MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bko | 2025-05-06 12:46:45+00:00
Incredible timeline to a $3B exit

> Windsurf began in 2021 as Exafunction, founded by MIT graduates Varun Mohan and Douglas Chen. The company initially focused on GPU optimization before pivoting to AI-assisted coding tools, launching Codeium, which later evolved into Windsurf.

> Series B (January 2024): $65 million at a $500 million valuation.

> Series C (September 2024): $150 million, led by General Catalyst, at a $1.3 billion valuation.

> May 2025: $3 billion acquisition from OpenAI

I wonder how much of the value is really from the model or the tooling around it. They all use the same models (mostly Claude, others have been horrible and buggy in my experience). Even co-pilot agent mode now uses Claude. The editor has their own LLM (?) that does the apply since LLMs often return snippets. They work well enough on Cursor. And then you have the auto-complete, which I think is their own model as well.

But the main value from me is from the agent mode and 95% of the value is the underlying model. The other stuff could be more or less a VS Code plugin. The other benefit is the fixed pricing. I have no idea how much 500 calls cost if I were to use the API, but I expect they're probably losing money.
by Tainnor | 2025-05-06 12:46:54+00:00
> Is the AfD acting extra-constitutionally?

Late answer, but: they did actually abuse their power in an unconstitutional way after last year's elections to the state parliament of Thuringia. The eldest member of the parliament was from the AfD and as such he was given the traditionally ceremonial role of moderating the parliamentary proceedings until such time as an actual president was elected. With absolutely no legal basis to do so he tried to block the parliament from voting on certain matters. The other parties had to get the state constitutional court involved who very firmly ordered the AfD to let the parliament work as intended.

While the AfD complied with the ruling (I don't really see how they couldn't have) and the crisis was ultimately averted, one should make no mistake: this was a test to see if the democratic forces were still strong enough to oppose them. For now, they were.
by unwind | 2025-05-06 12:46:55+00:00
I had to look up "skip-level" since my large tech company lingo was lacking.

It is defined as:

used to describe someone who works for a company at two levels higher than another person, or a meeting or relationship that involves an employee and a manager at two levels higher

by Cambridge's dictionary[1]. That makes it really complicated when the article talks about 1-3 skip levels, I'm not sure how to interpret that ... is it (my level + 1 + n) or (my level + 2 * n)?

Edit: the mathyness.

[1]: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/skip-lev...
by kacesensitive | 2025-05-06 12:47:05+00:00
This is a good reminder that the mythologized "Code of the West" wasn't some noble cowboy ethic—it was born out of postwar resentment, racial violence, and frontier lawlessness. It's easy to forget that much of what's now framed as rugged individualism was originally just unchecked aggression from people who couldn't handle losing a war. The romanticization of this period by early 20th-century writers smoothed over a lot of ugly history.
by aligundogdu | 2025-05-06 12:47:16+00:00
Is there any limit etc. It gives an error on my first try.

{"error":true,"name":"Error","message":"css should not be empty","stack":"Error: css should not be empty\n at module.exports (/usr/src/app/node_modules/penthouse/lib/index.js:206:14)\n at file:///usr/src/app/server.js:153:31\n at process.processTicksAndRejections (node:internal/process/task_queues:95:5)"}
by virgilp | 2025-05-06 12:47:58+00:00
I don't know. I'm 30 years into those 40 and, while I can list plenty of "achievements" ... that's not what got me promoted. There _is_ value in making bosses & grandbosses happy.

I don't think it's good for you to be a cynic(because there's more to life than "promotion!"), but I think it's good to know/be well aware of the cynical viewpoint, because there's often a lot of truth in it.
by bookofjoe | 2025-05-06 12:48:18+00:00
Not sure what "this" refers to....

edit. OK, I just went back and reread the parent post and now I understand what you're asking. I do agree with you, this is generalizable across the board: file under the old saw "Perfect is the enemy of good."

edit #2. Also applicable, from Alfred Korzybski's classic 1933 book "Science and Sanity": "When in doubt, read on." I've always generalized this statement (which I first encountered around 1968 while an undergraduate at UCLA when reading his book not for a class but because I had gone down a wonderful rabbit hole after learning about Korzybski and his huge influence at the time he was alive ) to all things that puzzle me or cause me to stop moving toward whatever it is I'm aiming at.

edit #3: PDF for Korzybski's book:

https://archive.org/details/alfred-korzybksi-science-and-san...
by JazzedPineda | 2025-05-06 12:48:44+00:00
There aren't any binary packages or cache yet, but the creator of IX, Anton, has provided a rootfs tarball which uncompresses to about the same size as an installation of Ubuntu on WSL.

Also, I haven't seen anyone other than Anton add new package recipes to the IX repository. The documentation for creating package recipes is at https://stal-ix.github.io/PKG , but it's not referenced by any other page on the stal/IX website.
by karmakaze | 2025-05-06 12:48:49+00:00
The post is apt in getting things 'done'. I prefer to get things done. Of course I can't always just do what I consider important, so I balance them, I meet the requirements of 'done' without much more, and I spend more time than most getting important stuff done, sometimes things that take a longer time--I'll do the gardening so that it eventually gets done.

People won't notice this extra effort for a long time, but from time to time, some problem/issue will arise and one of those things in my garden will be instrumental in solving or mitigating it. Over time, you get recognized as someone who gets things done well.

Basically get stuff 'done' in 80% of your time and make your own 20% time. What's funny is that I've often been given explicit 20% time, but I've found that I can't schedule/manage that time explicitly like that, so I went back to taking approximately 20% time if/when I thought it's appropriate.
by DavidPiper | 2025-05-06 12:49:08+00:00
Totally agree, standardisation makes everything so much more legible, even if there are problems with the standard.

I also think there is a profoundly non-linear relationship (I don't want to say negative-exponential, but it could be), between:

- The number of lines of code, or distinct configuration changes, you make to the defaults of an off-the-shelf tool

- The cognitive and practical load maintaining that personalized setup

I'm convinced that the opportunity cost of not using default configurations is significantly higher than we estimate, especially when that environment has to be shared across multiple people.

(It's unavoidable or even desirable in many cases of course, but so often we just reinvent hexagonal wheels.)
by NunoSempere | 2025-05-06 12:49:19+00:00
- Shortages of some goods expected in the US starting later this month, because of tariffs.

- The power outage on the Iberian Peninsula was the worst in Europe since 2003, and Europe may have been close to a more widespread blackout.

- Trump wants to involve the military in policing within the US.

- Negotiations between the US and Iran over its nuclear weapons program have stalled.

- Microsoft will host xAI’s Grok model in its cloud service, in a move to reduce Microsoft’s dependency on OpenAI.

- Gaza is running out of food, and the UN warns of famine.

- India-Pakistan tensions remain high.

---

Because imports are slowing, especially from China, shortages of some imported goods are expected to become noticeable in the coming weeks and to become substantial around August. If tariffs continue, some of these shortages may become pronounced; prices will increase dramatically for other goods. We recommend that those in the US consider buying imported goods before shortages and large price increases arrive.

Forecasters also discussed the possibility of shortages caused merely by self-fulfilling prophecy. For instance, the majority of toilet paper for US consumption is produced domestically, and so, one might naïvely think that as shelves start to empty of other products, toilet paper inventories will not be affected. However, shelves might empty of some products simply because people expect them to, even of products that are not substantially affected by tariffs.

---
by davidmurdoch | 2025-05-06 12:49:25+00:00
> they start delivering a stream of marginal improvements to a particular subsystem1. From their perspective, it feels like they’re crushing it. After all, they’re putting out work at their top speed: no downtime, no waiting on other teams. But they’re not doing their actual job, which is to deliver the most value they can to their company.

These people are often force multipliers, or "developer velocity engineers". They do work that doesn't deliver direct customer value, like updating old dependencies, swapping out deprecated APIs for new ones, always fixing warnings in CI pipelines and lint tools, etc. They free up others to deliver the "value" at higher speeds.

But yes, they are the first to go when layoffs happen. But I think these types are absolutely necessary for an efficient org, and no matter how many times this type is fired for it, someone will end up falling into the same work again eventually - because this "no-value" work needs to get done.
by whizzter | 2025-05-06 12:49:26+00:00
Not surprising.

One serious question is how much precedent research is grounded in possible reality? The "unexpeced-precedent-that-throws-off-the-opposition" and "old-or-savant-legal-expert-who-knows-them-all" tropes in media seems to hinge on them being important, and reading legal rulings on business cases (like those historic ones regarding Nintendo and Sega copy protections or EFF ones) does seem to put some weight on them?
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-05-06 12:49:49+00:00
> No one is starving in the netherlands.

This is inaccurate, nearly half a million people struggle to eat enough: https://www.rodekruis.nl/persberichten/450000-mensen-in-verb.... There's food banks, but there's a lot of shame associated with using them; despite that, ~200.000 people a year make use of them: https://voedselbankennederland.nl/wp-content/uploads/2024/09....

Also read the book "Superschool" about what was one of the worst schools in one of the poorest areas of the Netherlands, where there were loads of kids going to school hungry, dirty, and without basics like a coat.

Sorry, your throwaway remark just rubbed me up the wrong way. The Netherlands is not the socialist utopia that some people make it out to be, we just have bike lanes, sorta-legal weed and superior bread / cheese.
Show HN: Outpost – OSS infra for outbound webhooks and event destinations
by alexbouchard | 2025-05-06 12:50:46+00:00
Hey HN, we're launching Outpost, an open-source, self-hostable component designed to handle outbound event delivery for SaaS/API platforms.

If you're building a platform, you eventually need to send events to your users (think payment success, resource updates, workflow changes). Implementing this reliably—handling retries, monitoring, scaling, providing a decent dev experience for consumers, and managing tenants—becomes a significant, recurring engineering task that distracts from core product development. We built Outpost to offload that complexity.

Outpost delivers events via traditional webhooks and also directly to event destinations like message queues and buses. While webhooks are ubiquitous, they have limitations at scale regarding cost, reliability patterns, and security posture. We observed platforms like Stripe, Shopify, and Twilio offering direct bus/queue integrations for these reasons—it's often cheaper and more resilient. It offers a better DX for consumers who prefer programmatic consumption. Outpost provides this flexibility out of the box as a core feature.

Key features:

- Multiple Delivery Methods: Webhooks + native Event Destinations (SQS, Kinesis, GCP Pub/Sub, RabbitMQ, Hookdeck, etc.).

- Guaranteed Delivery: At-least-once guarantee with configurable automatic retries.

- Observability: Built-in event log & OpenTelemetry support.

- Management: API for destination (endpoint) management; optional User Portal for end-user self-service (debugging, destination management).

- Multi-tenancy, topics, webhook security best practices (signatures, timestamps), etc.

Given you most likely already have a system in place, Outpost is backward compatible with your existing payload format, HTTP headers, and signatures.

It's written in Go and licensed under Apache 2.0. It's still early days, and we'd love your feedback – especially on the architecture, desired event destinations, or any rough edges you find.

GitHub: https://github.com/hookdeck/outpost Docs: https://outpost.hookdeck.com/docs

Thanks for checking it out!
by whstl | 2025-05-06 12:52:12+00:00
Or at least hold them accountable for failing to get things done and communicating badly with developers. Which is something that I'm yet to see.

In previous companies, as an engineering manager, I had to burn a huge amount of political capital to steer my team in the right direction, several times.

My people (engineers) want to achieve their goals and create value, and the higher-ups want working software making money. I don't see why this has become so hard to achieve.
by wpietri | 2025-05-06 12:52:58+00:00
We agree: There is value in making the compiler happy. There's value in getting tasks done. There's value in pleasing bosses. They are necessary means to an end.

However, my point is that one's analysis of the purpose can't stop with any of those. That focusing only on any one of those is ultimately shallow.

And in particular, my critique of this article is that he's just shifting focus from one proximate goal to another. Is pleasing the bosses necessary? Under our current dominant theories of work, yes. Is it the point? No. Always and forever: no.
by actionfromafar | 2025-05-06 12:53:14+00:00
The OpenOffice name should be donated to LibreOffice.

They could/should security patch the last stable version of OpenOffice, keep that release maintained (only security fixes) and its downloads alive so people who want bug-for-bug compatilibity have a safe off-ramp.

Then either the LibreOffice or the OpenOffice could be sunset, or OpenOffice could be a corporate friendly version of LibreOffice only sold together with support contracts.

Such a waste of a great name and brand.
by pc86 | 2025-05-06 12:53:24+00:00
I think every child should get a hot, nutritious breakfast and lunch at school at taxpayer expense. But I'm also [edit] s/smart/reasonable enough to know that people who disagree with that aren't "subhuman."

There is no "basic test of humanity" and pretending their is is tribalistic bullshit so you can feel superior to other people who disagree with you.

It's digusting.
by phorkyas82 | 2025-05-06 12:53:26+00:00
The biggest pain I remember was placement of figures. I think the [h] parameter would advise to place the graphic right "here", but even if added the exclamation mark for extra force, it would often wind up somewhere else.

Like when our chess trainer could not put six diagrams on one page with latex, s.th. that is very feasible with typst (https://github.com/Phorkyas/typst-samples/tree/main/chess)
by sevensor | 2025-05-06 12:53:26+00:00
I like to take the “programming as theory building” approach. Every program is an experiment. When it stops working, you have more information about the world. At that point, you can revise the program, or you can let it go. Either way, you’ve refined your theory of the domain, and that’s much less likely to tumble back down the hill than some source code that at best represents an imperfect application of the theory.
by rvz | 2025-05-06 12:53:30+00:00
Very surprising outcome, since OpenAI went after Cursor (twice) [0] And I originally thought that Cursor would be bought instead a day before the rumour [1].

It was smart for Windsurf to take the offer and to get greedy in this hype cycle. Unless Cursor is thinking that Anthropic or someone else will buy them for a lot more, its going to get extremely competitive as the switching cost for Cursor is zero and that ARR can disappear very quickly.

Copilot will attempt to destroy Cursor on price and functionality for however long they want to.

Very risky for Cursor at $9B valuation (which I think is overvalued and based on VC FOMO).

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/17/openai-pursued-cursor-make...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43698819
by lolinder | 2025-05-06 12:54:17+00:00
If it acquired those customers in an environment where Microsoft was not enforcing their marketplace terms it very much does matter if they have a plan for supporting plugins in the future.

Are Cursor and Windsurf going to ask plugin devs to push to their own plugin stores in addition to VS Code's? Will they rally jointly behind a single open store? They need to have an answer to Microsoft here, and for the good of the ecosystem I hope they do have an answer, but customers will flee quickly if they lose access to all the proprietary plugins and to the broader ecosystem.
by km144 | 2025-05-06 12:55:00+00:00
Isn't the problem precisely that uncertainty though? That we have many data points showing that a rotting banana skin will not spontaneously gain sentience, but we have no clear way to predict the future? And we have no way of knowing the true chance of superintelligence arising from the current path of AI research—the fact that it could be 1-in-100 or 1-in-1e12 or whatever is part of the discussion of uncertainty itself, and people are biased in all sorts of ways to believe that the true risk is somewhere on that continuum.
by Ygg2 | 2025-05-06 12:55:49+00:00
> poor developer ergonomics

I don't think it's poor developer ergonomics. The compiler tells you "Hey, try adding &x at this position".

It's unfamiliarity with Rust's type system and syntax sugars.

<HYPERBOLE>

I'll take 1000 compiler errors over a single non-deterministic bug that only happens on ARM at 6 o'clock on Blue Moon when Mercury is in Orion (it's UB).

And I'd ritually sacrifice my first unborn werekid to the Dark Compiler Gods for a compiler error, that actually suggests a correct fix.

</HYPERBOLE>
by bayindirh | 2025-05-06 12:55:51+00:00
> But surely the film rolls still exist?

I just watched a video revealing that many multichannel masters of big artists have gone up in flames in a big warehouse fire in 2008 [0] [1], and a comment told that a film company burnt down their silent film archive to get insurance money.

So, I don't bet.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9eXk4o35UI

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/11/magazine/universal-fire-m...
by ImPostingOnHN | 2025-05-06 12:56:06+00:00
> More and more you run into people who simply don't care about craft and quality.

Many talented and conscientious craftspeople, to pay the bills, work jobs which don't afford them full creative freedom, or even appreciate it.

> people used to take much greater care in their craft even when they were paid less

Did they? Maybe this is the golden tint cast when we reminisce about "the good ol' days". I currently know some people who take much greater care in their craft, than some other people I used to know.

The attitude of "I'm not paid enough to do that" feels, to me, to be closely correlated with a company asking the employees to do more for/with the same or less, giving less freedom to choose what to do, micromanaging/policing how they do it, and all the while showing a decreasing amount of loyalty and humanity towards them. It'd be unreasonable to expect the employees to then suck it up, grin, and bear it -- They are equal partners in an employment relationship in which one party is attempting to unilaterally change the status quo.
by kordlessagain | 2025-05-06 12:56:26+00:00
It's almost halfway through 2025 and AI can generate perfectly fine code from conversational language interactions.

The interactions are where it's at - prompting obviously - but also feedback and clarification after breaking.

I went through the process of trying to figure out what a coding agent that coded for someone who didn't code look like when it first got going and created this: https://github.com/kordless/evolvemcp

It's less than perfect, but works well. I've used it to "auto code" several MCP servers/tools (honestly the MCP language is super confusing) and I can see where an MCP proxy with a search engine attached to it will be super handy later (and if you understand that and build such a thing, you're welcome for the idea if you hadn't had it already).
by forwardmsg | 2025-05-06 12:56:34+00:00
ForwardMsg is a powerful message forwarding tool that automatically syncs messages between Discord and Telegram. Whether you need Discord-to-Telegram, Telegram-to-Discord, or even Discord-to-Discord and Telegram-to-Telegram message forwarding, ForwardMsg delivers real-time, reliable performance. Ideal for communities, support teams, resellers, crypto investors, and content creators who manage multiple channels or platforms.
by rchaud | 2025-05-06 12:56:41+00:00
I wish this guy the best, but a "technology solution" is not going to be able to address the psychological burden of RSD, nor the executive functioning issues of ADHD. An Airtable sheet with a "Mark as Contacted" flag is something a business analyst would come up with after speaking to an person with ADHD.

RSD can't be solved 100%. At best, you can give yourself some guidance on how to resume contact with someone:

1) When was the last time I was in touch with this person?

2) How would I rate my relationship with them on a scale of 1-10 -- this is important because in adulthood friendships can fade even if nobody did anything wrong

3) Why do I feel they would not want to hear from me?

4) List 3 light topics of conversation that are low-risk, and choose one to reach out with. That can help reduce the internal resistance, which is a key factor in RSD.
by eesmith | 2025-05-06 12:57:10+00:00
The article itself is behind a paywall.

One thing I see is its focus on the East Antarctic Ice Sheet.

One of the citations is titled "Accelerated West Antarctic ice mass loss continues to outpace East Antarctic gains"

See for example https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/31158 from 2024:

> Areas in East Antarctica experienced modest amounts of mass gain due to increased snow accumulation. However, this gain is more than offset by significant ice mass loss on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (dark red) over the 21-year period.

Or from 2023 at https://www.antarcticajournal.com/antarctic-ice-sheet-mass-g...

> But it might only take a few decades for Antarctica’s growth to reverse, according to Zwally. “If the losses of the Antarctic Peninsula and parts of West Antarctica continue to increase at the same rate they’ve been increasing for the last two decades, the losses will catch up with the long-term gain in East Antarctica in 20 or 30 years — I don’t think there will be enough snowfall increase to offset these losses.” ...

> “The good news is that Antarctica is not currently contributing to sea level rise, but is taking 0.23 millimeters per year away,” Zwally said. “But this is also bad news. If the 0.27 millimeters per year of sea level rise attributed to Antarctica in the IPCC report is not really coming from Antarctica, there must be some other contribution to sea level rise that is not accounted for.”

So, if Antarctica is gaining ice mass on land, where is the sea level rise coming from?
by ta20240528 | 2025-05-06 12:57:15+00:00
The actual problem is its not possible to assign a percentage probability - or even a vague 'highly likely'- to a once-off event.

As long as the prediction is not 0% or 100%, its impossible to be wrong.

So, without hesitation, I predict with 99,999999% certainty that an asteroid will hit the Eiffel tower before the hour.