic. It's been on the App Store since January, and we have a bit over 1,000 users. I don't really expect it to get more than a couple of thousand.
I did test it with 12,000 users (fake ones), so it should handle small scales, but it will definitely have to be rewritten, for much larger scales. It would not be as usable, in that case. At this scale, it works very well, indeed.
That's fine. It works great, and we vet every signup, so we're not interested at all in scaling.
midhir · 9h ago
> Then came the weirdness: bursts of Tor traffic, spammy signups
I have a small hobby site - maybe a few hundred real users ever, and a handful of regulars. But the logs and users table are full of brute force and lousy sql injection attempts.
Why does this happen? How is it economical?
ACCount37 · 8h ago
Automated attacks, running on botnets or other breached servers.
Spraying 1-in-100000 chance attacks is very economical if you don't pay for compute or traffic.
bravesoul2 · 6h ago
Put a challenge in. A shitty hidden field honeytrap challenge can massively reduce this without needing to present people with a puzzle.
trenchpilgrim · 5h ago
It's economical because the compute and bandwidth come from devices infected with malware.
j45 · 9h ago
They are automated bots, it's economical when it's automated.
Often, they have databases of technologies, see what they come across and try a bunch of things that have worked, or try to look at the version of the software on your server and try just that.
TN1ck · 7h ago
Had a similar thought recently: With the advent of AI, custom software became extremely attainable. DHI syndrome suddenly becomes less of an issue - and can actually become a perk, as you build the most minimal software that works for your org, skipping potential vendor / saas fees. Really curious how the landscape of software will change in the next years due to that.
godot · 9h ago
> Could it be bigger? Sure. But at some point — maybe even before 1,000 people — the vibe breaks. The intimacy evaporates. You stop recognizing names. People talk less because it’s harder to know who’s listening. Growth would make it worse, not better.
>
> Some things work precisely because they’re small.
I'd argue this is true for social networks like Facebook actually. There was a magical period in Facebook between 2005 to 2010 or so where it was mostly college friends, high school friends, some work friends, and we all actually shared what we thought on our posts, shared links to interesting stuff, etc.
When all the relatives started being added to your network the vibe became decidedly different, and then acquaintances, people who aren't close, etc. and everyone has that one experience where one time they post something and someone who isn't close get offended, whether it's political or not, and they gradually share less and less.
wincy · 8h ago
I remember saying something on Facebook that wasn’t even that inflammatory but had a curse word and my grandma messaged me telling me to delete it. Instead I blocked grandma. Much happier just seeing grandma at holiday gatherings. I don’t think she even noticed honestly.
saghm · 7h ago
> I don’t think she even noticed honestly.
From her perspective, the post disappeared, and then you never posted anything like that again! Everyone wins
ChrisMarshallNY · 6h ago
I had a relative threaten his daughter, because her daughter-in-law posted some political stuff he disagreed with.
Basically, he had been helping her out financially, and pulled it, because she refused to sanction her daughter-in-law on his behalf.
coldtea · 5h ago
This goes both ways (old to young and reverse), but family goes before politics. You don't cut out, or disown, or stop visiting, or badmouth family because you disagree with their politics...
If you do so, you were a shitty relative to begin with.
generj · 4h ago
It depends, if the political take is sufficiently shitty it’s a betrayal of your morals, friends etc to continue to associate with your family spouting it.
Typically that has to be some extreme form of bigotry people won’t let go of after repeated coaching. Extreme bigotry or conspiracy thinking is arguably a form of abuse directed at other family members and it’s 100% ok to cut people off for being abusive.
RangerScience · 3h ago
AFAIK, you cut off shitty relatives…
…and you usually find out they’re shitty because of how they handle (or don’t) “political” conversations.
Pro tip: You don’t get to decide for someone else what’s “just” politics. If someone else says it’s important, while you’re interacting with them, it’s important.
No comments yet
stouset · 3h ago
No, sorry. Nazi family members come last. Family members with no respect for the rights and freedoms of others and who encourage and support inhumane treatment of others don’t get a free pass.
Ar-Curunir · 3h ago
Where does it stop? What if your relatives support, eg, racist policies? What if they support genocide? How personal does it have to be?
What if you’re dating a person of another race, and your relatives support keeps making racist comments to you, even after you try to explain why that’s not okay?
mkoubaa · 3h ago
What a stupid reason to cut off your child - so late in life too.
brentjanderson · 6h ago
There's actually a term for this, Context Collapse [1] that explores how social media forces everyone to have a single online persona instead of presenting in the way that makes sense for a given social context (e.g. the "you" at work vs. the "you" at school vs. the "you" with family).
That's a great point. In the mid 2000s I remember thinking about this. "You don't talk to your parents the same way you talk to your friends. So it's like, you are different people to different people."
saubeidl · 6h ago
Google Plus tried fixing that with its "circles" feature. Of course, that never really went anywhere..
kevml · 5h ago
Excellent point. Plus and Wave were ahead of their time.
throwawayq3423 · 2h ago
It never went anywhere because it's an engineer's solution to a social problem.
danlugo92 · 4h ago
IG and others have similar functionality nowadays at least.
positron26 · 5h ago
Circles was a killer feature. And then I never really used it. In hindsight, any SNS begins as a megaphone and if it can't make statements in culture, it doesn't exist. It's not actually about the individuals. Sure, people want to post things, but they want to be feeding into something that does stuff. I don't think Google ever made that case. It was pure chicken and egg with no ice breakers.
throwawayq3423 · 2h ago
> Circles was a killer feature. And then I never really used it.
Then it wasn't a good feature.
dghlsakjg · 3h ago
This meshes deeply with "The medium is the message" from McLuhan.
sugarpimpdorsey · 9h ago
I remember being the last one of my friend group to sign up. Having been an old-school internet who grew up on IRC and such, I thought it was insane people would enter their real name and picture into what looked like some shitty PHP site allegedly run by "some dude at Harvard". But all the girls were on it and the rest is history I guess.
pier25 · 9h ago
Facebook around 2008 was pretty cool. Just me hanging out with my irl friends.
And then relatives started joining and it became more like a dinner with your extended family.
xgkickt · 8h ago
I thought Google+’s Circles was a good idea.
mojuba · 8h ago
Google's Circles is a classical example of something that seems like a great idea on paper but doesn't work in practice. It had too much friction: categorizing people by circles and then also deciding which circle should receive what. Apparently nobody liked it and it's one of the reasons Plus failed so spectacularly.
ncruces · 4h ago
No, it didn't fail.
Circles is group chats (WhatsApp, or whatever's popular in your neck of the woods), which I'd argue is how (most?) people in 2025 actually do “social networking.”
They absolutely are. Maybe less so in the USA, but they have replaced Facebook for many (most?) people in the subcontinent, Africa, and south america
buzzerbetrayed · 7h ago
Another reason was asymmetric friendships. Meaning Alice could add Bob to a circle without Bob adding Alice back. Made it so much harder for the network effect to kick in.
danlugo92 · 4h ago
FWIW IG now has a similar feature. I don't use it but alas...
citizenkeen · 6h ago
And yet for certain communities - like TTRPGs - it not only worked incredibly well but were still unlocking the effects of its loss.
amelius · 8h ago
You could run something like Facebook but in tiny shards. It would be better. And require 1/1000th of the engineering workforce.
NikolaNovak · 7h ago
I liked Google Plus. "Circles (of friends)" is exactly how my brain works. So I had a family circle and computer geeks circle and photography circle and general circle. It was super easy to create and manage the Venn diagrams, and be in control of both how you share and what you see. It was even easy to share circles themselves! The joy of discovering somebody's shared circle with awesome photographers to follow. I felt in control and joyous and it was awesome.
I am, as always, a negative focus group - perhaps precisely for same reasons I loved it, apparently nobody else did :-/.
chrisldgk · 7h ago
People hated it because Google for some reason decided to force it into YouTube by forcing you to link your YouTube account to your G+ account. Remember that stick figure tank guy that was plastered over every comment section?
I believe that’s mostly what killed Google Plus. People were introduced to it in the worst way possible, so nobody actually cared to try it out, even if it was technically a good product.
xemdetia · 6h ago
This was also introduced in the same moment as a bunch of real name initiatives from multiple companies. People were rejecting it based on what it demanded compared to what was offered. It also killed or force reworked other Google products that were working fine to end users (e.g. Google Talk).
In my eyes it was one of the key moments that put them on a downward trajectory in public opinion. So while it might have had the right features the rest of the deal sucked, and people were already tiring of social media overall.
rom16384 · 6h ago
I understand the negative focus group part. The internet radio stations I like end up closing. I dislike advertising, but radio stations without income are unsustainable. This makes it hard for me to design products since they will likely fail! Maybe I should design them to be the opposite of what I'd like them to be...
xgkickt · 3h ago
Reminder for everyone to donate to your favorite station (eg SomaFM).
btilly · 7h ago
Google Plus correctly identified a major problem.
Unfortunately the solution that works for most people is to have multiple identities on multiple social media sites. So FB with one circle, work relationships on Slack, several channels on Discord, a group of friends on Instagram, a couple of groups on What's App, some mobile game friends on Line...
saghm · 7h ago
That's a really good point that I haven't seen made before. Even with apps/networks that are ostensibly pretty similar, like Slack and Discord both offering channel-based text chat, real-time audio calls with screen sharing, and the ability to join multiple servers/organizations, the people I hang out with and the type of things I talk about with them on Slack versus Discord are very different. I've never worked at a place that used Discord for their work communications, and I've never had a group of people I gamed with who use Slack to coordinate and talk while playing. While there's potentially a bit of friction if I happen to want to start gaming with a friend from work or something like that, I'd honestly still want to use separate accounts for my personal life and work stuff even if the same app was used everywhere, so having everything in a single place just doesn't feel like it matters.
lostdog · 7h ago
And that's why the real name policies helped kill Facebook. The best way to section off your friends from family from work is a separate somewhat anonymous account for each.
buzzerbetrayed · 7h ago
I wish Google didn’t give up up everything they try. Google plus was cool.
xnx · 8h ago
I can see many way where you can only follow (and be followed) by 1000 people would be better in many way. An audience of 1000 isn't monetizable so the network wouldn't be poisoned by ads ("sponsored content" AKA "sponcon").
> Path was a social networking-enabled photo sharing and messaging service for mobile devices that was launched on 14 November 2010. The service allowed users to share up to a total of 50 contacts with their close friends and family.
stanmancan · 8h ago
1,000 is way too many. Low hundreds max.
Seanambers · 4h ago
At some point, everyone on Facebook realized almost at the same time, that it was no longer a place to share, but a place to compete.
Then everyone basically stopped sharing and started curating.
jszymborski · 6h ago
This is sorta something people are discovering with Mastodon. Lots of instances are realizing it's better to cap registrations before they get too large and just have someone spin up another instance.
You sorta get the best of both worlds with Fedi. I'm glad I get to go down hashtag rabbit holes or see boosts from other instances, but I recognize names from my local instance and I feel comfortable we mostly agree on norms and moires which makes folks trust the moderation more (although maybe I'm biased, I'm on the trust and safety team of my instance).
thewebguyd · 9h ago
Yeah, Facebook's best days were when it still required a .edu email to sign up.
Makes me wonder if there would still be a market for a smaller, niche social media like that, but on the open web and not locked behind something like Discord servers.
ipaddr · 7h ago
This is the reason for facebooks success the rollout. Regardless of when you joined it was always better for you then the next group.
Everyone knows it's best days were when it was limited to Harvard.
There is a market for one. Can you roll it out the way facebook did to make it a success. Facebook technology started off pretty basic. There success is creating demand. Remember when facebook use to offer to login to hotmail and invite everyone for you before hotmail caught on and banned it? That's the secret sauce.
comes to mind... those were the days, circa 2014 for me, chilling with folk, waiting for thier grad admissions letters
30minAdayHN · 6h ago
Once a sister of my friend messaged me asking to take down a picture of him with a beer mug. It was because they were looking for matches for him (Indian wedding). I said no and told her that it is better to lose such a match :p
At this point, my network is bunch of 'aunts' and 'uncles'. I take secret pleasure by posting stuff that irks them :)
tombert · 5h ago
SomethingAwful is still fun precisely because they don't have too many people. At any given time, there's about ~2500 active users, which is enough to keep the chats funny and interesting and avoiding "dead mall" vibes, but not so much that it's horrible like LinkedIn or Facebook.
rco8786 · 9h ago
Yea the first few years of Facebook were magical. It felt like suddenly you could connect with your peers in a new way, discover old friends, etc. Went downhill pretty quickly though.
Jbird2k · 7h ago
Telegram is a platform where you can connect with people on a small scale
para_parolu · 7h ago
The best social network I ever used was private one with a few thousand users. Over time you just know most active users.
derefr · 8h ago
I think of this as the Dark Forest problem of social networks.
The original "Dark Forest hypothesis" is the idea that alien civilizations are silent not because they're not out there; and not because they wouldn't love to meet us and form positive-sum interactions; but rather because they've all concluded — from evidence or pure logic — that there are likely to be scary things "out there" listening; and that, by trying to draw attention to themselves to make friends, they would also draw the attention of these scary predators.
Modern social networks have the "dark forest problem" insofar as your mom, or your boss — or the HR departments of random companies you might in the future apply to work for — might be able to join, follow you, and see your posts. In this analogy, your mom/boss/bigcorp-HR are the predators lurking in the Dark Forest. Knowing they're there makes you go silent, refusing to "make yourself known" / "make yourself vulnerable" in any way these predators might potentially latch onto.
The analogy does break down a bit, because unlike alien civilizations in the cosmic void, there are signals we as individuals can send out on a social network that "make us known" at least somewhat but don't "make us vulnerable." These are the "performative, groomed" posts you see shared on Facebook, posted on public Instagram accounts, blogged on LinkedIn, etc. (I suppose a more-precise name, that incorporates this consideration, would be the "chaperone problem" — but that's less evocative.)
Social networks are good and fun and easy — possibly even a net positive for mental health — when they either inherently or coincidentally avoid becoming a dark forest.
In real-world terms:
• Interest-based activity groups (think "knitting circle" or "D&D group"), and community [not professional] sports leagues, are great social networks.
• Conventions, youth summer camps, and adult workshops [think "pottery class"] are all also great — though ephemeral — social networks.
• Group therapy sessions are good social networks.
• A high school is — perhaps shockingly — a decent social network. (It has failure modes, yes, but it almost never fails in the dark-forest sense of "nobody ends up making any friends because everyone's too scared to talk.") And a college is a slightly better social network — not as good at producing friendships, but the friendships are more likely to last beyond the years you spend there.
Good online examples of social networks are mostly older: the single-interest phpBB forums; early online games, before ELO-based matchmaking; and, yeah, old Facebook. (And MySpace, too.)
• I think Tumblr is probably the oldest major "modern" social network that hasn't yet succumbed to the dark forest problem. Not sure why. (Maybe it's just never attracted the right sort of celebrity posters to give moms or bosses any reason to join, I guess. Or maybe the fact that Tumblr posts (used to?) have public web URLs, meant that viral-meme Tumblr posts could simply be linked to, without that then forcing visitors to join the platform? Or maybe the fact that Tumblr lets users have multiple blogs each — sort of like how YouTube accounts can have multiple YouTube channels each; so Tumblr users can have one "clean" blog tied to their identity, that they can show people, and then other blogs that they post more outré — yet meaningful and vulnerable — stuff to. But without these being true "alts", as account DMs can still only originate from the main-blog identity.)
• BlueSky has also avoided the dark forest problem for now, but that's likely temporary; there's nothing in its design that makes it any less "for everybody" + "for public performance" than Twitter is/was.
Everything else is either a ghost town save for its performative stage (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, even HN somewhat); or it's an archipelago of out-of-band-formed groups of mutuals who are otherwise private and undiscoverable through the platform itself (Instagram, all group-chat apps); or it's not a "social network" at all, in that there is an expectation of anonymity / creating alt accounts / being able to (Reddit, 4chan, modern online games.)
It'd be interesting to design a social network from the ground up with the goal of making it inherently impossible for the network to devolve into a dark forest.
Velorivox · 7h ago
You’ve misrepresented the core of your argument. Wikipedia on dark forest hypothesis:
“The "dark forest" hypothesis presumes that any space-faring civilization would view any other intelligent life as an inevitable threat…”
> not because they wouldn't love to meet us and form positive-sum interactions
Not sure where you got this adaptation from.
WaltPurvis · 2h ago
> Not sure where you got this adaptation from.
Perhaps they got it from the experience of being a human being. I and many other human beings would love to meet an alien civilization and form positive-sum interactions, yet at the same time I'm not sure the risks outweighs the benefits. It doesn't seem like a very far-out addition to the theory to me.
danlugo92 · 4h ago
It's just seeing it from the other side, still applies IMO. E.g. not talking about politics ("making yourself 'dark'").
Velorivox · 4h ago
Not the response I expected. You've misunderstood a well known hypothesis and are spreading misinformation.
And then doubling down.
Well, what else can one expect from HN. :)
ajsnigrutin · 5h ago
Google + solved this issue with 'circles' or whatever it was called.
For me, facebook died when they replaced the user generated content with random garbage and links. Same with instagram, when photos of sunsets and plates of food turned to random videos of people I don't know.
The total number of people on the site never mattered to me, the user content getting replaced with random stuff made it.. well.. "unsocial", and we had other sites for that (digg->reddit, stumbleupon etc.)
andai · 4h ago
"What I really want is to hang out where I hung out with my friends in college, but have all my older relatives there too."
—xkcd 1320
xgkickt · 2h ago
Digital Heaven. We may not get it, but our AI death masks will.
wat10000 · 8h ago
The problem I see is that people naturally compartmentalize, and Facebook basically disallows that.
I’m sure we all have people we sometimes talk politics with, and people we completely avoid the subject with. If both of those groups see my posts, how is that supposed to work? Well, it doesn’t. The typical outcome seems to be that people mentally compartmentalize, posting stuff intended for a particular group, but everyone sees it and it all goes to hell.
There are some people whose company I enjoy whose Facebook posts are basically an unending stream of “people who don’t support Trump are evil/stupid/garbage.” And I’m thinking, you realize that includes several people you supposedly like? I’m sure they have a group of people with whom they talk shit about the political opposition, and another group where they stick to other topics, but both groups end up seeing the stuff and it’s just alienating.
doctorpangloss · 6h ago
Ha ha, the authors says do things that don’t scale, but he used Gemini to write that cliche prose.
pikseladam · 9h ago
Ekşi Sözlük (eksisozluk.com) has always been like that, and it still is. People wait over 4–5 years just to become a user, while non-users can only read. It remains one of the biggest websites in Türkiye, yet the design is still very simple, with only one or two new features added over the years. It reached more and more users, but it never really scaled in true meaning. It still like a weekend project
prisenco · 9h ago
I wonder if slow growth businesses like this will win out in the end. Every other social network decays under a crush of revenue expectations and an In-N-Out model of tech can grow steadily without ever falling apart.
Could be a real tortoise and the hare situation but we won't know for a long time.
celaleddin · 8h ago
Interesting and lovely to see ekşi sözlük getting mentioned on HN (even though I remember seeing ssg on HN before if I remember correctly).
I'm curious if there are any similar (in the vein of Douglas Adams' "Guide to the Galaxy") websites with a geographically wider adoption, basically its English version.
I remember İTÜ Sözlük changing its brand to Instela to go somewhat global. But looks like they failed.
I also remember seeing a "Guide" in some Douglas Adams related website, but it wasn't really an active website as far as I remember.
mooreds · 10h ago
Interesting perspective about writing a bunch of mini-apps that you aren't concerned with making money on or scaling.
Reminds me a bit of the carpenters I've seen work who spend time building frames/other wood "tools" to help them get the actual work done faster.
The cost of writing software has definitely decreased. And you do have a different and smaller class of problems when you write an ad-hoc app.
j45 · 9h ago
Making tools to make the tools is the real devops.
CI/CD can be as complex and full of pagentry as some people want and it's great when it fits, and premature optimization the rest of the time.
tstrimple · 8h ago
Those are called jigs and they really separate the good from great woodworkers. Tamar from 3x3Custom is probably one of my favorite YouTube woodworkers because she's all about making and using jigs. Typically they are trying to eliminate manual measurements for repeatable parts.
I love this mindset and where we're headed with the cost to build so low now. I follow r/MacApps and it's been wild to see the explosion of quality, specialized apps shared there. I have often thought it's because of Cursor, Claude, and other code production accelerators showing up recently.
ggambetta · 8h ago
In my double life as an actor, I've written some software that greatly simplifies the main day to day task of running a talent agency. Its ~15 users love it to death, but that's it, it has a total of ~15 users. It's my happy little project.
Could it be useful to more people? Almost certainly, and at some point I considered running it as a service, and I even had a few trial users. But then I realized that dealing with GDPR compliance and the like wasn't going to be as fun, so in the end it remained an internal project.
easton · 9h ago
> It would grab the photo, grab the caption, and send it through a direct mail API to my mom.
Anyone know what API they are talking about? If I could quickly email a photo somewhere and have it appear as a 4x6 in my mailbox in a few days i would have a much cooler fridge.
gbear605 · 9h ago
If you search “physical mail API”, I see several options. The first one that I saw charged $1 per letter.
derwiki · 9h ago
There are a few but I use directmailers.com!
bravesoul2 · 6h ago
Lol I agree. But I was thinking by "dont scale" to scratch my itch and never release it. That is more worthwhile now.
overgard · 5h ago
Nitpick, but having side projects you don’t plan to scale isn’t anything unique to the AI era
sowbug · 5h ago
The cost-benefit analysis has changed. It's now easier to build something indulgently complex -- something of larger scale than a "side project" -- for just a few people.
legendofbrando · 5h ago
I think this is precisely right. Like 100% correct. No notes. Exactly nails it.
theropost · 8h ago
But what if everything scales but what if no matter how complicated how obscure how mundane how niche what if everything I mean everything scales
krapp · 8h ago
Everything I mean everything doesn't scale.
anonzzzies · 7h ago
I find running a company over 50 people not nice. We had a few 1000 and it just really sucks imho.
Kibranoz · 9h ago
Open source your apps so other people can use it and host it on their own if they want.
Some non profits also hosts popular open source server - client software
SamInTheShell · 4h ago
Vibe coding isn’t going to net you horizontal scalability out of the box if you know nothing about scalable system architecture. These models have more examples of single node wonder codebases than they do for real world application of algorithms like Paxos or RAFT. That being said I let Claude Sonnet 4 eat my GHC premium creds a few weeks back to see if it could figure out multiraft in Go. The short answer is just no, without doing an entire refresher on where it went wrong.
It doesn’t really matter though. If you target a DB like Yugabyte and use distributed storage like an s3 bucket or minio, you can get pretty far as long as you keep the core components memory efficient and stateless.
manoDev · 9h ago
> The cost to build is so low now.
The cost seems deceivingly low right now because those AI companies are fighting for monopoly, but in reality the cost is huge – not only capital, but also trust, privacy, and environmental.
priyanmuthu · 9h ago
If the concern is about the inference cost -- we do have open-weight models that are getting more powerful, and hardware to run small-ish models cheap. I run agents using small local models in my MacBook.
manoDev · 9h ago
Yes – but when people say "AI", most often they are talking about the latest OpenAI/Claude development.
victorbjorklund · 8h ago
Todays open models are the latest OpenAI/Claude X months ago.
nine_k · 9h ago
Can you use something like Cursor with your local models? Is the quality comparable? Is the speed acceptable?
brabel · 8h ago
For quality to be comparable, you need to use a relatively big model, which will only work if you have around 64GB of RAM or more. The latest OpenAI local models (https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-oss/), for example, are really good, but you probably want the 120b to have results at least near what you get with their best cloud models, and that requires I think 80GB+. If you don't have that much, you can try stuff like the DeepSeek models, which are known for being ultra-efficient and runnable with "normal" computers, if you don't mind the politics of using that (and there are many models now that are similar!) but I haven't tried too many more to be able to comment.
On my Macbook M1 Pro I can run the gpt-oss-20b model without issues and quite fast.
bossyTeacher · 8h ago
>if you don't mind the politics of using that
what exactly are the "politics" of using DeepSeek? Feels weird to single out DeepSeek like that
kaashif · 7h ago
Using anything Chinese is political while using anything American or European is obviously totally apolitical?
Of course!
jakelazaroff · 7h ago
Not sure why parent is being downvoted here. Even without getting into whether it's possible for technology to be apolitical, many AI companies have explicitly political goals.
For example, OpenAI's charter is "to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity". They go on to list more specific political goals downstream from that: https://openai.com/charter/
overfeed · 8h ago
Aider (cli) and continue.dev (VS Code plugin) can both run with a local(net) Ollama. The qwen-coder models are pretty good and getting better; qwen3-coder is in the ballpark of Sonnet 3.5 for code-synthesis, albeit slower on my hardware.
jvanderbot · 9h ago
Aider!
derwiki · 8h ago
+1 Aider, first time I used it I knew I was looking into the future
conradev · 8h ago
I care far more about the noise and air pollution that x.ai is causing in Memphis (ruining lives) than the environmental impact of the industry as a whole.
6% YoY growth in domestic electricity demand is frankly nothing compared to the capacity that developing economies are building out for things other than AI.
aussieguy1234 · 4h ago
I have a bunch of little projects that benefit me personally and professionally in a number of ways.
I keep them private because for a lot of them, if others had access to the same tools, my tool assisted efforts in these areas would become ineffective if others were all doing the same thing as me.
Its only a small few tools that i'll actually share with the world.
jonovate · 7h ago
>"A few strangers from the Orange Site signed up"
Is that us?
Ironic this made it to the top of HN.
alexchantavy · 7h ago
Guess it better scale then :-)
supportengineer · 8h ago
If I was a successful billionaire, and I didn’t want any competition, I would tell all the young smart people to go play in a different field
YetAnotherNick · 8h ago
> Growth would make it worse, not better.
Worse for the company as a whole, yes. But for individuals involved it is generally better. Employees get to cash in, founders or people who like early stage can and often do start something small again, new employees like structure and better work life balance, and investors get their return.
salomonk_mur · 7h ago
Only in theory. Most times none of those stakeholders get anything but wages and recognition.
zer00eyz · 8h ago
This is a chord, this is another chord, this is a third chord.
Now start a band.
I dont think tech ever expected to have a "punk" phase but this is it. Do the math on how big your app has to be to make 240k a year (before tax). Now host that on something reasonable (not aws/cloud markup trash) and you can make a comfortable living. Payment processing apple/google store or square or ... CS, you dont need it any more! Accounting: software for that and a once a year with a professional. Payroll and insurance: there is a platform for that if you want to go into business with friends. Incorporation: tons of online tools will hand hold you through the process.
Your startup doesn't need to be a unicorn, it needs to pay for YOU.
m3kw9 · 9h ago
Money maximizers always try to scale, so we can handle a million users. I do think that’s risky most times. When you have limited resources Don’t scale till it gets close to breaking.
samdixon · 9h ago
This reads like a LinkedIn post
dented42 · 3h ago
Was scaling ever the point?
TZubiri · 6h ago
This is all well, if you want to be a hacker and spend 100s of hours migrating a hack that sends a postal card to your mom, that's a nice hobby.
But I want obscene amounts of wealth that would make my accountant uneasy, I want 10K DAU running against a single 10$/mo VPS that can do more cpu cycles in a second than the amount of words I have ever spoken, I want project 24 and 76 to take off, so I can kill all the others if they are too time consuming. I want to be greeted through SSH with a message telling me that I haven't logged in for 3400 days and coincidentally have that be the uptime, I want to check the balance of the stripe account with that single purpose LLC to be like 874$, even if I fail I want to at least go for the moonshot.
To each their own I guess.
halfi · 7h ago
Hi
nine_k · 8h ago
It's only a startup when it can attain the hockey-stick growth. Otherwise it's just a sparkling hobby.
Having a hobby is great! The biggest difference is that a startup is intended to make you a lot of money, and maybe change the way people do things, so you work on it full-time, and a hobby is intended to make your life immediately more enjoyable, and costs you money.
A cargo ship and a pleasure boat have a number of things in common, but...
hgomersall · 8h ago
Most businesses make enough money but not necessarily a lot of money. Slightly fewer make decent money. It's not that common for a business to make its founders "a lot" of money.
95% of businesses are classed as micro in the UK. Small and micro is 99%.
I'd love to see more people realize this and use that new power to build things that don't necessarily scale on their own, but might trigger changes for sizeable groups, either socially, or politically.
[1] https://mariozechner.at/posts/2024-07-15-two-years-in-review...
I'd argue that we need to apply this to companies too. Stop building startups (which start losing money and may never ever make a profit in the process of scaling) and start creating companies (which make a profit ASAP and may never scale).
OP wasn't talking about this kind of thing, of course. The phenomenon of hobby projects being "startups" has always been a weird fit.
[1] I define this at least as "supports more than one person's salary in perpetuity," but would probably add some things like margin requirements if I thought about it more. Obviously you can exist as a consultant charging by the hour, and that's not what either of us is talking about.
[2] The only examples of this I've personally ever seen have been dominant players in niche markets with high bars to entry. So they weren't hyper-growth unicorns, but weren't really your definition of "companies", either. You don't get to these kinds of businesses by aiming to be one - you get there by trying for something bigger and topping out the market.
[3] Consider the phenomenon of the small vet clinic, which is rapidly ceasing to exist. Private equity has been steadily hoovering up these relatively high-margin, low-regulation businesses for the same economic reasons that software companies get big. If you try to create a vet clinic, you will be assimilated or crushed by a bigger player with a brand and the ability to undercut your prices.
I think the cash merry go round will stop eventually because the moat, in as much as there is one, is the vet themselves, not the business. If my vet leaves and opens a new practice, I will follow the person. Vet services don't really scale either, you can hit efficiencies with admin, but I'm sure a software company is willing to eat the PE firm's lunch there. With software, costs are heavily weighted to the fixed side. With vets, seeing twice the number of dogs takes twice the number of vet hours, vet tech hours, etc.
You're right that vet clinics aren't like software in the variable cost structure, but that just makes the software business more attractive for consolidation, not less. Bigger players will have the customer relationship, lower fixed costs, and high margins, with little threat of competition.
The moat is the land. It doesn't even matter if it self-owned or a lease.
The vet just can't walk away and open a new practice nearby.
They're harder to find in B2C than B2B. Individual problems can sometimes map to B2B.
https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/
Yes, it was posted again just the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44913359
On another note: did you just tell a bunch of strangers on the internet how to snail-mail arbitrary photos to your mom? Or does that email thing only activate if the email comes from your own address? (Guess you'll find out! :))
There are a lot of sites on the web that let you make a hex map. A lot of them are even free. Many of them have features that my little webapp doesn't have.
But mine works the way I want it. I wanted rivers and forest to be modifiers on top of the base terrain of the tile. I wanted to have a few different settlement icons. I wanted to have more variations of hills and mountains than most of the other sites do.
And if I'm ever missing a feature on this thing, I can just add it, rather than just sort of saying, "Oh well."
Because it's an app that's just for me, I don't need to worry about scale or security or monetization or anything.
It took me about an hour to two hours of my attention (spread out over two calendar days) to have the AI code it.
I assume it will eventually become unmaintainable if I add a bunch to it.
https://youtu.be/5Vt8zqhHe_c?si=Etv3Gz5f0bfAw6gM
If you do build it with boring tech in a simple way, you can just rely on it.
Quality of the code aside because now it doesn’t have to support millions of users anymore.
People don't want the responsability to keep them updated, secured, deployed, etc. Paying a small amount will always be more convenient than to maintain it yourself. The issue was never coding it.
I did test it with 12,000 users (fake ones), so it should handle small scales, but it will definitely have to be rewritten, for much larger scales. It would not be as usable, in that case. At this scale, it works very well, indeed.
That's fine. It works great, and we vet every signup, so we're not interested at all in scaling.
I have a small hobby site - maybe a few hundred real users ever, and a handful of regulars. But the logs and users table are full of brute force and lousy sql injection attempts.
Why does this happen? How is it economical?
Spraying 1-in-100000 chance attacks is very economical if you don't pay for compute or traffic.
Often, they have databases of technologies, see what they come across and try a bunch of things that have worked, or try to look at the version of the software on your server and try just that.
I'd argue this is true for social networks like Facebook actually. There was a magical period in Facebook between 2005 to 2010 or so where it was mostly college friends, high school friends, some work friends, and we all actually shared what we thought on our posts, shared links to interesting stuff, etc.
When all the relatives started being added to your network the vibe became decidedly different, and then acquaintances, people who aren't close, etc. and everyone has that one experience where one time they post something and someone who isn't close get offended, whether it's political or not, and they gradually share less and less.
From her perspective, the post disappeared, and then you never posted anything like that again! Everyone wins
Basically, he had been helping her out financially, and pulled it, because she refused to sanction her daughter-in-law on his behalf.
If you do so, you were a shitty relative to begin with.
Typically that has to be some extreme form of bigotry people won’t let go of after repeated coaching. Extreme bigotry or conspiracy thinking is arguably a form of abuse directed at other family members and it’s 100% ok to cut people off for being abusive.
…and you usually find out they’re shitty because of how they handle (or don’t) “political” conversations.
Pro tip: You don’t get to decide for someone else what’s “just” politics. If someone else says it’s important, while you’re interacting with them, it’s important.
No comments yet
What if you’re dating a person of another race, and your relatives support keeps making racist comments to you, even after you try to explain why that’s not okay?
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context_collapse
Then it wasn't a good feature.
And then relatives started joining and it became more like a dinner with your extended family.
Circles is group chats (WhatsApp, or whatever's popular in your neck of the woods), which I'd argue is how (most?) people in 2025 actually do “social networking.”
Instagram/TikTok/Xitter is… something else entirely.
I am, as always, a negative focus group - perhaps precisely for same reasons I loved it, apparently nobody else did :-/.
I believe that’s mostly what killed Google Plus. People were introduced to it in the worst way possible, so nobody actually cared to try it out, even if it was technically a good product.
In my eyes it was one of the key moments that put them on a downward trajectory in public opinion. So while it might have had the right features the rest of the deal sucked, and people were already tiring of social media overall.
Unfortunately the solution that works for most people is to have multiple identities on multiple social media sites. So FB with one circle, work relationships on Slack, several channels on Discord, a group of friends on Instagram, a couple of groups on What's App, some mobile game friends on Line...
> Path was a social networking-enabled photo sharing and messaging service for mobile devices that was launched on 14 November 2010. The service allowed users to share up to a total of 50 contacts with their close friends and family.
Then everyone basically stopped sharing and started curating.
You sorta get the best of both worlds with Fedi. I'm glad I get to go down hashtag rabbit holes or see boosts from other instances, but I recognize names from my local instance and I feel comfortable we mostly agree on norms and moires which makes folks trust the moderation more (although maybe I'm biased, I'm on the trust and safety team of my instance).
Makes me wonder if there would still be a market for a smaller, niche social media like that, but on the open web and not locked behind something like Discord servers.
Everyone knows it's best days were when it was limited to Harvard.
There is a market for one. Can you roll it out the way facebook did to make it a success. Facebook technology started off pretty basic. There success is creating demand. Remember when facebook use to offer to login to hotmail and invite everyone for you before hotmail caught on and banned it? That's the secret sauce.
comes to mind... those were the days, circa 2014 for me, chilling with folk, waiting for thier grad admissions letters
At this point, my network is bunch of 'aunts' and 'uncles'. I take secret pleasure by posting stuff that irks them :)
The original "Dark Forest hypothesis" is the idea that alien civilizations are silent not because they're not out there; and not because they wouldn't love to meet us and form positive-sum interactions; but rather because they've all concluded — from evidence or pure logic — that there are likely to be scary things "out there" listening; and that, by trying to draw attention to themselves to make friends, they would also draw the attention of these scary predators.
Modern social networks have the "dark forest problem" insofar as your mom, or your boss — or the HR departments of random companies you might in the future apply to work for — might be able to join, follow you, and see your posts. In this analogy, your mom/boss/bigcorp-HR are the predators lurking in the Dark Forest. Knowing they're there makes you go silent, refusing to "make yourself known" / "make yourself vulnerable" in any way these predators might potentially latch onto.
The analogy does break down a bit, because unlike alien civilizations in the cosmic void, there are signals we as individuals can send out on a social network that "make us known" at least somewhat but don't "make us vulnerable." These are the "performative, groomed" posts you see shared on Facebook, posted on public Instagram accounts, blogged on LinkedIn, etc. (I suppose a more-precise name, that incorporates this consideration, would be the "chaperone problem" — but that's less evocative.)
Social networks are good and fun and easy — possibly even a net positive for mental health — when they either inherently or coincidentally avoid becoming a dark forest.
In real-world terms:
• Interest-based activity groups (think "knitting circle" or "D&D group"), and community [not professional] sports leagues, are great social networks.
• Conventions, youth summer camps, and adult workshops [think "pottery class"] are all also great — though ephemeral — social networks.
• Group therapy sessions are good social networks.
• A high school is — perhaps shockingly — a decent social network. (It has failure modes, yes, but it almost never fails in the dark-forest sense of "nobody ends up making any friends because everyone's too scared to talk.") And a college is a slightly better social network — not as good at producing friendships, but the friendships are more likely to last beyond the years you spend there.
Good online examples of social networks are mostly older: the single-interest phpBB forums; early online games, before ELO-based matchmaking; and, yeah, old Facebook. (And MySpace, too.)
• I think Tumblr is probably the oldest major "modern" social network that hasn't yet succumbed to the dark forest problem. Not sure why. (Maybe it's just never attracted the right sort of celebrity posters to give moms or bosses any reason to join, I guess. Or maybe the fact that Tumblr posts (used to?) have public web URLs, meant that viral-meme Tumblr posts could simply be linked to, without that then forcing visitors to join the platform? Or maybe the fact that Tumblr lets users have multiple blogs each — sort of like how YouTube accounts can have multiple YouTube channels each; so Tumblr users can have one "clean" blog tied to their identity, that they can show people, and then other blogs that they post more outré — yet meaningful and vulnerable — stuff to. But without these being true "alts", as account DMs can still only originate from the main-blog identity.)
• BlueSky has also avoided the dark forest problem for now, but that's likely temporary; there's nothing in its design that makes it any less "for everybody" + "for public performance" than Twitter is/was.
Everything else is either a ghost town save for its performative stage (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, even HN somewhat); or it's an archipelago of out-of-band-formed groups of mutuals who are otherwise private and undiscoverable through the platform itself (Instagram, all group-chat apps); or it's not a "social network" at all, in that there is an expectation of anonymity / creating alt accounts / being able to (Reddit, 4chan, modern online games.)
It'd be interesting to design a social network from the ground up with the goal of making it inherently impossible for the network to devolve into a dark forest.
“The "dark forest" hypothesis presumes that any space-faring civilization would view any other intelligent life as an inevitable threat…”
> not because they wouldn't love to meet us and form positive-sum interactions
Not sure where you got this adaptation from.
Perhaps they got it from the experience of being a human being. I and many other human beings would love to meet an alien civilization and form positive-sum interactions, yet at the same time I'm not sure the risks outweighs the benefits. It doesn't seem like a very far-out addition to the theory to me.
And then doubling down.
Well, what else can one expect from HN. :)
For me, facebook died when they replaced the user generated content with random garbage and links. Same with instagram, when photos of sunsets and plates of food turned to random videos of people I don't know.
The total number of people on the site never mattered to me, the user content getting replaced with random stuff made it.. well.. "unsocial", and we had other sites for that (digg->reddit, stumbleupon etc.)
—xkcd 1320
I’m sure we all have people we sometimes talk politics with, and people we completely avoid the subject with. If both of those groups see my posts, how is that supposed to work? Well, it doesn’t. The typical outcome seems to be that people mentally compartmentalize, posting stuff intended for a particular group, but everyone sees it and it all goes to hell.
There are some people whose company I enjoy whose Facebook posts are basically an unending stream of “people who don’t support Trump are evil/stupid/garbage.” And I’m thinking, you realize that includes several people you supposedly like? I’m sure they have a group of people with whom they talk shit about the political opposition, and another group where they stick to other topics, but both groups end up seeing the stuff and it’s just alienating.
Could be a real tortoise and the hare situation but we won't know for a long time.
I'm curious if there are any similar (in the vein of Douglas Adams' "Guide to the Galaxy") websites with a geographically wider adoption, basically its English version.
I remember İTÜ Sözlük changing its brand to Instela to go somewhat global. But looks like they failed.
I also remember seeing a "Guide" in some Douglas Adams related website, but it wasn't really an active website as far as I remember.
Reminds me a bit of the carpenters I've seen work who spend time building frames/other wood "tools" to help them get the actual work done faster.
The cost of writing software has definitely decreased. And you do have a different and smaller class of problems when you write an ad-hoc app.
CI/CD can be as complex and full of pagentry as some people want and it's great when it fits, and premature optimization the rest of the time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOTqqSEtvng
Could it be useful to more people? Almost certainly, and at some point I considered running it as a service, and I even had a few trial users. But then I realized that dealing with GDPR compliance and the like wasn't going to be as fun, so in the end it remained an internal project.
Anyone know what API they are talking about? If I could quickly email a photo somewhere and have it appear as a 4x6 in my mailbox in a few days i would have a much cooler fridge.
Some non profits also hosts popular open source server - client software
It doesn’t really matter though. If you target a DB like Yugabyte and use distributed storage like an s3 bucket or minio, you can get pretty far as long as you keep the core components memory efficient and stateless.
The cost seems deceivingly low right now because those AI companies are fighting for monopoly, but in reality the cost is huge – not only capital, but also trust, privacy, and environmental.
On my Macbook M1 Pro I can run the gpt-oss-20b model without issues and quite fast.
what exactly are the "politics" of using DeepSeek? Feels weird to single out DeepSeek like that
Of course!
For example, OpenAI's charter is "to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity". They go on to list more specific political goals downstream from that: https://openai.com/charter/
6% YoY growth in domestic electricity demand is frankly nothing compared to the capacity that developing economies are building out for things other than AI.
I keep them private because for a lot of them, if others had access to the same tools, my tool assisted efforts in these areas would become ineffective if others were all doing the same thing as me.
Its only a small few tools that i'll actually share with the world.
Is that us?
Ironic this made it to the top of HN.
Worse for the company as a whole, yes. But for individuals involved it is generally better. Employees get to cash in, founders or people who like early stage can and often do start something small again, new employees like structure and better work life balance, and investors get their return.
Now start a band.
I dont think tech ever expected to have a "punk" phase but this is it. Do the math on how big your app has to be to make 240k a year (before tax). Now host that on something reasonable (not aws/cloud markup trash) and you can make a comfortable living. Payment processing apple/google store or square or ... CS, you dont need it any more! Accounting: software for that and a once a year with a professional. Payroll and insurance: there is a platform for that if you want to go into business with friends. Incorporation: tons of online tools will hand hold you through the process.
Your startup doesn't need to be a unicorn, it needs to pay for YOU.
But I want obscene amounts of wealth that would make my accountant uneasy, I want 10K DAU running against a single 10$/mo VPS that can do more cpu cycles in a second than the amount of words I have ever spoken, I want project 24 and 76 to take off, so I can kill all the others if they are too time consuming. I want to be greeted through SSH with a message telling me that I haven't logged in for 3400 days and coincidentally have that be the uptime, I want to check the balance of the stripe account with that single purpose LLC to be like 874$, even if I fail I want to at least go for the moonshot.
To each their own I guess.
Having a hobby is great! The biggest difference is that a startup is intended to make you a lot of money, and maybe change the way people do things, so you work on it full-time, and a hobby is intended to make your life immediately more enjoyable, and costs you money.
A cargo ship and a pleasure boat have a number of things in common, but...
95% of businesses are classed as micro in the UK. Small and micro is 99%.