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Updated: 32 min 47 sec ago

The Useless Web

Tue, 02/24/2026 - 10:37pm

Article URL: https://theuselessweb.com/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47147000

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Categories: Hacker News

Ask HN: Is the offline user SaaS more profitable than online startups?

Tue, 02/24/2026 - 10:34pm

Dear HN,

i currently feeling stuck with my own choice choosing whether to stick to the SAAS like a POS app that focused on offline business user or online SAAS such as tools for startups, freelancer, or onlines environmental business.

I'd really appreciate insights from founders who've faced a similar decision.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47146978

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Categories: Hacker News

IPnews: The IP Tool That Fixed My Global NetOps Workflow (No Fluff)

Tue, 02/24/2026 - 10:31pm

Network engineer here, managing 50+ global nodes. For months, my workflow was: ·2AM alert: Singapore node lagging ·Waste 2hrs troubleshooting, realize IP tool only shows “Malaysia” (country-level) ·Block legitimate users because free IP DB is outdated ·Repeat. Then I switched to IPnews. Here’s the hard NetOps value: ·City/ISP-level global geolocation (pinpoints routing issues in minutes) ·Real-time risk scoring (blocks scanners/proxies before they hit servers) ·Stable API (integrates with Prometheus/Grafana, no timeouts) ·Bulk lookup (up to 3,000 IP addresses per query) It’s not a “enterprise tool” with 100 unused features — it’s built for engineers who need accurate IP data to fix things faster. If you’re in NetOps/DevOps managing global infrastructure, it’s worth the free tier test.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47146955

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Categories: Hacker News

Show HN: Reunited My Cats in Code – yet another lightweight OpenClaw alternative

Tue, 02/24/2026 - 10:25pm

# I Reunited My Cats in Code

Pickle is yelling for food right now. She does this 8PM everyday.

Cookie was her step-brother. The chill one. He lives somewhere else now.

So I reunited them in code - Pickle handles the chat, Cookie handles the memories. They're still together.

---

Okay, enough cat story.

I built *pickle-bot* - yet another lightweight OpenClaw alternative.

OpenClaw is incredible, but I wanted to understand how agents work. So I built my own: - Runs on Raspberry Pi - A clean and manageable codebase - Create agents, add skills, schedule crons - Chat via CLI, Telegram, Discord - Web Search, API server, all good stuff.

*Chatting with "Pickle" while Pickle yells at me? Just so much fun.*

Check the repo: [pickle-bot](https://github.com/zane-chen/pickle-bot)

Pickle is mine. Bring your own cats :)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47146914

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Categories: Hacker News

Show HN: Crustdata (YC F24) – Web Search API for Token-Efficient AI Agents

Tue, 02/24/2026 - 10:11pm

Hi HN! We’re Abhilash Chowdhary, Chris Pisarski and Manmohit Grewal. We built Crustdata (YC F24). Today we’re launching our web search API for AI agents, which not only returns the most relevant documents from the web but also maps them to the correct entity (person, company or event). Demo video here https://youtu.be/IouWW97hBN8

If you run agents at scale, tokens become a line item. The web data is the worst input: long pages, repeated content, mixed entities, stale claims. The usual web search -> scrape -> summarize + structure forces the agent to spend tokens doing janitorial work before it can take action.

We’re trying to move that work upstream. We keep a canonical graph (ontology) of people and companies: stable internal IDs, aliases, and relationships. Then we continuously index the web and attach each document to the right entity ID. Example: raw web search for "Stripe pricing changes 2026" returns ~10 results across ~4,000 tokens, mostly redundant. We return 6 deduplicated results in ~1,200 tokens.

This is not just about saving tokens. It also matters because the common failure isn’t “search missed something.” It’s “search found something about the wrong entity.” Names collide. Companies rebrand. Domains move. Press releases get syndicated and look like independent sources. If you treat strings as IDs, you eventually attach evidence to the wrong person/company and the agent takes a confident action based on that mistake.

Under the hood, we run a continuous pipeline that updates the entity-linked index: discover -> fetch -> extract -> dedupe -> entity resolution -> attach -> index . And we serve you this index via our search API.

We didn’t start with web search. We spent ~2 years building verified people + company data from higher-trust sources. That forced us to build identity as a system, not a string. When we tried to bolt on web search and started building our integrated index of documents + people + companies, we ended up with a pile of local fixes: parser tweaks, domain rules, prompt hacks. Each fix helped one case and broke another because identity isn’t local. That’s when we committed to an entity-first index: pay the entity resolution cost once, then reuse it everywhere.

If you’re building AI agents for sales, recruiting, or investing that do a lot of web searches for people and companies, we’d love for you to try our web search APIs. https://crustdata.com/demo

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47146819

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

Categories: Hacker News

Tests Are the New Moat

Tue, 02/24/2026 - 9:41pm
Categories: Hacker News

Show HN: Measuring brand share in AI answers – a Y Combinator case study

Tue, 02/24/2026 - 9:36pm

After working in data science at Google, I built GeoVector to systematically measure how brands appear in AI-generated answers. Our approach is research-based, using position-adjusted scoring grounded in published GEO literature. The Y Combinator report is one example of the analysis we run.

We ran 150 prompts across ChatGPT and Gemini, tracking 21 brands. Three things that surprised us:

1. Techstars outranks YC on ChatGPT despite YC's far stronger Google presence 2. YC's own site accounts for just 8 of 940 AI source references 3. The single most-cited source driving competitor visibility is a blog post on pitchwise.se — not any accelerator's own website

Full report at the link, no signup. GeoVector runs this analysis for any brand or vertical.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47146588

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Categories: Hacker News

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