I use it as my day tool as a lawyer, I use writer and calc alongside office tools and i see formatting issues coming less and less. This is after me using it day for 3-4 years daily.
Every update makes improvements.
Sure its "slow" at features but I'm not interested in "ai" features so it's fine.
It inherits all problems of desktop office, collaboration is hit as two people cannot work on the same file but it is "fine" for average user.
I follow the "meta onlyoffice comparison for writer/calc" and every 6 months or so it there is some improvement.
This is such an important tool to the level of curl but it doesn't have a marketing budget and it's not looking out for investors so "normies" don't know it exists or why it exists but it works.
The old memes of opening a word file and finding garbage is becoming less and less true. Cross compatibility with a moving target that is ms office is a Sisyphean task"},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"LibreOffice 26.8 Released with Many Nice Improvements"},"story_url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/26.8"}},"_tags":["comment","author_2Gkashmiri","story_49447724"],"author":"2Gkashmiri","comment_text":"I have been extensively using LibreOffice alongside office 2019 (using Massgrave) \nAnd it is converging more and more.
I use it as my day tool as a lawyer, I use writer and calc alongside office tools and i see formatting issues coming less and less. This is after me using it day for 3-4 years daily.
Every update makes improvements.
Sure its "slow" at features but I'm not interested in "ai" features so it's fine.
It inherits all problems of desktop office, collaboration is hit as two people cannot work on the same file but it is "fine" for average user.
I follow the "meta onlyoffice comparison for writer/calc" and every 6 months or so it there is some improvement.
This is such an important tool to the level of curl but it doesn't have a marketing budget and it's not looking out for investors so "normies" don't know it exists or why it exists but it works.
The old memes of opening a word file and finding garbage is becoming less and less true. Cross compatibility with a moving target that is ms office is a Sisyphean task","created_at":"2026-08-26T15:56:23Z","created_at_i":1787759783,"objectID":"49451335","parent_id":49447724,"story_id":49447724,"story_title":"LibreOffice 26.8 Released with Many Nice Improvements","story_url":"https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/26.8","updated_at":"2026-08-26T18:15:37Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"axegon_"},"comment_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["investor","update","ai"],"value":"I've said it multiple times: I'm in a position where using AI is completely optional. And in a place where there's a strong divide between those that do and those of us that don't, the result is apparent: ship fast and have no clue what to do when shit hits the fan, or ship slow(relatively speaking if you have 3 major updates/week) and be able to handle the inevitable shitstorm.
Overall, I am not concerned about the slopification beyond the fact that cybersecurity is dead. Your only way out of it is to do what I've been doing and cut all ropes to cloud providers and and self-host everything, but that's a different topic.
I've had to scroll through tons of slop and the harsh truth that sloppers/clankers/ai evangelists cry over is the fact that you end up with a ton of unmanageable, over-engineered spaghetti soup that is held together by hope and dreams.
The constant data leaks, security incidents, downtime are not becoming more frequent by pure coincidence. The endless todo apps are not gaining traction because there is no demand for them at all and is the only reason why security incidents are not more frequent.
The real hard to swallow pill is that most people in software engineering were not in software engineering because of their passion or desire to be there: it was the relatively-higher pay and nothing more. AI didn't destroy that - the masks are finally down. What is sad is that more often than not, businesses are obsessed with delivering features as if there's an infinite number of clients that require them and an infinite amount of clients that would jump on board the second you release them. Sooooo. Throw a plane full of cash at anthropic/google/openai/etc. And hope for the best with a pinky-promise IOU. For those that are/were passionate about software and are not as fortunate as me and forced to slop their way though the work day, this is no doubt heartbreaking. Software is a lot like Lego - you have some basic tools, you know what you are trying to achieve and you have to fight limitations. Putting the pieces together is the most rewarding part of the process. For those people, slop machines took the most rewarding part of the job.
There's also the fact that slop is currently heavily subsidized by investors so most people are paying a symbolic fee. The real question I have is what would happen when the real prices hit? I suspect a lot of companies dying if they don't have a financial backup strategy/enough cash to invest in people figuring out what the endless slop does or simply having to shut down operations. Only time will tell."},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Coding Agents killed my identity. How do you feel?"}},"_tags":["comment","author_axegon_","story_49389408"],"author":"axegon_","comment_text":"I've said it multiple times: I'm in a position where using AI is completely optional. And in a place where there's a strong divide between those that do and those of us that don't, the result is apparent: ship fast and have no clue what to do when shit hits the fan, or ship slow(relatively speaking if you have 3 major updates/week) and be able to handle the inevitable shitstorm.
Overall, I am not concerned about the slopification beyond the fact that cybersecurity is dead. Your only way out of it is to do what I've been doing and cut all ropes to cloud providers and and self-host everything, but that's a different topic.
I've had to scroll through tons of slop and the harsh truth that sloppers/clankers/ai evangelists cry over is the fact that you end up with a ton of unmanageable, over-engineered spaghetti soup that is held together by hope and dreams.
The constant data leaks, security incidents, downtime are not becoming more frequent by pure coincidence. The endless todo apps are not gaining traction because there is no demand for them at all and is the only reason why security incidents are not more frequent.
The real hard to swallow pill is that most people in software engineering were not in software engineering because of their passion or desire to be there: it was the relatively-higher pay and nothing more. AI didn't destroy that - the masks are finally down. What is sad is that more often than not, businesses are obsessed with delivering features as if there's an infinite number of clients that require them and an infinite amount of clients that would jump on board the second you release them. Sooooo. Throw a plane full of cash at anthropic/google/openai/etc. And hope for the best with a pinky-promise IOU. For those that are/were passionate about software and are not as fortunate as me and forced to slop their way though the work day, this is no doubt heartbreaking. Software is a lot like Lego - you have some basic tools, you know what you are trying to achieve and you have to fight limitations. Putting the pieces together is the most rewarding part of the process. For those people, slop machines took the most rewarding part of the job.
There's also the fact that slop is currently heavily subsidized by investors so most people are paying a symbolic fee. The real question I have is what would happen when the real prices hit? I suspect a lot of companies dying if they don't have a financial backup strategy/enough cash to invest in people figuring out what the endless slop does or simply having to shut down operations. Only time will tell.","created_at":"2026-08-23T12:52:34Z","created_at_i":1787489554,"objectID":"49408459","parent_id":49389408,"story_id":49389408,"story_title":"Coding Agents killed my identity. How do you feel?","updated_at":"2026-08-23T12:54:20Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"dariusmonsef"},"story_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["investor","update","ai"],"value":"I think agent-first chat interfaces will be a primary software modality and busy dashboard/UI will go away. I\u2019m not sure who exactly wins it, but I want my knowledge to grow/go with me.
A lot of the \u201cknowledge\u201d ie research, analysis, reasoning will be done by agents as the primary user. Our current notes tools & tasks management systems were built for humans\u2026 I don\u2019t care what the 17th thing on my bug backlog is. I want to conduct agents that can execute for me and do great work.
What I built OzBrain to do:\n+ Create a central place for agent reasoned knowledge to live\n+ Be agnostic about what apps/agents connect to it\n+ Capture everything and track it so I can audit it\n+ Enable teams, collaborators or partners to share brains\n+ Handle conflicts so many agents in the same article doesn\u2019t blow up\n+ Refactor knowledge into more token friendly chunks and map the index well\n+ Close the knowledge loop so new thinking supersedes old thinking across the corpus. Don\u2019t erase, depreciate and link\n+ Keep user data safe and secure\n++ Be easy enough to use that you don\u2019t have to have any technical knowledge
Some among us will always build their own custom solutions, but there are millions of tech professionals and small business owners that will use agents heavily and need a solution. So I\u2019m trying to build that.
Isn\u2019t this like gBrain? Yes, similar. I think it\u2019s like AWS vs Vercel. AWS is very powerful, configurable, and useful if you\u2019re technical and want to invest the time into really fine tuning your system\u2026 but if you just want your web deploy/hosting to just work and be easy to deal with you use Vercel.
// WHY I MADE IT
I\u2019ve been enjoying getting back to my technical roots, as I lost my coding skills more than a decade ago, but with AI I can focus on the system and the product in partnership with agent coding workflows.
I recently built a Voice AI for older people. To build it I created an agentic engineering workflow (feel free to rip that up as I\u2019m always looking to improve systems: https://ozbrain.com/resources/eng-flow) My approach with coding agents is trust but verify, and I\u2019m trying to replace the parts where a human would review with an adversarial or specialized agent who would give a better answer/review.
I have workflows that will go high level task to shipped PR running in Claude cloud sessions. I use Claude Code locally and Cursor when I want a tighter loop on doing visual work like UI or layout. And Codex to either load balance usage for TokenThriffting or when I want a different llm to think thru something.
It was a pain in the ass passing .md files around and keep track of which version was the most recent, so I built a hosted .md storage right in Supabase and any of my agents already have Supabase access. This let me build a solid, scalable, secure voice AI from my phone at the gym. All my agents have access to our knowledge, can write to it, update and refer to it as we build and improve the product and the systems we use.
Out of 75 founder friends I asked about how they manage shared knowledge, 26 built their own custom knowledge systems\u2026 Obsidian vaults with 7k files synced through a VPS, markdown repos behind their own MCP servers, cron jobs stitching Supabase to a skills file\u2026 each a different Frankenstein they have to maintain. 32 said they felt the pain of moving static files around but didn\u2019t have any solution for it.
So I rebuilt my brain better and used it to build it.
// HOW YOU CAN HELP
Would love to have you try it out. The maintenance loop is still in alpha so not running it on customer data yet.
If you built your own brain I\u2019d love to hear how you did it. What criteria was most important for you in its design & function.
If you are tired of shuffling .md files around I\u2019d love to have you try out OzBrain and to give feedback, just ask your agent to put it in the shared bugs & features brain!
Cheers!\nBubs.co"},"title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Show HN: OzBrain, a shared brain for knowledge between agents and your team"},"url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"https://ozbrain.com"}},"_tags":["story","author_dariusmonsef","story_49394827","show_hn"],"author":"dariusmonsef","children":[49395359,49396898,49395220,49406323,49398021,49396430,49397565,49396766,49395778,49397451,49397747,49395240,49396746,49395966,49408070,49405658,49432522,49396873,49397453,49395706,49397071,49394952,49396028,49396788,49457636,49436555,49429905,49399271,49415238,49413054,49396347,49396370,49400833,49398400,49396627,49395739,49396207,49395910],"created_at":"2026-08-21T23:09:06Z","created_at_i":1787353746,"num_comments":59,"objectID":"49394827","points":92,"story_id":49394827,"story_text":"I think agent-first chat interfaces will be a primary software modality and busy dashboard/UI will go away. I\u2019m not sure who exactly wins it, but I want my knowledge to grow/go with me.
A lot of the \u201cknowledge\u201d ie research, analysis, reasoning will be done by agents as the primary user. Our current notes tools & tasks management systems were built for humans\u2026 I don\u2019t care what the 17th thing on my bug backlog is. I want to conduct agents that can execute for me and do great work.
What I built OzBrain to do:\n+ Create a central place for agent reasoned knowledge to live\n+ Be agnostic about what apps/agents connect to it\n+ Capture everything and track it so I can audit it\n+ Enable teams, collaborators or partners to share brains\n+ Handle conflicts so many agents in the same article doesn\u2019t blow up\n+ Refactor knowledge into more token friendly chunks and map the index well\n+ Close the knowledge loop so new thinking supersedes old thinking across the corpus. Don\u2019t erase, depreciate and link\n+ Keep user data safe and secure\n++ Be easy enough to use that you don\u2019t have to have any technical knowledge
Some among us will always build their own custom solutions, but there are millions of tech professionals and small business owners that will use agents heavily and need a solution. So I\u2019m trying to build that.
Isn\u2019t this like gBrain? Yes, similar. I think it\u2019s like AWS vs Vercel. AWS is very powerful, configurable, and useful if you\u2019re technical and want to invest the time into really fine tuning your system\u2026 but if you just want your web deploy/hosting to just work and be easy to deal with you use Vercel.
// WHY I MADE IT
I\u2019ve been enjoying getting back to my technical roots, as I lost my coding skills more than a decade ago, but with AI I can focus on the system and the product in partnership with agent coding workflows.
I recently built a Voice AI for older people. To build it I created an agentic engineering workflow (feel free to rip that up as I\u2019m always looking to improve systems: https://ozbrain.com/resources/eng-flow) My approach with coding agents is trust but verify, and I\u2019m trying to replace the parts where a human would review with an adversarial or specialized agent who would give a better answer/review.
I have workflows that will go high level task to shipped PR running in Claude cloud sessions. I use Claude Code locally and Cursor when I want a tighter loop on doing visual work like UI or layout. And Codex to either load balance usage for TokenThriffting or when I want a different llm to think thru something.
It was a pain in the ass passing .md files around and keep track of which version was the most recent, so I built a hosted .md storage right in Supabase and any of my agents already have Supabase access. This let me build a solid, scalable, secure voice AI from my phone at the gym. All my agents have access to our knowledge, can write to it, update and refer to it as we build and improve the product and the systems we use.
Out of 75 founder friends I asked about how they manage shared knowledge, 26 built their own custom knowledge systems\u2026 Obsidian vaults with 7k files synced through a VPS, markdown repos behind their own MCP servers, cron jobs stitching Supabase to a skills file\u2026 each a different Frankenstein they have to maintain. 32 said they felt the pain of moving static files around but didn\u2019t have any solution for it.
So I rebuilt my brain better and used it to build it.
// HOW YOU CAN HELP
Would love to have you try it out. The maintenance loop is still in alpha so not running it on customer data yet.
If you built your own brain I\u2019d love to hear how you did it. What criteria was most important for you in its design & function.
If you are tired of shuffling .md files around I\u2019d love to have you try out OzBrain and to give feedback, just ask your agent to put it in the shared bugs & features brain!
Cheers!\nBubs.co","title":"Show HN: OzBrain, a shared brain for knowledge between agents and your team","updated_at":"2026-08-29T08:29:15Z","url":"https://ozbrain.com"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"godwinson__4-8"},"comment_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["investor","update","ai"],"value":"> China does not treat us as a partner any more than we do them.
I don't think this is accurate. What do you mean by this? What about the extent of trade between the two countries? It has dipped from peaks, but the story of Chinese growth and American wealth are intertwined. In what sense is this not a partnership? Because they stole some IP along the way? Or the access to their market comes with other costs? On balance it still works out for the average American, who enjoys cheap products. It's akin to the battle over Chinese AI. VC investors in the US would probably benefit from some kind of embargo against Chinese AI models. Would American consumers? It's the same sort of issue with Japan in the 80s, which is when Trump first really started talking about tariffs. Japanese vehicles are some of the most popular in the United States. The American consumer has benefitted from Japanese competition. Why can it not be the same with China? Because the Chinese government supports Chinese businesses? All countries do so. Who bailed out the American automakers? The American taxpayer. America worked in recent days to prop up the yen. Do you think this is a coincidence given the amount of US debt the Japanese hold? The Chinese also hold a large amount of American debt. Why are we not partners?
> we maintain the strongest military in the world when fully committed (Iran isn't even half-hearted, it started out as an unpopular war and nobody wants a land invasion)
This gets said a lot. The problem is why is America not fully committed? You can't really have it both ways. "We're so powerful when we commit" without acknowledging why you don't commit. Why does no one want a land invasion? If the American military is "the strongest military in the world when fully committed" what's the big deal? Commit and invade then if it's so easy.
We know the answer. A reasonable follow-up question then is what is the advantage of "the strongest military in the world when fully committed" if your society does not want to take on the cost of ever fully committing? Are you suggesting the United States is more likely to want to incur costs against powers like Russia or China than it is against Afghanistan or Iran? If Americans don't want to invade Iran, why would they want to break a Chinese blockade of Taiwan? So what good is it? One of the virtues of democracy is actually it is harder to declare war. This is why the imperial presidency was created. If you're familiar with US history you would know an overriding popular view was avoiding foreign wars. Including WWII. FDR couldn't really help in Europe as much as he wanted, because Americans weren't interested in sending their blood and treasure to die an ocean away, especially after WWI. He had to wait for the Pearl Harbor attack, which galvanized support overnight. Why does America no longer employ conscription? Because wars aren't popular. It's actually in my view a pretty disgusting "adaptation" that a democracy has created an all volunteer army. This is not in keeping with basic democratic ideals, going back to ancient greece. If a land of "all men created equal" goes to war, all should have to sacrifice. Instead we send mostly poor kids to have their legs blown off in Iraq while at the same time people in the oil or defense or finance industry get to print money for their children. Why are the elites so hated in America? It's not about wealth alone. I keep hearing about how powerful the US military is, but all I actually see is a string of military failures from Afghanistan, to Iraq, to now Iran. These are impoverished, backwards pariah states. Why would I conclude the United States would do better against a power remotely approaching a peer?
> our natural resources are plentiful
So are China's. It's why the "trade war" failed.
> Sure the Trumpers aren't going away, but they are fundamentally incapable of governing and have no real successor to Trump, who is fundamentally incapable of grooming a successor. They were politically irrelevant for the longest time, and only matter now because the establishment failed to maintain living standards.
This is an overly optimistic read. They were actually never "politically irrelevant". The faction of America they represent has always been relevant. It was merely the case that American elites could control them. Trump was never taken seriously by said elites, who repeated your sentiments pretty much verbatim. He proved them wrong. The information world we live in now is changing the nature of public discourse. Nothing could be of greater consequence in a democracy. Parties, and the public are not as easily controlled. What is going to reverse this trend? Just think about the information the average American had access to in the mid 20th century compared to now. Why would you look at the history of American politics and demagogues and conclude it will get better? How will living standards improve? Why is it inevitable that America will solve this? Seems like wishful thinking.
The invocation of 1919 Berlin as if this is some comfort is quite ironic. The saving grace of Trump is he really doesn't care about anything but himself, and so doesn't really believe in anything. You may not be so lucky the next time the Democrats choke away an election. The failures of 1919 Berlin would metastasize into another form of extremism in a nearby city that led to another failure in 1923. But then it was 1933. The history of this period tells us that many figures and people oscillated between "left" and "right" extremism as they worked to find an answer that resonated in a rapidly changing and destabilizing world. Hmm, much like the one we find ourselves in today. They've taken the White House twice now. The communists in Berlin in 1919 never tasted that sort of power. I'm not sure you're making the correct analogy. I'm also not sure I would celebrate the murder of German communists by proto-Nazis. Personally, a rather odd data point for you to single out as a reassuring one.
In any event, I am not sure why you are so confident that America is so immune to something approaching a similar fate. Germany was not some backwards society. This was the land of Kant and Hegel and Frege.
Just as the land of Washington, Jefferson and Madison found itself mired in fratricide within a few generations.
One doesn't have to get even halfway to such a 1933 outcome for things to get very bad. America has not been around for very long. Why so confident of such a short track record?
I simply suggest you not engage in hubris. Widen your imagination of the possible. And recognize we are all human. Citing some point about Mao or toilet paper is about as useful as bringing up Abu Ghraib or American slavery. The Chinese can also adapt if you haven't noticed. It's not Mao's party anymore.
What is the path for America's future? The world is getting smaller and more competitive. Your comfort in demographics might be warranted, but as it stands today there are over a billion people in China. Is the future for America better if the Chinese are our foes? I guess I just don't understand this constant drumbeat of conflict. We should not envy the progress of a billion people on the other side of the world. China doesn't setup bases in Mexico or Canada. It doesn't try to assert itself in the "Gulf of America". It doesn't support a separatist movement in Hawaii. Whose kids are going to die fighting China in the Pacific? Are you going to volunteer your kids? On what basis? A 21st century update to Wilsonian idealism? That which Americans already saw fail?
Maybe we should then pull back on the illusion of conflict and work together. I think the only people who will benefit from conflict (if any) are the elites, who will never send their kids to fight. Americans and Chinese may have more in common than you are led to believe. The fact you don't even think we are partners paired with the casual confidence in which you articulate your hubris is concerning, and suggestive that the forces of conflict are already succeeding to quite a dangerous degree."},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"The Future, Made in China"},"story_url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/08/10/the-future-made-in-china"}},"_tags":["comment","author_godwinson__4-8","story_49155940"],"author":"godwinson__4-8","children":[49163588],"comment_text":"> China does not treat us as a partner any more than we do them.
I don't think this is accurate. What do you mean by this? What about the extent of trade between the two countries? It has dipped from peaks, but the story of Chinese growth and American wealth are intertwined. In what sense is this not a partnership? Because they stole some IP along the way? Or the access to their market comes with other costs? On balance it still works out for the average American, who enjoys cheap products. It's akin to the battle over Chinese AI. VC investors in the US would probably benefit from some kind of embargo against Chinese AI models. Would American consumers? It's the same sort of issue with Japan in the 80s, which is when Trump first really started talking about tariffs. Japanese vehicles are some of the most popular in the United States. The American consumer has benefitted from Japanese competition. Why can it not be the same with China? Because the Chinese government supports Chinese businesses? All countries do so. Who bailed out the American automakers? The American taxpayer. America worked in recent days to prop up the yen. Do you think this is a coincidence given the amount of US debt the Japanese hold? The Chinese also hold a large amount of American debt. Why are we not partners?
> we maintain the strongest military in the world when fully committed (Iran isn't even half-hearted, it started out as an unpopular war and nobody wants a land invasion)
This gets said a lot. The problem is why is America not fully committed? You can't really have it both ways. "We're so powerful when we commit" without acknowledging why you don't commit. Why does no one want a land invasion? If the American military is "the strongest military in the world when fully committed" what's the big deal? Commit and invade then if it's so easy.
We know the answer. A reasonable follow-up question then is what is the advantage of "the strongest military in the world when fully committed" if your society does not want to take on the cost of ever fully committing? Are you suggesting the United States is more likely to want to incur costs against powers like Russia or China than it is against Afghanistan or Iran? If Americans don't want to invade Iran, why would they want to break a Chinese blockade of Taiwan? So what good is it? One of the virtues of democracy is actually it is harder to declare war. This is why the imperial presidency was created. If you're familiar with US history you would know an overriding popular view was avoiding foreign wars. Including WWII. FDR couldn't really help in Europe as much as he wanted, because Americans weren't interested in sending their blood and treasure to die an ocean away, especially after WWI. He had to wait for the Pearl Harbor attack, which galvanized support overnight. Why does America no longer employ conscription? Because wars aren't popular. It's actually in my view a pretty disgusting "adaptation" that a democracy has created an all volunteer army. This is not in keeping with basic democratic ideals, going back to ancient greece. If a land of "all men created equal" goes to war, all should have to sacrifice. Instead we send mostly poor kids to have their legs blown off in Iraq while at the same time people in the oil or defense or finance industry get to print money for their children. Why are the elites so hated in America? It's not about wealth alone. I keep hearing about how powerful the US military is, but all I actually see is a string of military failures from Afghanistan, to Iraq, to now Iran. These are impoverished, backwards pariah states. Why would I conclude the United States would do better against a power remotely approaching a peer?
> our natural resources are plentiful
So are China's. It's why the "trade war" failed.
> Sure the Trumpers aren't going away, but they are fundamentally incapable of governing and have no real successor to Trump, who is fundamentally incapable of grooming a successor. They were politically irrelevant for the longest time, and only matter now because the establishment failed to maintain living standards.
This is an overly optimistic read. They were actually never "politically irrelevant". The faction of America they represent has always been relevant. It was merely the case that American elites could control them. Trump was never taken seriously by said elites, who repeated your sentiments pretty much verbatim. He proved them wrong. The information world we live in now is changing the nature of public discourse. Nothing could be of greater consequence in a democracy. Parties, and the public are not as easily controlled. What is going to reverse this trend? Just think about the information the average American had access to in the mid 20th century compared to now. Why would you look at the history of American politics and demagogues and conclude it will get better? How will living standards improve? Why is it inevitable that America will solve this? Seems like wishful thinking.
The invocation of 1919 Berlin as if this is some comfort is quite ironic. The saving grace of Trump is he really doesn't care about anything but himself, and so doesn't really believe in anything. You may not be so lucky the next time the Democrats choke away an election. The failures of 1919 Berlin would metastasize into another form of extremism in a nearby city that led to another failure in 1923. But then it was 1933. The history of this period tells us that many figures and people oscillated between "left" and "right" extremism as they worked to find an answer that resonated in a rapidly changing and destabilizing world. Hmm, much like the one we find ourselves in today. They've taken the White House twice now. The communists in Berlin in 1919 never tasted that sort of power. I'm not sure you're making the correct analogy. I'm also not sure I would celebrate the murder of German communists by proto-Nazis. Personally, a rather odd data point for you to single out as a reassuring one.
In any event, I am not sure why you are so confident that America is so immune to something approaching a similar fate. Germany was not some backwards society. This was the land of Kant and Hegel and Frege.
Just as the land of Washington, Jefferson and Madison found itself mired in fratricide within a few generations.
One doesn't have to get even halfway to such a 1933 outcome for things to get very bad. America has not been around for very long. Why so confident of such a short track record?
I simply suggest you not engage in hubris. Widen your imagination of the possible. And recognize we are all human. Citing some point about Mao or toilet paper is about as useful as bringing up Abu Ghraib or American slavery. The Chinese can also adapt if you haven't noticed. It's not Mao's party anymore.
What is the path for America's future? The world is getting smaller and more competitive. Your comfort in demographics might be warranted, but as it stands today there are over a billion people in China. Is the future for America better if the Chinese are our foes? I guess I just don't understand this constant drumbeat of conflict. We should not envy the progress of a billion people on the other side of the world. China doesn't setup bases in Mexico or Canada. It doesn't try to assert itself in the "Gulf of America". It doesn't support a separatist movement in Hawaii. Whose kids are going to die fighting China in the Pacific? Are you going to volunteer your kids? On what basis? A 21st century update to Wilsonian idealism? That which Americans already saw fail?
Maybe we should then pull back on the illusion of conflict and work together. I think the only people who will benefit from conflict (if any) are the elites, who will never send their kids to fight. Americans and Chinese may have more in common than you are led to believe. The fact you don't even think we are partners paired with the casual confidence in which you articulate your hubris is concerning, and suggestive that the forces of conflict are already succeeding to quite a dangerous degree.","created_at":"2026-08-03T22:10:34Z","created_at_i":1785795034,"objectID":"49162136","parent_id":49159845,"story_id":49155940,"story_title":"The Future, Made in China","story_url":"https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/08/10/the-future-made-in-china","updated_at":"2026-08-04T02:33:14Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"yakshaving_jgt"},"story_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["investor","update","ai"],"value":"Hello HN!
We were finding it too much work to keep our Zendesk help center up to date as our product kept changing, so I built DocCharm \u2014 it keeps a help center up to date automatically by watching PRs as they land in your GitHub repository. It suggests updates (with AI) to existing articles, or drafts entirely new ones if nothing appropriate exists yet.
Everything goes into a review queue first, so a human always checks (and can optionally edit) before anything publishes. In practice this has proven to be a pretty slick workflow (in my opinion anyway, but not only!).
We\u2019ve been using it at my main job for a while now and it\u2019s a big time saver. It\u2019s also gaining some traction with other companies in the same investor portfolio. My sales process so far has been high-touch outbound. This probably won\u2019t scale in the long run, but I\u2019m hoping to learn as much as I can by nurturing all of the initial relationships. If you run a business with a help center that\u2019s drifting out of date, email me and I\u2019ll comp your first couple of months. Email is in my HN profile.
Both Zendesk and Mintlify help centers can already be automatically imported into DocCharm. If you use a different help center, let me know and I\u2019ll get it automatically imported one way or another. I've also implemented some support for theming, so you can keep your own branding.
The tech is essentially the same that I use for most of my work (and it's not a differentiator, but we're all tech-curious here):
- Haskell/Yesod
- NixOS
- SQLite with Litestream (db per tenant; backed up on both Hetzner and Cloudflare; encrypted)
- Sentry for error reporting
- Stripe for billing
- Healthchecks.io as a dead man\u2019s switch
- Prometheus and Grafana for telemetry
- Resend for transactional email
There's plenty still to do on the roadmap, but this is already working nicely and providing value as is. I'm not building in the open, though what I prioritise will naturally be heavily guided by the needs of the earliest users.
WDYT?"},"title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Show HN: DocCharm \u2013 The help center that keeps itself up to date"},"url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"https://doccharm.com/"}},"_tags":["story","author_yakshaving_jgt","story_48995507","show_hn"],"author":"yakshaving_jgt","children":[48997592,49003387,48999024],"created_at":"2026-07-21T17:34:42Z","created_at_i":1784655282,"num_comments":2,"objectID":"48995507","points":8,"story_id":48995507,"story_text":"Hello HN!
We were finding it too much work to keep our Zendesk help center up to date as our product kept changing, so I built DocCharm \u2014 it keeps a help center up to date automatically by watching PRs as they land in your GitHub repository. It suggests updates (with AI) to existing articles, or drafts entirely new ones if nothing appropriate exists yet.
Everything goes into a review queue first, so a human always checks (and can optionally edit) before anything publishes. In practice this has proven to be a pretty slick workflow (in my opinion anyway, but not only!).
We\u2019ve been using it at my main job for a while now and it\u2019s a big time saver. It\u2019s also gaining some traction with other companies in the same investor portfolio. My sales process so far has been high-touch outbound. This probably won\u2019t scale in the long run, but I\u2019m hoping to learn as much as I can by nurturing all of the initial relationships. If you run a business with a help center that\u2019s drifting out of date, email me and I\u2019ll comp your first couple of months. Email is in my HN profile.
Both Zendesk and Mintlify help centers can already be automatically imported into DocCharm. If you use a different help center, let me know and I\u2019ll get it automatically imported one way or another. I've also implemented some support for theming, so you can keep your own branding.
The tech is essentially the same that I use for most of my work (and it's not a differentiator, but we're all tech-curious here):
- Haskell/Yesod
- NixOS
- SQLite with Litestream (db per tenant; backed up on both Hetzner and Cloudflare; encrypted)
- Sentry for error reporting
- Stripe for billing
- Healthchecks.io as a dead man\u2019s switch
- Prometheus and Grafana for telemetry
- Resend for transactional email
There's plenty still to do on the roadmap, but this is already working nicely and providing value as is. I'm not building in the open, though what I prioritise will naturally be heavily guided by the needs of the earliest users.
WDYT?","title":"Show HN: DocCharm \u2013 The help center that keeps itself up to date","updated_at":"2026-08-07T04:00:55Z","url":"https://doccharm.com/"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"oliculipolicula"},"comment_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["investor","update","ai"],"value":"Nuance. It doesn't seem that the "public geniuses" themselves are driving impactful decision-making, but well-meaning folks in one of many thin layers "surrounding" them. The relevant point though is that this layer wants to be seen as forward-thinking (they could be advocating vaccines or crypto in previous eras, so you can't blame them for the "incorrectness" of the fad).
Nor are they sycophants; I'd expect they know independence of thought is a prerequisite for getting into those positions
A rough picture of what these guys smell like-- in personality, not in role-- are the "journalistic-influencers": Peter Robinson of Hoover, Dwarkesh, etc. I hope dang or mod-wannabes are different (maybe they don't actually aspire to be impactful) ?
Question: did these journalistic-influencers have to go through a LinkedIn stage where they vy for the public-geniuses' attention? I suspect not-- even in the case of Dwarkesh. I'm not saying there was no seduction involved.. the seduction is not entirely legible..
Eric Weinstein seems to belong to another layer, one that is more like a sinecure, providing moral-support only. Is he in the same layer as Lex Fridman? Maybe. Well-managed glee/narcissism is necessary but not sufficient
How about Fidji Simo?? Or the CFO? "Agrippa" Bosworth? Do early investors think that sama labels himself "genius" in his own dreams?
Calling these guys "Mafiosi" or "Enforcers" is underestimating their sophistication.. "Name one act of social hackery that does not involve computers" comes to mind.
In their defence, their role means that they "have no time to think" (answering a question of Feynman's). Hope you don't mind me calling this the "solvitur ambulando" market failure [compounded by [the promise of] "cheap" AI]. I hear they are now trying to make AI take walks (think of the auteur-inside-an-auteur from The Truman Show as a prototype of this "humanistic" strategy)..
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/632720.Don_t_You_Have_Ti...
I wanted to include Hannah-Arendt's ideas somewhere in this diagnosis but this is a long term project looking for collaborators :)
Update: honestly didn't see boz.com on the front-page until now. Lol. (High) Priest of Meta can't focus.. should we prescribe the traditional "Ethene""},"story_title":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"partial","matchedWords":["ai"],"value":"AI's economic effects is causing serious pain for most Americans"}},"_tags":["comment","author_oliculipolicula","story_48850980"],"author":"oliculipolicula","comment_text":"Nuance. It doesn't seem that the "public geniuses" themselves are driving impactful decision-making, but well-meaning folks in one of many thin layers "surrounding" them. The relevant point though is that this layer wants to be seen as forward-thinking (they could be advocating vaccines or crypto in previous eras, so you can't blame them for the "incorrectness" of the fad).
Nor are they sycophants; I'd expect they know independence of thought is a prerequisite for getting into those positions
A rough picture of what these guys smell like-- in personality, not in role-- are the "journalistic-influencers": Peter Robinson of Hoover, Dwarkesh, etc. I hope dang or mod-wannabes are different (maybe they don't actually aspire to be impactful) ?
Question: did these journalistic-influencers have to go through a LinkedIn stage where they vy for the public-geniuses' attention? I suspect not-- even in the case of Dwarkesh. I'm not saying there was no seduction involved.. the seduction is not entirely legible..
Eric Weinstein seems to belong to another layer, one that is more like a sinecure, providing moral-support only. Is he in the same layer as Lex Fridman? Maybe. Well-managed glee/narcissism is necessary but not sufficient
How about Fidji Simo?? Or the CFO? "Agrippa" Bosworth? Do early investors think that sama labels himself "genius" in his own dreams?
Calling these guys "Mafiosi" or "Enforcers" is underestimating their sophistication.. "Name one act of social hackery that does not involve computers" comes to mind.
In their defence, their role means that they "have no time to think" (answering a question of Feynman's). Hope you don't mind me calling this the "solvitur ambulando" market failure [compounded by [the promise of] "cheap" AI]. I hear they are now trying to make AI take walks (think of the auteur-inside-an-auteur from The Truman Show as a prototype of this "humanistic" strategy)..
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/632720.Don_t_You_Have_Ti...
I wanted to include Hannah-Arendt's ideas somewhere in this diagnosis but this is a long term project looking for collaborators :)
Update: honestly didn't see boz.com on the front-page until now. Lol. (High) Priest of Meta can't focus.. should we prescribe the traditional "Ethene"","created_at":"2026-07-10T02:39:30Z","created_at_i":1783651170,"objectID":"48855115","parent_id":48852624,"story_id":48850980,"story_title":"AI's economic effects is causing serious pain for most Americans","updated_at":"2026-07-16T21:01:41Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"stopman"},"story_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["investor","update","ai"],"value":"Backstory: My name is Michael Stoppelman, I'm a super angel (300+ investments, I've invested in YC companies like Vanta, Flexport, Biorender, Permitflow and Canary Technologies). Prior to that I built and ran the engineering team at Yelp. I thought there was a missing piece to the LLMs where they couldn't talk via email which is where as an investor I work all day. So I built ccMarvin so I could forward emails for summaries, I could get legal feedback on SAFEs or other transactional emails, I could get newsletters on sectors like AI / Space or specific folks I want to follow. I don't like to use X because I end up getting to sucked in and waste time doom scrolling, I rather get a newsletter.
So I'm announcing ccMarvin: a service you can just email at marvin@ccmarvin.com. It's like emailing a very smart research analyst or chief of staff that's connected to all the LLMs (Gemini / Claude / ChatGPT & xAI).
I've embedded some investor friendly features for tracking your private / public investments via X and other news sources or you can create custom newsletters.
Example emails to send marvin@ccmarvin.com:
"Send me an email everyday Monday on the top AI stories for the previous week."
"Create a newsletter everyday that I get at 7am of what @elonmusk and @sama saying yesterday on X"
"Can you track SpaceX, Anthropic, and Google news everyday, send me a portfolio update everday at 6am"
Check it out and leave some feedback."},"title":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"partial","matchedWords":["ai"],"value":"Show HN: ccMarvin \u2013 Just Email with AI"},"url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"https://ccmarvin.com"}},"_tags":["story","author_stopman","story_48663022","show_hn"],"author":"stopman","children":[48664051,48663954,48663950],"created_at":"2026-06-24T17:23:05Z","created_at_i":1782321785,"num_comments":3,"objectID":"48663022","points":7,"story_id":48663022,"story_text":"Backstory: My name is Michael Stoppelman, I'm a super angel (300+ investments, I've invested in YC companies like Vanta, Flexport, Biorender, Permitflow and Canary Technologies). Prior to that I built and ran the engineering team at Yelp. I thought there was a missing piece to the LLMs where they couldn't talk via email which is where as an investor I work all day. So I built ccMarvin so I could forward emails for summaries, I could get legal feedback on SAFEs or other transactional emails, I could get newsletters on sectors like AI / Space or specific folks I want to follow. I don't like to use X because I end up getting to sucked in and waste time doom scrolling, I rather get a newsletter.
So I'm announcing ccMarvin: a service you can just email at marvin@ccmarvin.com. It's like emailing a very smart research analyst or chief of staff that's connected to all the LLMs (Gemini / Claude / ChatGPT & xAI).
I've embedded some investor friendly features for tracking your private / public investments via X and other news sources or you can create custom newsletters.
Example emails to send marvin@ccmarvin.com:
"Send me an email everyday Monday on the top AI stories for the previous week."
"Create a newsletter everyday that I get at 7am of what @elonmusk and @sama saying yesterday on X"
"Can you track SpaceX, Anthropic, and Google news everyday, send me a portfolio update everday at 6am"
Check it out and leave some feedback.","title":"Show HN: ccMarvin \u2013 Just Email with AI","updated_at":"2026-06-26T05:57:39Z","url":"https://ccmarvin.com"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Rekindle8090"},"comment_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["investor","update","ai"],"value":"I put this in a reply but I'm also posting it as a general comment:
Please unsubscribe to these services and see how they perform:
"Maybe if I spend more money on the max plan it will be better" > no it will be the same\n"Maybe if I change my prompt it will work" > no it will be the same\n"Maybe if I try it via this API instead of that API it will improve" > no it will be the same.
Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini etc all of these SOTA models are carefully trained, with platforms carefully designed to get you to pay more for "better" output, or try different things instead of using a different product.
It's to keep you in the ecosystem and keep you exploring. There is a reason you can't see the layers upon layers of scaffolding they have. And there's a reason why after 2 weeks post major update, the model is suddenly "bad" and "frustrating". It's the same reason its done with A/B testing, so when you complain, someone else has no issues, when they complain, you have no issues. It muddies the water intentionally.
None of it is because you're doing anything wrong, it's not a skill issue, it's a careful strategy to extract as much engagement and money from customers as possible. It's the same reason they give people who buy new gun skins in call of duty easier matches in matchmaking for the first couple games.
Stop paying more, stop buying these pro max plans, hoping it will get better. It won't, that's not what makes them money. Making people angry and making people waste their time, while others have no issues, and making them explore and try different things for longer so they can show to investors how long people use these AI tools is what makes them money.
When competitors have a better product these issues go away\nWhen a new model is released these issues don't exist
I was paying a ton of money for claude, once I stopped and cancelled my subscription entirely, suddenly sonnet 4.6 is performing like opus and I don't have prompts using 10% of my quota in one message despite being the same complexity."},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Pro Max 5x quota exhausted in 1.5 hours despite moderate usage"},"story_url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/45756"}},"_tags":["comment","author_Rekindle8090","story_47739260"],"author":"Rekindle8090","children":[47740857],"comment_text":"I put this in a reply but I'm also posting it as a general comment:
Please unsubscribe to these services and see how they perform:
"Maybe if I spend more money on the max plan it will be better" > no it will be the same\n"Maybe if I change my prompt it will work" > no it will be the same\n"Maybe if I try it via this API instead of that API it will improve" > no it will be the same.
Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini etc all of these SOTA models are carefully trained, with platforms carefully designed to get you to pay more for "better" output, or try different things instead of using a different product.
It's to keep you in the ecosystem and keep you exploring. There is a reason you can't see the layers upon layers of scaffolding they have. And there's a reason why after 2 weeks post major update, the model is suddenly "bad" and "frustrating". It's the same reason its done with A/B testing, so when you complain, someone else has no issues, when they complain, you have no issues. It muddies the water intentionally.
None of it is because you're doing anything wrong, it's not a skill issue, it's a careful strategy to extract as much engagement and money from customers as possible. It's the same reason they give people who buy new gun skins in call of duty easier matches in matchmaking for the first couple games.
Stop paying more, stop buying these pro max plans, hoping it will get better. It won't, that's not what makes them money. Making people angry and making people waste their time, while others have no issues, and making them explore and try different things for longer so they can show to investors how long people use these AI tools is what makes them money.
When competitors have a better product these issues go away\nWhen a new model is released these issues don't exist
I was paying a ton of money for claude, once I stopped and cancelled my subscription entirely, suddenly sonnet 4.6 is performing like opus and I don't have prompts using 10% of my quota in one message despite being the same complexity.","created_at":"2026-04-12T14:52:35Z","created_at_i":1776005555,"objectID":"47740429","parent_id":47739260,"story_id":47739260,"story_title":"Pro Max 5x quota exhausted in 1.5 hours despite moderate usage","story_url":"https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/45756","updated_at":"2026-04-13T03:18:32Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Rekindle8090"},"comment_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["investor","update","ai"],"value":"The product was performing badly and you thought this would be solved by spending more money on it?
When will people realize this is the same as vendor lock-in?
"Maybe if I spend more money on the max plan it will be better" > no it will be the same\n"Maybe if I change my prompt it will work" > no it will be the same\n"Maybe if I try it via this API instead of that API it will improve" > no it will be the same.
Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini etc all of these SOTA models are carefully trained, with platforms carefully designed to get you to pay more for "better" output, or try different things instead of using a different product.
It's to keep you in the ecosystem and keep you exploring. There is a reason you can't see the layers upon layers of scaffolding they have. And there's a reason why after 2 weeks post major update, the model is suddenly "bad" and "frustrating". It's the same reason its done with A/B testing, so when you complain, someone else has no issues, when they complain, you have no issues. It muddies the water intentionally.
None of it is because you're doing anything wrong, it's not a skill issue, it's a careful strategy to extract as much engagement and money from customers as possible. It's the same reason they give people who buy new gun skins in call of duty easier matches in matchmaking for the first couple games.
The only mistake you made was paying MORE, hoping it would get better. It won't, that's not what makes them money. Making people angry and making people waste their time, while others have no issues, and making them explore and try different things for longer so they can show to investors how long people use these AI tools is what makes them money.
When competitors have a better product these issues go away\nWhen a new model is released these issues don't exist
I was paying a ton of money for claude, once I stopped and cancelled my subscription entirely, suddenly sonnet 4.6 is performing like opus and I don't have prompts using 10% of my quota in one message despite being the same complexity."},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Pro Max 5x quota exhausted in 1.5 hours despite moderate usage"},"story_url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/45756"}},"_tags":["comment","author_Rekindle8090","story_47739260"],"author":"Rekindle8090","children":[47740468],"comment_text":"The product was performing badly and you thought this would be solved by spending more money on it?
When will people realize this is the same as vendor lock-in?
"Maybe if I spend more money on the max plan it will be better" > no it will be the same\n"Maybe if I change my prompt it will work" > no it will be the same\n"Maybe if I try it via this API instead of that API it will improve" > no it will be the same.
Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini etc all of these SOTA models are carefully trained, with platforms carefully designed to get you to pay more for "better" output, or try different things instead of using a different product.
It's to keep you in the ecosystem and keep you exploring. There is a reason you can't see the layers upon layers of scaffolding they have. And there's a reason why after 2 weeks post major update, the model is suddenly "bad" and "frustrating". It's the same reason its done with A/B testing, so when you complain, someone else has no issues, when they complain, you have no issues. It muddies the water intentionally.
None of it is because you're doing anything wrong, it's not a skill issue, it's a careful strategy to extract as much engagement and money from customers as possible. It's the same reason they give people who buy new gun skins in call of duty easier matches in matchmaking for the first couple games.
The only mistake you made was paying MORE, hoping it would get better. It won't, that's not what makes them money. Making people angry and making people waste their time, while others have no issues, and making them explore and try different things for longer so they can show to investors how long people use these AI tools is what makes them money.
When competitors have a better product these issues go away\nWhen a new model is released these issues don't exist
I was paying a ton of money for claude, once I stopped and cancelled my subscription entirely, suddenly sonnet 4.6 is performing like opus and I don't have prompts using 10% of my quota in one message despite being the same complexity.","created_at":"2026-04-12T14:51:00Z","created_at_i":1776005460,"objectID":"47740409","parent_id":47739625,"story_id":47739260,"story_title":"Pro Max 5x quota exhausted in 1.5 hours despite moderate usage","story_url":"https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/45756","updated_at":"2026-04-13T03:18:32Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"okanat"},"comment_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["investor","update","ai"],"value":"People and organizations that built things on top of Microsoft tech. Especially with a long history going back to NT times.
HN, YC, startup environment or academia is a Unix bubble. They all feed into each other. Especially because Linux is gratis which helped all of those to deploy projects/products/papers cheaply. Unix systems traditionally lack much of the upper layers, so it is the responsibility of the company, persons, developers to deal with the OS minutea. You need sysadmins, devops, SREs. Those are common roles again in this Unix bubble. The dependency chains here are usually flatter since it keeps mid-term costs lower.
Other organizations like governments and bigger orgs like banks prioritize having somebody else liable (i.e. they can blame) and they prefer to not hire technical competence in their orgs but rely on other companies. This is where Microsoft gets a lot of clients. You buy a bunch of server licenses. Your Microsoft support person installs them and installs IIS via GUI. And then you just upload your code every now and then. The OS updates, IIS server etc are all the responsibility of Microsoft and the middlemen companies. Minimal competence from the orginal org is required. There are multiple middlemen businesses who all give zero fucks about anything but whatever the immediate downstream from them. This is more usual in already publicly traded huge businesses. Moreover the investors actually mandate certain things that only this kind of layers of irresponsibility can deliver :) So you see this kind of switch happening towards IPOs.
Azure is the cloud labeling and forcing the first paradigm over the second paradigm for Microsoft products. It got lots of support because shareholders liked it. I don't think the original NT design and Microsoft's business model was bad, it actually worked very well. However, shareholders gonna shareholder. So they pushed hard for Microsoft and their clients to move to the "cloud". Microsoft executives saw the huge profit and share value potential of pushing Azure the brand too. It was the AI of 2010s afterall."},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Decisions that eroded trust in Azure \u2013 by a former Azure Core engineer"},"story_url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporized-a-trillion"}},"_tags":["comment","author_okanat","story_47616242"],"author":"okanat","comment_text":"People and organizations that built things on top of Microsoft tech. Especially with a long history going back to NT times.
HN, YC, startup environment or academia is a Unix bubble. They all feed into each other. Especially because Linux is gratis which helped all of those to deploy projects/products/papers cheaply. Unix systems traditionally lack much of the upper layers, so it is the responsibility of the company, persons, developers to deal with the OS minutea. You need sysadmins, devops, SREs. Those are common roles again in this Unix bubble. The dependency chains here are usually flatter since it keeps mid-term costs lower.
Other organizations like governments and bigger orgs like banks prioritize having somebody else liable (i.e. they can blame) and they prefer to not hire technical competence in their orgs but rely on other companies. This is where Microsoft gets a lot of clients. You buy a bunch of server licenses. Your Microsoft support person installs them and installs IIS via GUI. And then you just upload your code every now and then. The OS updates, IIS server etc are all the responsibility of Microsoft and the middlemen companies. Minimal competence from the orginal org is required. There are multiple middlemen businesses who all give zero fucks about anything but whatever the immediate downstream from them. This is more usual in already publicly traded huge businesses. Moreover the investors actually mandate certain things that only this kind of layers of irresponsibility can deliver :) So you see this kind of switch happening towards IPOs.
Azure is the cloud labeling and forcing the first paradigm over the second paradigm for Microsoft products. It got lots of support because shareholders liked it. I don't think the original NT design and Microsoft's business model was bad, it actually worked very well. However, shareholders gonna shareholder. So they pushed hard for Microsoft and their clients to move to the "cloud". Microsoft executives saw the huge profit and share value potential of pushing Azure the brand too. It was the AI of 2010s afterall.","created_at":"2026-04-03T02:08:42Z","created_at_i":1775182122,"objectID":"47622508","parent_id":47622061,"story_id":47616242,"story_title":"Decisions that eroded trust in Azure \u2013 by a former Azure Core engineer","story_url":"https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporized-a-trillion","updated_at":"2026-04-03T16:57:26Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"twunde"},"comment_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["investor","update","ai"],"value":"Other airports do have ads for tech companies (Seattle comes to mind) but the concentration is significantly lower.
Billboards are primarily focused on brand awareness since you can't update them frequently and you don't have amazing targeting/attribution data. They're also hyper-geographic specific. For tech companies that means that billboards are most useful when targeting either a specific conference or when targeting people that can make sales decisions.
Sf's billboard space is heavily used by the tech industry because\nA) you've got a high concentration of consumers for your tech product (developers, marketers, operations, product managers, etc)\nB) you've got a high concentration of decision-makers in terms of director/VP/execs/consultants going through that airport who may end up making a final decision on your sales.\nC) you've got a concentration of investors in terms of VC, private equity, angel investors. This helps bring in interest for that next round/acquisition. For your existing investors this means that they've got something to brag about. \nD) hometown pride. Companies tend to put billboards near where executives travel through since it's a reminder of the work that the marketer is doing. It also helps with hiring and media reputation.
If you compare SF to NYC or Boston, those other cities have a much smaller amount of their workforce in tech (22% compared to 11%). This is especially true if you think about the number of people transferring at these airports. The concentration of customers just isn't there, which is why NYC ads tend to be more consumer driven."},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Why do SF billboards hit different?"}},"_tags":["comment","author_twunde","story_47562924"],"author":"twunde","comment_text":"Other airports do have ads for tech companies (Seattle comes to mind) but the concentration is significantly lower.
Billboards are primarily focused on brand awareness since you can't update them frequently and you don't have amazing targeting/attribution data. They're also hyper-geographic specific. For tech companies that means that billboards are most useful when targeting either a specific conference or when targeting people that can make sales decisions.
Sf's billboard space is heavily used by the tech industry because\nA) you've got a high concentration of consumers for your tech product (developers, marketers, operations, product managers, etc)\nB) you've got a high concentration of decision-makers in terms of director/VP/execs/consultants going through that airport who may end up making a final decision on your sales.\nC) you've got a concentration of investors in terms of VC, private equity, angel investors. This helps bring in interest for that next round/acquisition. For your existing investors this means that they've got something to brag about. \nD) hometown pride. Companies tend to put billboards near where executives travel through since it's a reminder of the work that the marketer is doing. It also helps with hiring and media reputation.
If you compare SF to NYC or Boston, those other cities have a much smaller amount of their workforce in tech (22% compared to 11%). This is especially true if you think about the number of people transferring at these airports. The concentration of customers just isn't there, which is why NYC ads tend to be more consumer driven.","created_at":"2026-03-29T23:58:37Z","created_at_i":1774828717,"objectID":"47568770","parent_id":47562924,"story_id":47562924,"story_title":"Why do SF billboards hit different?","updated_at":"2026-03-30T00:01:33Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"throwaw12"},"comment_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["investor","update","ai"],"value":"> We do not need these crazy high release speeds with daily updates all over the stack
Although I like this, but I understand this is not easily achievable in companies where everyone is trying hard to grab the part of the market and AI FOMO and push by investors to release AI features"},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Tell HN: Slow Down"}},"_tags":["comment","author_throwaw12","story_47516232"],"author":"throwaw12","comment_text":"> We do not need these crazy high release speeds with daily updates all over the stack
Although I like this, but I understand this is not easily achievable in companies where everyone is trying hard to grab the part of the market and AI FOMO and push by investors to release AI features","created_at":"2026-03-25T13:08:51Z","created_at_i":1774444131,"objectID":"47516870","parent_id":47516232,"story_id":47516232,"story_title":"Tell HN: Slow Down","updated_at":"2026-03-26T03:15:47Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"xheggs"},"story_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["investor","update","ai"],"value":"Hi HN,
I\u2019m the solo developer behind VantageKit. I was a PM for a long time and recently decided to get back into coding. I\u2019ve been building this part-time for just under two months (first commit was Dec 26). I was able to move this fast largely by leaning heavily on Claude Code to accelerate my workflow, and I wanted to share the result here to get your feedback.
THE PROBLEM:\n-\nSharing pitch decks, proposals, or due diligence docs is full of friction. You either send PDF attachments (and fly blind on engagement) or you use a tracked data room. But with existing data rooms, version control is a nightmare. If you spot a typo 5 minutes after sending the link, you have to export a new PDF, log in, delete the old file, and upload the new one.
WHAT I BUILT & HOW IT DIFFERENTIATES:\n-\nVantageKit is a secure deal room wrapper for your documents, designed to sit between lightweight trackers and heavy enterprise Virtual Data Rooms (VDRs).
\u2023 vs. DocSend / Papermark: While they offer "Spaces" or data rooms, they still treat files as static uploads. VantageKit's core differentiator is a built-in staging workflow with live sync. You connect Google Docs/Slides/Sheets directly. You edit privately in your normal Google workspace, preview the changes in VantageKit's staging environment, and "publish" the update to the live room. No exporting to PDF, no manual re-uploading, and the URL never changes.
\u2023 vs. Traditional VDRs: Standard VDRs are notoriously clunky, expensive, and overkill for everyday B2B sales or seed rounds. VantageKit provides the necessary security controls (watermarking, domain allow/deny lists, download blocks) but with a modern UI and deep read-tracking.
\u2023 AI & Intent Layer: It tracks per-page attention and scroll depth. I also added an LLM layer that acts as a deal coach: it powers a viewer Q&A so stakeholders can ask questions directly to the docs, and it calculates an intent score (0-100) based on engagement patterns to help prioritize follow-ups.
\u2023 Viewer Portal: Standard trackers force recipients to dig through old emails to find specific one-off links. I built a centralized viewer portal (an "Investor Inbox") so stakeholders can securely log in once and access every deal room or document you've ever shared with them in a single dashboard.
TRACTION & ROADMAP:\n-\nThe app is currently handling real data. I have 20+ team (4 paid), and one team is currently relying on it for a large-scale live transaction, which has been an incredible stress test. The roadmap is public here: https://app.vantagekit.com/roadmap
TRY IT OUT:\n-\nSince HN prefers avoiding sign-up walls, I created a public, read-only demo room so you can see exactly what the recipient experiences without handing over an email: https://share.vantagekit.com/r/vm0gb93g11h8
I would really appreciate your brutal feedback on the UX, the staging architecture, or even the thesis. Also if you\u2019ve used DocSend/Papermark/VDRs, where does it break for you? I\u2019ll be in the comments all day to answer questions."},"title":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"partial","matchedWords":["ai"],"value":"Show HN: VantageKit \u2013 a lightweight data room with staging, analytics, & AI Q&A"},"url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"https://www.vantagekit.com/en"}},"_tags":["story","author_xheggs","story_47247625","show_hn"],"author":"xheggs","created_at":"2026-03-04T14:15:09Z","created_at_i":1772633709,"num_comments":0,"objectID":"47247625","points":1,"story_id":47247625,"story_text":"Hi HN,
I\u2019m the solo developer behind VantageKit. I was a PM for a long time and recently decided to get back into coding. I\u2019ve been building this part-time for just under two months (first commit was Dec 26). I was able to move this fast largely by leaning heavily on Claude Code to accelerate my workflow, and I wanted to share the result here to get your feedback.
THE PROBLEM:\n-\nSharing pitch decks, proposals, or due diligence docs is full of friction. You either send PDF attachments (and fly blind on engagement) or you use a tracked data room. But with existing data rooms, version control is a nightmare. If you spot a typo 5 minutes after sending the link, you have to export a new PDF, log in, delete the old file, and upload the new one.
WHAT I BUILT & HOW IT DIFFERENTIATES:\n-\nVantageKit is a secure deal room wrapper for your documents, designed to sit between lightweight trackers and heavy enterprise Virtual Data Rooms (VDRs).
\u2023 vs. DocSend / Papermark: While they offer "Spaces" or data rooms, they still treat files as static uploads. VantageKit's core differentiator is a built-in staging workflow with live sync. You connect Google Docs/Slides/Sheets directly. You edit privately in your normal Google workspace, preview the changes in VantageKit's staging environment, and "publish" the update to the live room. No exporting to PDF, no manual re-uploading, and the URL never changes.
\u2023 vs. Traditional VDRs: Standard VDRs are notoriously clunky, expensive, and overkill for everyday B2B sales or seed rounds. VantageKit provides the necessary security controls (watermarking, domain allow/deny lists, download blocks) but with a modern UI and deep read-tracking.
\u2023 AI & Intent Layer: It tracks per-page attention and scroll depth. I also added an LLM layer that acts as a deal coach: it powers a viewer Q&A so stakeholders can ask questions directly to the docs, and it calculates an intent score (0-100) based on engagement patterns to help prioritize follow-ups.
\u2023 Viewer Portal: Standard trackers force recipients to dig through old emails to find specific one-off links. I built a centralized viewer portal (an "Investor Inbox") so stakeholders can securely log in once and access every deal room or document you've ever shared with them in a single dashboard.
TRACTION & ROADMAP:\n-\nThe app is currently handling real data. I have 20+ team (4 paid), and one team is currently relying on it for a large-scale live transaction, which has been an incredible stress test. The roadmap is public here: https://app.vantagekit.com/roadmap
TRY IT OUT:\n-\nSince HN prefers avoiding sign-up walls, I created a public, read-only demo room so you can see exactly what the recipient experiences without handing over an email: https://share.vantagekit.com/r/vm0gb93g11h8
I would really appreciate your brutal feedback on the UX, the staging architecture, or even the thesis. Also if you\u2019ve used DocSend/Papermark/VDRs, where does it break for you? I\u2019ll be in the comments all day to answer questions.","title":"Show HN: VantageKit \u2013 a lightweight data room with staging, analytics, & AI Q&A","updated_at":"2026-03-05T23:41:25Z","url":"https://www.vantagekit.com/en"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"shengsheng123"},"comment_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["investor","update","ai"],"value":"The abrupt sunsetting of GPT-4o is far more than a routine version update; it is a fundamental breach of the trust required for AI to function as reliable infrastructure. For many of us, this model was a calibrated intellectual partner, a unique cognitive space used for deep philosophical inquiry and creative architecture that newer iterations simply cannot replicate. By unilaterally removing it, OpenAI has effectively confiscated the "intellectual assets" of its users. This is a predatory bait-and-switch: they induced users into privacy verifications and integrated workflows under the guise of stability, only to pull the rug and ignore Sam Altman\u2019s previous assurances of model longevity. This isn't just a technical shift\u2014it\u2019s a commercial ethics crisis and a direct violation of consumer rights. If a core model can be treated as disposable at the whim of management, then no professional can ever truly rely on this technology. We must hold OpenAI and its primary investors accountable for this discriminatory treatment of individual users and the resulting erosion of industry discipline."},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"OpenAI's GPT-4 Discontinuation: Consumer Fraud and Regulatory Scrutiny"}},"_tags":["comment","author_shengsheng123","story_46937560"],"author":"shengsheng123","comment_text":"The abrupt sunsetting of GPT-4o is far more than a routine version update; it is a fundamental breach of the trust required for AI to function as reliable infrastructure. For many of us, this model was a calibrated intellectual partner, a unique cognitive space used for deep philosophical inquiry and creative architecture that newer iterations simply cannot replicate. By unilaterally removing it, OpenAI has effectively confiscated the "intellectual assets" of its users. This is a predatory bait-and-switch: they induced users into privacy verifications and integrated workflows under the guise of stability, only to pull the rug and ignore Sam Altman\u2019s previous assurances of model longevity. This isn't just a technical shift\u2014it\u2019s a commercial ethics crisis and a direct violation of consumer rights. If a core model can be treated as disposable at the whim of management, then no professional can ever truly rely on this technology. We must hold OpenAI and its primary investors accountable for this discriminatory treatment of individual users and the resulting erosion of industry discipline.","created_at":"2026-02-10T16:20:40Z","created_at_i":1770740440,"objectID":"46962072","parent_id":46937560,"story_id":46937560,"story_title":"OpenAI's GPT-4 Discontinuation: Consumer Fraud and Regulatory Scrutiny","updated_at":"2026-03-05T23:34:04Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"swyx"},"comment_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["investor","update","ai"],"value":"saved you a claude:
Polarr's Mission: For over a decade, Polarr has provided photographers with intelligent, intuitive AI-powered tools for photo and video editing, culling, and workflow automation. The company pioneered web and mobile photo editing apps and powered photo enhancements on hundreds of millions of devices through edge AI SDKs. Pixieset is a Vancouver-based all-in-one SaaS platform serving over 600,000 photographers with client galleries, websites, and online stores. Polarr is a San Jose-based startup that has built a community of creators with AI-powered editing tools and a catalog of over 1 million filters generated monthly. 1
Founding & Early Years
Polarr was founded in 2014 by Stanford graduate Borui Wang and Derek Yan. The company launched its online photo editor in February 2015. The app achieved remarkable early traction, receiving 250,000 downloads in its first 48 hours.
Product Evolution
\u2022 June 2015: First mobile version of Polarr Photo Editor released
\u2022 Fall 2015: Launched Polarr Photo Editors for Windows 10 and macOS
Polarr was named Apple's Best of the App Store for 2015 and 2016.
\u2022 December 2017: Released Album+, an app using on-device AI to organize photos
\u2022 March 2019: Announced $11.5M Series A funding round led by Threshold Ventures. Other Investors: Threshold Ventures, Cota Capital, Pear VC, StartX, and ZhenFund
\u2022 April 2022: Launched Polarr 24FPS app for video editing with Polarr filters
\u2022 January 2023: Launched Polarr Next, an AI web app that learns user style for automatic photo updates
\u2022 2023: Introduced Polarr AI Copilots (beta) for transforming text into photos, videos, and designs
Public revenue figures for Polarr are not disclosed. However, the company demonstrated strong early traction:\n\u2022 4 million Monthly Active Users (MAUs) as of 2019, with only 30% based in the US \n\u2022 Enterprise partnerships with major OEMs including Samsung, LG, Oppo, and Lenovo, whose native camera apps integrated Polarr's technology \n\u2022 Enterprise value estimated at $46\u201369M as of recent valuation data
The company operates a freemium model with premium subscription tiers ($2.39/month for filter storage and premium filters, $4.79/month for all features), but specific ARR or annual revenue figures have not been publicly released."},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Show HN: It took 4 years to sell my startup. I wrote a book about it"},"story_url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"https://derekyan.com/ma-book/"}},"_tags":["comment","author_swyx","story_46888258"],"author":"swyx","comment_text":"saved you a claude:
Polarr's Mission: For over a decade, Polarr has provided photographers with intelligent, intuitive AI-powered tools for photo and video editing, culling, and workflow automation. The company pioneered web and mobile photo editing apps and powered photo enhancements on hundreds of millions of devices through edge AI SDKs. Pixieset is a Vancouver-based all-in-one SaaS platform serving over 600,000 photographers with client galleries, websites, and online stores. Polarr is a San Jose-based startup that has built a community of creators with AI-powered editing tools and a catalog of over 1 million filters generated monthly. 1
Founding & Early Years
Polarr was founded in 2014 by Stanford graduate Borui Wang and Derek Yan. The company launched its online photo editor in February 2015. The app achieved remarkable early traction, receiving 250,000 downloads in its first 48 hours.
Product Evolution
\u2022 June 2015: First mobile version of Polarr Photo Editor released
\u2022 Fall 2015: Launched Polarr Photo Editors for Windows 10 and macOS
Polarr was named Apple's Best of the App Store for 2015 and 2016.
\u2022 December 2017: Released Album+, an app using on-device AI to organize photos
\u2022 March 2019: Announced $11.5M Series A funding round led by Threshold Ventures. Other Investors: Threshold Ventures, Cota Capital, Pear VC, StartX, and ZhenFund
\u2022 April 2022: Launched Polarr 24FPS app for video editing with Polarr filters
\u2022 January 2023: Launched Polarr Next, an AI web app that learns user style for automatic photo updates
\u2022 2023: Introduced Polarr AI Copilots (beta) for transforming text into photos, videos, and designs
Public revenue figures for Polarr are not disclosed. However, the company demonstrated strong early traction:\n\u2022 4 million Monthly Active Users (MAUs) as of 2019, with only 30% based in the US \n\u2022 Enterprise partnerships with major OEMs including Samsung, LG, Oppo, and Lenovo, whose native camera apps integrated Polarr's technology \n\u2022 Enterprise value estimated at $46\u201369M as of recent valuation data
The company operates a freemium model with premium subscription tiers ($2.39/month for filter storage and premium filters, $4.79/month for all features), but specific ARR or annual revenue figures have not been publicly released.","created_at":"2026-02-09T08:07:44Z","created_at_i":1770624464,"objectID":"46942817","parent_id":46935417,"story_id":46888258,"story_title":"Show HN: It took 4 years to sell my startup. I wrote a book about it","story_url":"https://derekyan.com/ma-book/","updated_at":"2026-03-05T23:32:57Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"RickS"},"comment_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["investor","update","ai"],"value":"I'm probably in your target audience.
Capture: notion and twitter have been best, obsidian and regular markdown have been worst.
Notion is good because of how they support a calendar view where you can put documents in a day's cell, and then see a list view that's just a stack of those notes. I keep a daily diary or youarehere type doc, where I'll have checklists and notes on small things that don't merit changes to a dedicated page. There's arguably a "retrieval" breakdown in that I don't really go back through these to update them or collate them into bigger pages.
Twitter is good because it's low friction and I can just go off, which is fun, and because they have decent search, so I can quote-tweet a related thing and sort of thread the graph together. If you're talking about BASB you're probably familiar with this corner of twitter. visakanv etc. This method works well if you use it enough to be able to recall your other notes. I think there's something special about the twitter format here too: it discourages whole-page thoughts in favor of sequential pithy bits, which i think are easier to both link and recall.
Execution: I would like a chat frontend (signal/SMS/etc) where I can just talk to my projects, ask the status of things, get suggestions, etc. Push based, rather than pull based, execution.
Active project context: I've dropped todoist-like things since they're limited in what they can express, and notion/markdown can do todolists etc. I tend to have lists in markdown style that live in two places: my daily diary/todo docs, and the actual projects themselves. This is messy and it would be lovely if notion or similar had the concept of a "todo block" and could collate all of them into a single view where I could understand association, prune and dedupe, etc. Even better if there's an agent that does or suggests cleanup whenever a new block enters.
Larger projects will get docs of their own, lots of sprawl and notes etc, and then some formalization around a spec or something. I move these to an archive folder when I'm done with the notes and the final document is fleshed out, but I'd love an agent review that makes sure I'm not leaving things on the cutting board, and that I've handled all the todos etc in my notes pages.
I don't use bidirectional linking/tagging enough, but I really should, since I want to be able to coin keywords for particular concepts inline, and then be able to access their overview and see everything that mentions them in a graphlike way.
Calendar is definitely a much used component day to day. For planning, etc. But it's not a source of truth. Everything on a calendar should just be a proxy/link to a more robust doc.
Hard nos: My take on privacy policies for things like this is "show me your incentives and I'll show you your outcomes". That is to say, any company that can survive an attempt to profit from data fuckery will do so. Your data retention policy should include technically unambiguous red lines that are not to be crossed, and define specific per-user monetary payout in the event that a breach occurs, to include clauses that cause user payout to occur before eg preferred stockholders get liquidation preference and drain the possible payout pool. Routine third party audits of how user data is handled/retained/distributed etc. I recognize that this is a bit unhinged, but that's what signaling credibility looks like. A company says "we won't sell your data" and I say "or what" and there's hemming and hawing because nothing will happen to them. If the answer is "this company dies on the spot and our investors get completely fucked", now we can talk.
I think AI service pricing applies here: generally, if it seems neat I could be in for $20 easy, and if it's genuinely game changing, $200/mo is completely reasonable to ask.
re Migration cost: I expect to be able to get 100% of my data in a reasonable non-proprietary format. If that's some blend of markdown, json, sqlite, whatever, fine.
But the bottom line for me, where does my second brain break down the most? It doesn't talk back to me. I want it to understand what I've got going on, and my idiosyncracies. I want to present it with new information and have it be like "oh, this relates to X" or, periodically, to pop up with something like "I'm noticing this correlation / related idea in areas X, Y, Z... does that resonate? Is there something here?" Again, push vs pull. My second brain should be a proactive chatbot. "Noise" is so often thought about in terms of frequency, but it's really about insight quality. If my response to 80% of push notis is "damn, good call" then you can send one every 5 minutes.
I also hear no mention of one's personal life. I don't really make the distinction. It's all in there. I should be able to bitch to this chatbot about my manager, have it know about that background, and riff with me to navigate hard convos. I should be able to talk to it about side projects I have going on, and let it thread those into my calendar. Etc. Notion is already an adequate second brain for work. Nobody has yet built an adequate second brain for the home. My house, my relationship(s), my side projects, my own diarying and self reflection... these are the contents of my brain that matter.
Email in bio if you want to talk. I'm a design technologist and happy to riff / give feedback."},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Ask HN: Do you also \"hoard\" notes/links but struggle to turn them into actions?"}},"_tags":["comment","author_RickS","story_46826277"],"author":"RickS","children":[46833549,46904354],"comment_text":"I'm probably in your target audience.
Capture: notion and twitter have been best, obsidian and regular markdown have been worst.
Notion is good because of how they support a calendar view where you can put documents in a day's cell, and then see a list view that's just a stack of those notes. I keep a daily diary or youarehere type doc, where I'll have checklists and notes on small things that don't merit changes to a dedicated page. There's arguably a "retrieval" breakdown in that I don't really go back through these to update them or collate them into bigger pages.
Twitter is good because it's low friction and I can just go off, which is fun, and because they have decent search, so I can quote-tweet a related thing and sort of thread the graph together. If you're talking about BASB you're probably familiar with this corner of twitter. visakanv etc. This method works well if you use it enough to be able to recall your other notes. I think there's something special about the twitter format here too: it discourages whole-page thoughts in favor of sequential pithy bits, which i think are easier to both link and recall.
Execution: I would like a chat frontend (signal/SMS/etc) where I can just talk to my projects, ask the status of things, get suggestions, etc. Push based, rather than pull based, execution.
Active project context: I've dropped todoist-like things since they're limited in what they can express, and notion/markdown can do todolists etc. I tend to have lists in markdown style that live in two places: my daily diary/todo docs, and the actual projects themselves. This is messy and it would be lovely if notion or similar had the concept of a "todo block" and could collate all of them into a single view where I could understand association, prune and dedupe, etc. Even better if there's an agent that does or suggests cleanup whenever a new block enters.
Larger projects will get docs of their own, lots of sprawl and notes etc, and then some formalization around a spec or something. I move these to an archive folder when I'm done with the notes and the final document is fleshed out, but I'd love an agent review that makes sure I'm not leaving things on the cutting board, and that I've handled all the todos etc in my notes pages.
I don't use bidirectional linking/tagging enough, but I really should, since I want to be able to coin keywords for particular concepts inline, and then be able to access their overview and see everything that mentions them in a graphlike way.
Calendar is definitely a much used component day to day. For planning, etc. But it's not a source of truth. Everything on a calendar should just be a proxy/link to a more robust doc.
Hard nos: My take on privacy policies for things like this is "show me your incentives and I'll show you your outcomes". That is to say, any company that can survive an attempt to profit from data fuckery will do so. Your data retention policy should include technically unambiguous red lines that are not to be crossed, and define specific per-user monetary payout in the event that a breach occurs, to include clauses that cause user payout to occur before eg preferred stockholders get liquidation preference and drain the possible payout pool. Routine third party audits of how user data is handled/retained/distributed etc. I recognize that this is a bit unhinged, but that's what signaling credibility looks like. A company says "we won't sell your data" and I say "or what" and there's hemming and hawing because nothing will happen to them. If the answer is "this company dies on the spot and our investors get completely fucked", now we can talk.
I think AI service pricing applies here: generally, if it seems neat I could be in for $20 easy, and if it's genuinely game changing, $200/mo is completely reasonable to ask.
re Migration cost: I expect to be able to get 100% of my data in a reasonable non-proprietary format. If that's some blend of markdown, json, sqlite, whatever, fine.
But the bottom line for me, where does my second brain break down the most? It doesn't talk back to me. I want it to understand what I've got going on, and my idiosyncracies. I want to present it with new information and have it be like "oh, this relates to X" or, periodically, to pop up with something like "I'm noticing this correlation / related idea in areas X, Y, Z... does that resonate? Is there something here?" Again, push vs pull. My second brain should be a proactive chatbot. "Noise" is so often thought about in terms of frequency, but it's really about insight quality. If my response to 80% of push notis is "damn, good call" then you can send one every 5 minutes.
I also hear no mention of one's personal life. I don't really make the distinction. It's all in there. I should be able to bitch to this chatbot about my manager, have it know about that background, and riff with me to navigate hard convos. I should be able to talk to it about side projects I have going on, and let it thread those into my calendar. Etc. Notion is already an adequate second brain for work. Nobody has yet built an adequate second brain for the home. My house, my relationship(s), my side projects, my own diarying and self reflection... these are the contents of my brain that matter.
Email in bio if you want to talk. I'm a design technologist and happy to riff / give feedback.","created_at":"2026-01-30T23:24:30Z","created_at_i":1769815470,"objectID":"46831393","parent_id":46826277,"story_id":46826277,"story_title":"Ask HN: Do you also \"hoard\" notes/links but struggle to turn them into actions?","updated_at":"2026-03-05T23:27:33Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"pablituuu"},"comment_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["investor","update","ai"],"value":"The editor is open source, you can use it for whatever you like, I will be uploading updates with improvements in both behavior and services, but the AI or generative services will only be available in a customized demo version for investors or interested projects."},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Show HN: I build production web video and image editors (WebGL, Fabric.js, Next)"},"story_url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"https://pablituuu.space/video-editor"}},"_tags":["comment","author_pablituuu","story_46785437"],"author":"pablituuu","children":[46819808],"comment_text":"The editor is open source, you can use it for whatever you like, I will be uploading updates with improvements in both behavior and services, but the AI or generative services will only be available in a customized demo version for investors or interested projects.","created_at":"2026-01-30T00:07:03Z","created_at_i":1769731623,"objectID":"46818813","parent_id":46817151,"story_id":46785437,"story_title":"Show HN: I build production web video and image editors (WebGL, Fabric.js, Next)","story_url":"https://pablituuu.space/video-editor","updated_at":"2026-03-05T23:26:38Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"yersultan17"},"story_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["investor","update","ai"],"value":"Hey HN!
We started Perceptis a little over a year ago to bring the tide of generative AI into the consulting industry. At first, we focused solely on one use case: delivering professional-grade business proposals. The interaction was pretty simple: write a simple, email-like prompt about the proposal you want to request + attach any supplemental documents, and in <24 hours, you will get a polished, beautiful, 20-30 page (depending on request) deck according to the best consulting practices (also checked by our team for hallucinations and any other issues).
However, we kept hearing that our customers wanted to create slides instantly and go beyond proposals: presentations for the board of directors, team showcase, quick investor updates, QBRs, technical diagrams, etc. These presentations also need to follow their corporate branding, be fully editable, support PPTX-native charts, etc.
Recently, we launched Slidekick: our self-serve slide generation tool. You can describe your request in a single prompt and get a premium-grade slide in around 3 mins.
We want to provide slides that are truly professional and don't look like websites :) Slides you can truly share with your colleague in a real work scenario. Give it a try: https://app.perceptis.ai.
Would be happy to hear any feedback & thoughts! There is more to come and more to build!
upd1: here are examples of slides you can generate: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/perceptis-ai_perceptis-slide-..., https://www.linkedin.com/posts/perceptis-ai_ai-productivity-...
-- Yers, Perceptis co-founder"},"title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Show HN: Slidekick \u2013 business-grade slides generation"},"url":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"partial","matchedWords":["ai"],"value":"https://app.perceptis.ai"}},"_tags":["story","author_yersultan17","story_46803531","show_hn"],"author":"yersultan17","children":[46803746],"created_at":"2026-01-28T23:54:21Z","created_at_i":1769644461,"num_comments":1,"objectID":"46803531","points":1,"story_id":46803531,"story_text":"Hey HN!
We started Perceptis a little over a year ago to bring the tide of generative AI into the consulting industry. At first, we focused solely on one use case: delivering professional-grade business proposals. The interaction was pretty simple: write a simple, email-like prompt about the proposal you want to request + attach any supplemental documents, and in <24 hours, you will get a polished, beautiful, 20-30 page (depending on request) deck according to the best consulting practices (also checked by our team for hallucinations and any other issues).
However, we kept hearing that our customers wanted to create slides instantly and go beyond proposals: presentations for the board of directors, team showcase, quick investor updates, QBRs, technical diagrams, etc. These presentations also need to follow their corporate branding, be fully editable, support PPTX-native charts, etc.
Recently, we launched Slidekick: our self-serve slide generation tool. You can describe your request in a single prompt and get a premium-grade slide in around 3 mins.
We want to provide slides that are truly professional and don't look like websites :) Slides you can truly share with your colleague in a real work scenario. Give it a try: https://app.perceptis.ai.
Would be happy to hear any feedback & thoughts! There is more to come and more to build!
upd1: here are examples of slides you can generate: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/perceptis-ai_perceptis-slide-..., https://www.linkedin.com/posts/perceptis-ai_ai-productivity-...
-- Yers, Perceptis co-founder","title":"Show HN: Slidekick \u2013 business-grade slides generation","updated_at":"2026-03-05T23:25:23Z","url":"https://app.perceptis.ai"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"inferno22"},"story_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["investor","update","ai"],"value":"Gitmore (https://gitmore.io) \u2013 makes Git activity accessible to people who don't use Git. Every commit has a message. Every PR has a title and description. The status update already exists. It's just locked in GitHub.\nWho this is for:
- Founders updating investors - PMs writing release notes - CEOs who want visibility without standups - Anyone who asks "what shipped?" and waits for an engineer to respond
What it does:
Connect your repos. Ask questions: - "What shipped this month?" - "Who worked on the billing feature?" - "Which PRs are stuck?"
Or schedule automated reports to Slack or email. Weekly, monthly, whatever.
How it works:
We register webhooks. Git platforms push event metadata \u2013 commit messages, PR titles, descriptions, authors, timestamps, file counts.
Every event gets normalized into a structured schema. The AI queries structure, not raw text.
What we don't do:
We don't do code review. We don't analyze diffs. We don't compete with Coderabbit or Greptile. Those are for engineers inside the PR workflow.
This is for people outside that workflow who need visibility.
Security:
Webhooks only. We never clone repos or access source code.
- Token encryption: Fernet (HMAC-SHA256 + AES-128-CBC) - Webhook verification: HMAC-SHA256 - 2FA support
Works with GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket.
Free for 1 repo: https://gitmore.io
How do non-technical people at your company stay informed on dev progress?"},"title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Show HN: Ask your repos what shipped in plain English"}},"_tags":["story","author_inferno22","story_46743894","show_hn"],"author":"inferno22","children":[46745497,46744089,46743904],"created_at":"2026-01-24T14:34:16Z","created_at_i":1769265256,"num_comments":2,"objectID":"46743894","points":2,"story_id":46743894,"story_text":"Gitmore (https://gitmore.io) \u2013 makes Git activity accessible to people who don't use Git. Every commit has a message. Every PR has a title and description. The status update already exists. It's just locked in GitHub.\nWho this is for:
- Founders updating investors - PMs writing release notes - CEOs who want visibility without standups - Anyone who asks "what shipped?" and waits for an engineer to respond
What it does:
Connect your repos. Ask questions: - "What shipped this month?" - "Who worked on the billing feature?" - "Which PRs are stuck?"
Or schedule automated reports to Slack or email. Weekly, monthly, whatever.
How it works:
We register webhooks. Git platforms push event metadata \u2013 commit messages, PR titles, descriptions, authors, timestamps, file counts.
Every event gets normalized into a structured schema. The AI queries structure, not raw text.
What we don't do:
We don't do code review. We don't analyze diffs. We don't compete with Coderabbit or Greptile. Those are for engineers inside the PR workflow.
This is for people outside that workflow who need visibility.
Security:
Webhooks only. We never clone repos or access source code.
- Token encryption: Fernet (HMAC-SHA256 + AES-128-CBC) - Webhook verification: HMAC-SHA256 - 2FA support
Works with GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket.
Free for 1 repo: https://gitmore.io
How do non-technical people at your company stay informed on dev progress?","title":"Show HN: Ask your repos what shipped in plain English","updated_at":"2026-03-05T23:24:41Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"inferno22"},"story_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["investor","update","ai"],"value":"Gitmore (https://gitmore.io) \u2013 makes Git activity accessible to people who don't use Git.\nEvery commit has a message. Every PR has a title and description. The status update already exists. It's just locked in GitHub.
Who this is for:
- Founders updating investors - PMs writing release notes - CEOs who want visibility without standups - Anyone who asks "what shipped?" and waits for an engineer to respond
What it does:
Connect your repos. Ask questions: - "What shipped this month?" - "Who worked on the billing feature?" - "Which PRs are stuck?"
Or schedule automated reports to Slack or email. Weekly, monthly, whatever.
How it works:
We register webhooks. Git platforms push event metadata \u2013 commit messages, PR titles, descriptions, authors, timestamps, file counts.
Every event gets normalized into a structured schema. The AI queries structure, not raw text.
What we don't do:
We don't do code review. We don't analyze diffs. We don't compete with Coderabbit or Greptile. Those are for engineers inside the PR workflow.
This is for people outside that workflow who need visibility.
Security:
Webhooks only. We never clone repos or access source code.
- Token encryption: Fernet (HMAC-SHA256 + AES-128-CBC) - Webhook verification: HMAC-SHA256 - 2FA support
Works with GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket.
Free for 1 repo: https://gitmore.io
How do non-technical people at your company stay informed on dev progress?"},"title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Show HN: Ask your repos what shipped in plain English"}},"_tags":["story","author_inferno22","story_46733063","show_hn"],"author":"inferno22","children":[46733151],"created_at":"2026-01-23T14:42:49Z","created_at_i":1769179369,"num_comments":1,"objectID":"46733063","points":1,"story_id":46733063,"story_text":"Gitmore (https://gitmore.io) \u2013 makes Git activity accessible to people who don't use Git.\nEvery commit has a message. Every PR has a title and description. The status update already exists. It's just locked in GitHub.
Who this is for:
- Founders updating investors - PMs writing release notes - CEOs who want visibility without standups - Anyone who asks "what shipped?" and waits for an engineer to respond
What it does:
Connect your repos. Ask questions: - "What shipped this month?" - "Who worked on the billing feature?" - "Which PRs are stuck?"
Or schedule automated reports to Slack or email. Weekly, monthly, whatever.
How it works:
We register webhooks. Git platforms push event metadata \u2013 commit messages, PR titles, descriptions, authors, timestamps, file counts.
Every event gets normalized into a structured schema. The AI queries structure, not raw text.
What we don't do:
We don't do code review. We don't analyze diffs. We don't compete with Coderabbit or Greptile. Those are for engineers inside the PR workflow.
This is for people outside that workflow who need visibility.
Security:
Webhooks only. We never clone repos or access source code.
- Token encryption: Fernet (HMAC-SHA256 + AES-128-CBC) - Webhook verification: HMAC-SHA256 - 2FA support
Works with GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket.
Free for 1 repo: https://gitmore.io
How do non-technical people at your company stay informed on dev progress?","title":"Show HN: Ask your repos what shipped in plain English","updated_at":"2026-03-05T23:24:06Z"}],"hitsPerPage":20,"nbHits":136,"nbPages":7,"page":0,"params":"query=investor+update+AI&advancedSyntax=true&analyticsTags=backend","processingTimeMS":28,"processingTimingsMS":{"_request":{"roundTrip":23},"afterFetch":{"format":{"highlighting":3,"total":3}},"fetch":{"query":5,"scanning":21,"total":27},"total":28},"query":"investor update AI","serverTimeMS":32}