AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: Is anyone doing anything cool with tiny language models?

Top comment by kaspermarstal

I built an Excel Add-In that allows my girlfriend to quickly filter 7000 paper titles and abstracts for a review paper that she is writing [1]. It uses Gemma 2 2b which is a wonderful little model that can run on her laptop CPU. It works surprisingly well for this kind of binary classification task.

The nice thing is that she can copy/paste the titles and abstracts in to two columns and write e.g. "=PROMPT(A1:B1, "If the paper studies diabetic neuropathy and stroke, return 'Include', otherwise return 'Exclude'")" and then drag down the formula across 7000 rows to bulk process the data on her own because it's just Excel. There is a gif on the readme on the Github repo that shows it.

[1] https://github.com/getcellm/cellm

2. Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?

Top comment by jasode

>move our local communities off Facebook and onto our own platform. Is there a off-the-shelf solution

To get better answers, you need to flesh out all the features of Facebook that your communities are using. E.g. Shared event calendars? Groups? Private Messaging? Video hosting for users to upload vids of community events? Live feeds? Etc.

Look at the left side of navigation topics to help you enumerate and think about it: https://www.facebook.com/help/130979416980121/

Do you expect those ~50k to create new logins for the new platform? Or do they sign in with their existing "Facebook ID" to avoid hassle of new account creation? Do they need a phone app? If it's website only from the smartphone web browser, do you need web push for notifications? Facebook interaction with others has convenient lookup from the phones' contact listing. Web-only site doesn't have straightforward access to smartphone's address book (without PhoneGap). Etc.

If your communities are using a lot of those social networking features, it means trying to use Mastodon as a substitute for Facebook is going to be a very incomplete solution.

Of course, alternative solutions are not going to fully match Facebook but you still need to think of the threshold for a minimum viable feature set so your 50k users won't reject it.

3. Ask HN: Why buy domains and 301 redirect them to me?

Top comment by TrueDuality

As others have mentioned this is likely one of a couple of scenarios, roughly ordered by my guess on likelihood:

- Attempting to use your legitimate content and services to improve the SEO rank of other domains (even unrelated ones). This can usually be checked by looking for a sitemap.xml, there will be pages not redirected to your site that contain pages of links.

- Closely following the above, the pages may not be links to other sites but might be hosting phishing pages for other services unrelated to yours. The redirect here acts as a bluff for casual inspection of the domain. You won't see page entries in a sitemap.xml file for these ones.

- Attempting to "age" a domain. Not many talk about this option, but new domains are a red flag to a lot of automated security processes. When purchasing a domain and giving it a history associated with a legitimate service they make the domain look less suspicious for future malicious use.

- Preparation for a targeted campaign. This is pretty unlikely, you need to be really worth a dedicated long term campaign effort specifically against you or your company. If you're doing controversial/novel research, are managing millions of dollars, performing a service a state actor would object to, or have high profile clientele then maybe you fall into this category. These are patient campaigns and want to make the domain "feel normal and official". They won't do anything public with the domain such as SEO tweaking or link spam, they'll use these domains only for specific targeted one-off low-noise attacks. They're relying on staff to see that the domain has been connected to your service for years and is likely just a domain someone in marketing purchased and forgot about. This is exceptionally rare.

4. Ask HN: Is anyone making money selling traditional downloadable software?

Top comment by lefstathiou

My brother acquired an aging app (from an aging founder) built on Delphi used by many dozens (or low hundred) of the world’s leading shipping, energy and commodities companies, used as a standard to calculate “laytime” and “demurge” (myriad of fees associated when a ship docks into a port). It used to cost $5k for a perpetual license tied to usb based key that had to be plugged in to activate. If you wanted to use on two machines, you had to buy two licenses with two keys.

Customers in the US and Europe hated the usb, especially during COVID. In random places of Africa, where they greatly valued the single perpetual license, it persists. From my perspective, I don’t see anything positive from being an installed application for this use case - he had to hop through so many security hoops that when he rolled out the web solution IT departments breathed a huge sigh of relief and thanked him.

Over a period of about 2 years he converted almost everyone to saas and 4x’d the annual revenue. That also generated enough fcf to hire more developers to ship more features.

Saas is generally the way to go. Installed apps are common in financial services and industrial applications. I can think of a bunch of other niche examples but I personally would never pursue this model. We put bugs into production from time to time and it is nice to be able to instantly roll out updates.

5. Ask HN: Can we just admit we want to replace jobs with AI?

Top comment by gnfargbl

But how is an individual supposed to "prepare" for AGI?

The outcome of further automation will be to move even more capital under the control of an even smaller number of hands. It's that increasing inequality which is the problem, not AGI.

6. Ask HN: How are you preparing for PEPPOL?

Top comment by magicalhippo

We make a niche B2B software which has an invoicing module and we've had to add EHF[1] support, which is the Norwegian implementation of electronic invoices delivered through PEPPOL.

The gov't in Norway has mandated use of EHF for billing the gov't for about a decade now, which really drove adoption. Our customers has to have an agreement with one of the access points[3], so the cost of sending the EHF goes directly to the customer.

Adding support wasn't terribly hard, but it wasn't trivial either. The XML is fairly straight forward, but when you submit one the access point doesn't just do a schema verification, it also verifies that intermediate values are calculated and rounded correctly for example.

[1]: https://anskaffelser.dev/postaward/g3/spec/current/billing-3...

[2]: https://peppol.org/learn-more/country-profiles/norway/

[3]: https://anskaffelser.no/verktoy/veiledere/aksesspunkter-ehf-...

7. Ask HN: Songwriters, what software do you use?

Top comment by dietrichepp

Currently working on an album.

Software I use for songwriting: mostly Logic, also Dorico. Voice memos. Rhymezone sometimes. Rhymezone seems less and less helpful as I go on. I hardly use text editors for lyrics, paper seems to work a lot better. I end up with a lot of scribbles all over the paper.

AI suggestions for songwriting seems a bit like turning on cheat codes in a game. Cheat codes will help me beat a game faster. The cost? The game is less fun, and the whole reason I play games is to have fun. Songwriting is an activity for me, like gardening or running or something like that. Or putting together a jigsaw puzzle. If you had an AI assistant that could help you put together a jigsaw puzzle, would you use it?

There are AI tools around and some work decently well:

- Logic has session players. I don’t think they’re AI, but they are decent at putting up the skeleton of a song.

- AI-powered stem-splitting tools help you pick apart songs you like and figure out how they work.

- AI-powered song mastering tools produce dubious output. I have gone through multiple iterations with AI-powered tools and ended up happier just mastering the song myself.

LLMs seem like the great failure here.

8. Ask HN: Trying to find a post about some OS developer in the 80s coding by hand

Top comment by romanhn

This looks pretty close to your description: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39342143

EDIT: Looks like the parent post entered the second chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308). Not only did all the timestamps get rewritten, but apparently I can now edit this day-old comment :) Interestingly, it does show the correct timestamp when editing. Off-topic, but thought it's interesting behavior worth mentioning.

9. Ask HN: What is a common PR review time at your company?

Top comment by moosedev

As a reviewer... it really, really depends on how trivial or gnarly the PR is.

If it's a simple change that is obviously correct, I'll try to unblock the author ASAP - often within minutes, even if it interrupts my flow.

If it's a giant PR with lots of risky changes in vital code, an awkward-to-unreadable diff, and/or maddeningly questionable design/coding decisions that require me to think a lot and compose some nuanced, reasoned comments to steer you in a better direction, then, well, you might find yourself nagging me for a review 2 days later. (And I'll probably ask you to split up PRs like this in future, e.g. to separate major refactoring from any logic changes.)

10. Ask HN: Moving a not-for-profit web app off AWS

Top comment by isoprophlex

Few things beats a cheap, powerful Hetzner server, IMO. I host a LOT of stuff on my single €40/month box. 20 core, 64 gb ram, 1 TB ssd, unmetered network.

They have GPU-backed servers too, obviously theyre more expensive, and not ideal for your usecase maybe.

Modal is a good serverless alternative if you want to scale to zero and be able to handle spiky loads.