AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: Would you still choose Ruby on Rails for a startup in 2025?

Top comment by tra3

Yes, I would. In fact, I'd use any boring technology [0]. Anything that's been around and battle tested.

If I was at a startup trying to solve a business problem, the last thing I'd want to do is bruise my knuckles fighting with my tools. Rails provides an opinionated way to structure your codebase as well as many existing modules that just work. It's not exclusive in this space, but it's a safe bet. You can get any dev that's familiar with rails to ramp up pretty quick. If you rolled a custom web framework in a dialect of javascript you may have a more challenging time.

0: https://boringtechnology.club

2. Ask HN: Anyone else find LLM related posts causing them to lose interest in HN

Top comment by thallavajhula

It's the current hotness in tech. HN has always included trending tech topics. Ever since HN started, I've seen -

* Explosion of social media

* JavaScript libraries and the frontend revolution to modernizing the web and browsers

* Mobile apps

* Crypto

* Machine Learning

and now, AI & LLMs.

The only difference LLMs have with the others is the learning curve. The others, one could easily hop on the trend. With LLMs, before being able to understand what everyone's talking about, there's a lot to know. There can be a sense of being left out. I think that can be demotivating.

edit: formatting

3. Ask HN: Are YC startups *actually* hiring?

Top comment by TheGamerUncle

I would like to assume that I am a good candidate I usually get calls back from even LinkedIn posts or even indeed, but after well applying to more than two hundred offerings on the who is hiring posts in this place, and only having had been called twice. I can assure you that the ones here usually are not hiring and at best just want a rooster of possible replacements for their current employees. Most notable offender is mixrank, I know more than twenty people that have applied to no avail, even people with more than 22 years of experience and very fancy titles.

4. Ask HN: How to learn AI from first principles?

Top comment by noduerme

The following is not a take that will get you a job or teach you precisely how LLMs work, because you can look that up yourself. However, it may inspire you and you may create something that has a better-than-lottery-ticket chance of being an improvement over the AI status quo:

Without reading about how it's done now, just think about how you think a neural network should function. It ostensibly has input, output, and something in the middle. Maybe its input is a 64x64 pixel handwritten character, and its output is a unicode number. In between the input pixels (a 64x64 array) and the output, are a bunch of neurons. Layers of neurons. That talk to each other and learn or un-learn (are rewarded or punished).

Build that. Build a cube where one side is a pixel grid and the other side delivers a number. Decide how the neurons influence each other and how they train their weights to deliver the result at the other end. However you think it should go. Just raw code it with arrays in whatever dimensions you want and make it work; you can do it in Javascript or BASIC. link them however you want. Don't worry about performance, because you can assume that whatever marginally works can be tested on a massive scale and show "impressive" results.

5. Ask HN: To LinkedIn am I just collateral damage of a barely functioning system

Top comment by demosthanos

For what it's worth, I think you're overestimating how important LinkedIn is today. I'm interviewing candidates this week and honestly haven't even noticed whether any of them had a LinkedIn profile in their resume, much less visited it. LinkedIn would love for all of us to think they're an essential part of the hiring process, but from my perspective on this side of it there's no value delivered, and pretty much everyone I talk to is sick of LinkedIn.

The only exception is that I know some companies use LinkedIn as essentially their job application process, but this isn't common—when I had to apply for hundreds of jobs after getting laid off at the end of 2022, I updated my LinkedIn profile but then never interacted with LinkedIn at all in the process of applying.

I half wonder if they're flagging behavior like yours as suspicious because most real humans have stopped interacting with their platform.

6. Ask HN: Why are banks charging so many fees for accounts and cards?

Top comment by bill_mcgonigle

I was a kid in the 80's and would regularly see $5 interest credits on my meager savings, free ATM, free phone banking (don't laugh) and they even set it up for me that if I went below $20 in my checking the system would pull $50 from my savings. 1986 or so - overdraft fees hadn't been invented. After the dot-boom/bust The Fed "aggressively pursued ZIRP (zero interest rate) policies". Mortgages got much cheaper but fees replaced the interest income. Somebody is paying either way. It used to be the loan holders. I even remember my local bank having a stack of a hundred toaster ovens to give to anybody who opened an account. They wanted your business so you would do your loans with them. I quite preferred that America though it might be possible to argue that getting nickel-and-dimed everywhere is overall cheaper. But that was at the height of Americans' real purchasing power from wages and I'm disappointed that my kids had to grow up in the opposite environment. Maybe this will change before they will be shopping for a home. I read recently that real wages (purchasing power) were actually higher during the Great Depression. Soaring highs on the Dow don't matter much to people when all the productivity gains during that period have been transfered to financialized everything to make that NGU. The system needs to be stable for us to all benefit. "The Gini Coefficient is too damn high" as they say.

7. Ask HN: Are you tired of all LLM posts on HN?

Top comment by saaaaaam

Yes and no. A lot of them are low value, but there are some that have been hugely useful to me, either examples of how to do things, or tools that I now use regularly, or posts that have made me view problems I’m trying to solve through another lens.

It’s a hot topic and so of course there are going to be a lot of posts. A few years back there were lots of blockchain posts.

I think anyone could pick a topic to which they feel a certain level of antipathy and build a case that there are too many posts of that type.

8. Ask HN: AI bots everywhere – does anyone have a good whitelist for robots.txt?

Top comment by ryukoposting

I operate under the assumption that Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, Bytedance et al either totally ignore it or only follow it selectively. I haven't touched my Robots.txt in a while. Instead, I have nginx return empty and/or bogus responses when it sees those UA substrings.

9. Ask HN: How do I get good at math as a 42yo with kids?

Top comment by sebg

https://www.mathacademy.com/ is probably the most popular HN response.

It's expensive at $50 per month, but it seems highly thought of if you look at Algolia (https://hn.algolia.com/?q=math+academy).

I haven't used it myself, but I am evaluating it for my kids to use.

It's too early to give feedback on that front, though.

10. Ask HN: Confused about how DeepSeek hurts Nvidia

Top comment by dehrmann

It's a bit like "the Cisco moment" (and lots of people have been observing this). The company was building hardware needed for building out networks. The web looked like it was going to be the next big thing, and people couldn't get enough of CSCO. The web didn't pan out the way people hoped (or as quickly), and CSCO fell quickly.

Cisco kept making and selling network hardware, and probably (citation needed) sold more from 2000-2006 than 1994-2000, but the stock trade was over. The web did become a serious thing, but only once people got broadband at home.

The Nvidia valuation was getting pretty weak. Lots of FAANGs with deep pockets started to invest in their own hardware, and it got good enough to start beating Nvidia. Intel and AMD are still out there and under pressure to capture at least some of the market. Then this came along and potentially upended the game, bringing costs down by orders of magnitude. It might not be true, and it might even drive up sales long-term, but for now, but the NVDA trade was always a short-term thing.