MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: I'm considering open-sourcing my UI library – how to generate income?
by mrholek | 2025-06-10 09:24:52+00:00
Hi HN,

I'm the creator of CoreUI (https://coreui.io) — a UI components library and admin template system that enhances Bootstrap with modern improvements like Sass Modules support, advanced components, and dedicated versions for React, Vue, and Angular.

We’re not a side project. CoreUI is developed and maintained full-time by a small team of professionals. Unlike many OSS UI libraries that are built "after hours," we invest full-time engineering resources into improving, documenting, and supporting the library. This level of commitment is what allows us to deliver production-quality UI components and provide enterprise-grade support.

We currently follow a mixed model: free + paid (PRO) templates. But now I’m considering open-sourcing the entire UI components library to grow adoption and foster community contributions.

My concern is funding. Going fully open source would remove the current paid entry point — and I still need to pay salaries and keep the team sustainable.

Questions for HN:

1. Have you open-sourced a monetized frontend/UI project and kept it financially viable?

2. What OSS funding models actually work when you’re not a solo developer?

- Dual licensing? - Enterprise support?

3. How to balance openness with sustainability — without burning out or going broke?

Thank you in advance — real-world experiences, especially welcome.
by mschuster91 | 2025-06-10 09:25:02+00:00
We can hold humans accountable though. An AI driving tool, we cannot, not without serious reforms in the entire issue of "corporate veils" - when a human gets behind the wheel despite being knowingly unwell to drive, we lock the human up. With a corporate made driving tool, the insurance pays some money in damages and that's it, no human gets any kind of consequence (at least if there was no intent involved like with Volkswagen's emissions scandal).

And we can (and do) make our cities safer to reduce road fatalities and injuries... Germany for example, even though it has Autobahns with unlimited speed, has about ~2800 fatalities per year on a population of about 84 million people. The Netherlands have ~700 road fatalities a year on 18 million people. The US in contrast has ~40.000 fatalities on a population of 340 million - about 4 times the fatality rate of Germany and the Netherlands.

And yes, I am comparing based on populations because the availability of decent public transport is key in reducing vehicular accidents.
by xdennis | 2025-06-10 09:25:09+00:00
Because international institutions have an anti-Israel bias. E.g. in 2020 Israel was condemned by the UN 17 times while all the other countries put together only got 6 condemnations. [1]

In 2020, Israel killed 33 Palestinians. Compare that to Americans killing 19444 Afganis, drug lords killing 34512 Mexicans, Saudis killing 19056 Yemenis, Boko Haram killing 7300 Africans, etc. [2]

[1]: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/12/24/un-condemns-israel...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_armed_conflicts_in_202...
by pembrook | 2025-06-10 09:27:02+00:00
Unfortunately the time to think about digital sovereignty was back in the 1970s.

We've stacked on so many layers of abstraction to computing and every step of the way Europe missed the boat due to its underlying structural issues for investment and fragmented cultures/markets. It's quite frankly too late.

Here's a NYT article from 34 years ago with the exact same story as today: https://www.nytimes.com/1991/04/22/business/europe-stumbles-...

Europe missed the PC, the internet, the smartphone, and is currently burying its head in the sand over AI.

Dumping a bunch of money into building an inferior domestic version of Microsoft 365 just as it's about to be disrupted by AI-native paradigms would be the amusing cherry on top.

It'd be like Apple moving the final cardboard packaging step to US factories and claiming their entire supply chain is 'sovereign.' Sure, China can't affect that last packaging step. But every layer of (far more important) abstraction below it they still have power over.
by jjav | 2025-06-10 09:27:22+00:00
> Historically, the jump from 2 kids to 3 kids requires purchasing a new car.

The cost of daycare and education is so immensely larger than the cost of a car, that I don't think cost of a car is a factor. The important consideration with having a child, or another, is how could you possibly afford the daycare and later school.
by rollcat | 2025-06-10 09:28:01+00:00
<https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/217>

TL;DR: if you want window decorations, link with libadwaita.

SDL ended up linking with libdecor. You know how when you use a Qt app in Gnome, it looks out of place? Now even the window decorations look inconsistent from one another.
by alkonaut | 2025-06-10 09:29:03+00:00
As I understood it, it makes a difference between R&D on one hand, and "maintenance" on the other hand. This has resulted in that my US corporate overlords are shifting maintenance work to the US (better for taxes) and doing greenfield development where I am in the EU.

This must be excellent for morale in the US office, but I'm not complaining.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-06-10 09:29:05+00:00
Europe doesn't have any behemoths that are younger than 40+ years but every behemoth that Europe has was once a start-up too in the distant past: Novo Nordisk, ASML, Airbus, Bosch, Siemens, VW, Nestle, etc. How do people forget this?

Behemoths are important because only they have the massive R&D budgets to experiment on new and risky ventures, but also have the economies of scale to built massively expensive and complex things like rockets, hyperscalers, etc.

You can't have a powerful growing and internationally competitive economy just with "Mittelstand" mom & pop shops making niche knick-knacks, you also need behemoths. Why else do you think the German military is contracting Google to build them an on-prem cloud and not a German company?[1] Because Germany, like all of Europe, has no SW behemoths that can do the thigs Google can do at that cost and scale. That's why behemoths are important.

[1] https://www.heise.de/en/news/Bundeswehr-relies-on-Google-Clo...
by Klaster_1 | 2025-06-10 09:29:48+00:00
> This brings us to the AI tools. Following the pattern, the Orbit website was updated with a banner that announced the service would shut down by June 26 ... Orbit's private, self-contained setup can be replaced with the new sidebar built directly into Firefox, letting you connect to third-party chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini.

Orbit served me well for summarizing pages and videos. I tried to ask the ChatGPT in the sidebar to do the same, but it seems to lack the browsing context. Any idea how to achieve similar one click experience Orbit used to provide?
by tange1 | 2025-06-10 09:29:57+00:00
Hi HN! I'm excited to share Stealth Crossword, a unique gaming experiment that combines stealth gameplay mechanics with traditional word puzzles.

Technical Stack: - Frontend: HTML5 + Tailwind CSS for responsive design - Game Engine: Custom built with focus on seamless gameplay - Analytics: GA4 for user behavior tracking - SEO: Optimized with structured data and semantic HTML

Key Features: - Innovative gameplay merging stealth and wordplay - Responsive design that works across all devices - Progressive difficulty scaling - No installation required - play directly in browser

The idea came from wanting to create something that challenges both strategic thinking and vocabulary skills. The stealth mechanics add an extra layer of complexity to traditional crossword solving.

I'd love to hear your feedback, especially on: - Game mechanics and difficulty balance - Performance optimization - User experience - Potential features

Try it here: https://stealthcrossword.online

Source code and technical details available upon request.
by worldsayshi | 2025-06-10 09:29:57+00:00
It seems to mostly be about risk management - knowing how to contain risk? What is the cost of this piece of code failing to do what it is supposed to? Is it easy to replace?

If the answer is low and yes, then speed matters more than perfection and you don't have to always know exactly how it works. We already accept some risk while outsourcing parts of our problems when using dependencies. The risk management puzzle is different but still fundamentally the same?

If you don't know how the thing work in principle though, it's not going to be easy to replace.
by holowoodman | 2025-06-10 09:30:20+00:00
Yes, there was something: https://gaia-x-hub.de/en/funding-projects/

But as always, most of it is pork for some cronies anyways.

One related thing that has been developed/packaged is the "sovereign cloud stack" https://scs.community/ . However, it didn't see much use yet, for the reasons mentioned.
by rajeshpatel15 | 2025-06-10 09:30:38+00:00
By forcing software wages to be amortized over 5 years (15 for foreign devs), Section 174 has sapped cash flow, prompting layoffs and project cancellations totaling $3–4 M for some firms. Reinstating immediate expensing could unlock roughly $240 B in stuck deductions and supercharge R&D credits, materially bolstering hiring and keeping IP onshore. Has anyone modeled the macroeconomic gains of full expensing versus the budgetary trade-offs in the current $4.5 T tax proposal?
by falcor84 | 2025-06-10 09:30:48+00:00
I'd appreciate a legal perspective on this - is the problem that Microsoft's EU operations are run by a corporate division rather than a standalone subsidiary?

If it were an EU-based subsidiary that controlled the data about EU citizens, it would not be beholden to US executive orders, while still otherwise offering MS the ability to control global corporate strategy from its US HQ, right?

EDIT: fixed s/division/subsidiary/ in the second paragraph
by throwawayffffas | 2025-06-10 09:31:11+00:00
In my experience the problem is not they are too fast, they are too slow.

Honestly, their speed is just the right amount to make them bad. If they were faster, I could focus on following the code they are writing. But they take so much time for every edit that I tune out. On the other hand if they were slower, I could do other work while they are working, but they are done every 50 seconds to a few minutes which means I can't focus on other tasks.

If they did smaller faster changes it would probably be better.

Ideally though I would prefer them to be more autonomous, and the collaboration mode to be more like going over merge requests than pair programming. I ideally would like to have them take a task and go away for a few hours or even like 30 minutes.

The current loop, provide a task, wait 1 to 3 minutes, see a bunch of changes, provide guidance, repeat is the worst case scenario in my view.
by HighGoldstein | 2025-06-10 09:31:26+00:00
> Is there a VM technology that can make Linux aware that it's running in a VM, and be able to hand back the memory it uses to the host OS?

Isn't this an issue of the hypervisor? The guest OS is just told it has X amount of memory available, whether this memory exists or not (hence why you can overallocate memory for VMs), whether the hypervisor will allocate the entire amount or just what the guest OS is actually using should depend on the hypervisor itself.
by rock_artist | 2025-06-10 09:31:51+00:00
> After the general Rosetta support ends, Apple will maintain a subset of Rosetta functionality specifically for older unmaintained gaming titles that depend on Intel-based frameworks

I guess Apple Rosetta support will be a mix of interests.

1. Apple currently has interest in getting games on their platform. They even made a debugger tool running on Windows so a game dev could profile/debug from his Windows machine :)

2. Unless Apple will have enough power (meaning they will have leverage over games devs), they won't be able to decide when they completely drop Rosetta2.

3. Most likely that companies with personal connections with key people at Apple would take part in when/if the pull the plug on Rosetta2. I guess big software companies might be able to convince Apple is they'll decide to remove it prematurely.
by j4mie | 2025-06-10 09:32:10+00:00
Things that are down or impacted:

* Heroku and most of Salesforce

* Pipedrive: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44234098

* OpenAI: https://status.openai.com/incidents/01JXCAW3K3JAE0EP56AEZ7CB...

* Lobsters: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44234075

What's the common denominator?
by bradley13 | 2025-06-10 09:33:19+00:00
Mozilla-the-company is, in the end, mainly about Firefox. These other projects sound more like hobby-projects, at best something to do in someone's spare time.

Governance is the job of the foundation. Thunderbird has been spun off. So why does Mozilla need 750 employees? Correct me if I'm being naive, but that seems like 10 or even 20 times the number of employees they ought to have.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-06-10 09:34:06+00:00
> What makes someone like you so eager to defend the "invaders"?

I'm not particularly incensed about illegal immigration either way. I think ICE could be more humane. But they're ultimately executing the nation's laws.

What Trump is doing with California's National Guard and the Marines is orthogonal to what he's using to justify it. (The Marines aren't arresting illegal immigrants. They've been deployed against protesters. Mostly Americans.)

To the extent I believe there is a risk from illegal immigrants, it's principally in the risk from cartel violence leaking into America. These sort of theatrics undermine that law-enforcement prerogative by focussing on quantity [1] over quality.

> My instinct is to annihilate them in defence of myself, my family, my people, and our territory

I'm much more concerned about someone with those instincts than I am about nonviolent people. (As would have been our founders.)

[1] https://www.axios.com/2025/05/28/immigration-ice-deportation...
by freehorse | 2025-06-10 09:34:18+00:00
I have caught my self a few times do this repeated prompting "fix the bugs" out of mere laziness to go down on the code and actually read it. Actually fixing the bugs oneself requires a certain kind of effort and focus that you are not into while "vibe coding", and this increases the less familiar you are with the language/code. If I do this on anything serious, as in anything I will need to maintain or reuse, I end up losing more time than gaining. If it is something I am gonna throw away anyway, I do not care as much. I don't know what the context in this example is.

I would say that the main reason to not do this for any actual code you work on is that you will need to go into the code and fix bugs anyway when the LLM will, at some point inevitably, start consistently failing certain tasks. All the time you (think you had) saved by avoiding actually delving into the code will come back as technical debt then.
by dachworker | 2025-06-10 09:34:33+00:00
Regulation is a complete red herring.

The reason the EU cannot compete in tech, is because its market is way too tight with the US market. Any founder has a choice (if you can raise this insane level of seed capital you have the choice). They could pick US, Canada, UK, France, Germany ...etc. Given that choice, they will pick the US every single time. It's strategically the best choice, simple because of its size and wealth.
by lysp | 2025-06-10 09:34:49+00:00
Original comment was flagged, so jumping onto this one.

The phrases used by @refurb are commonly repeated phrases, but they are missing nuance.

Masks absolutely work, just ask any nurse who didn't catch COVID while working 12-hour shifts for weeks in a COVID ward. The issue like you said is the right type of mask, and wearing it properly.

Half the time people were wearing masks with their nose poking out, or under their chin. Even wearing it fully covering - if it isn't airtight, and you haven't pinched the wired nose connection removing the small gap, it still won't work.

Similar with vaccines, science isn't exact, so a statement made at the start of the pandemic is not going to be the same 12-18 months later. There were dozens of variants of COVID each with different levels of risk. A vaccine doesn't guarantee you won't catch the virus, but can minimise or reduce symptoms, reduce spread, prime your body with some antibodies for your body to start combating it sooner.

So it's easy to say someone "lied". But data changes. Also, you have to make statements for the general population (lowest common denominator), not people with an educated / scientific / medical background.

Vaccines, masks, social distancing are all part of the Swiss Cheese Model which will reduce risk, but not eliminate it.
by empiko | 2025-06-10 09:35:01+00:00
In my experience, the publication pressure in today's science is to large extent inhibiting innovation. How can you innovate when you need to have X papers every year, otherwise you will not get that position of funding. To fulfill the quota, the only rational strategy is to focus on simple iterative papers that are very similar to what everybody else is doing. There is simply no time to innovate or be brave, you have to comfort. There is also barely time to make sure they what you are doing is actually methodologically correct. If you spend too much time, you will get scooped and forgotten.

Case in point, everybody is doing AI research nowadays and NIPS has like 15k submitted papers. But the innovation rate in AI is actually not that much higher than 10 years ago, I would even argue that it is lower. What are all these papers for? They help people build their careers as proofs of work.
by int_19h | 2025-06-10 09:35:33+00:00
I cited a state as an example of the kind of scale that even a relatively poor state can pull off. But the point is that you don't need a million drones to have sufficient capacity for organized violence to be a state.

FWIW I don't think drones count as "asymmetrical warfare". They might have been that ten years ago, but a lot has changed since then. Today, they are very much part of conventional warfare, and the state with more drones still wins, all else being equal.
by makeitdouble | 2025-06-10 09:36:47+00:00
I'd be with you if Apple didn't bake cloud related features into their OS. From memory, screen time management for a family member required an up to date device for instance. I also wonder if they can still be used for Apple's 2FA.

More things can be done through the web interface than before, but it's still not web first, and not being able to push a button because your OS is 6 years old is pretty frustrating.
by anenefan | 2025-06-10 09:36:49+00:00
Just a few days ago someone pulled me on the road, they were lost and trying to find a certain house address on my locale road. They had themselves a smart phone so I suggest they put the address into duckduckgo and it would more than likely show them as part of the results, a map of the location ... they had no joy. All I could do was point them in the general direction. What they did say as the search failed was striking, search engines no longer show you the results that fit the query - "they're displaying the results they want, not what you want" ... nah I though, it just one needs to add the right key words to refine the search. Yesterday I was surprised that neither google or duckduckgo could find an Australian retailer of head gaskets that supplied older D series ford engine gaskets -- it's sort of sad, the net once promised to solve half the work finding parts - now like I once did 30 years ago, I'm going to have to go back to tracking down yellow pages for various capital cities and locating some physical stores that might be able to help me out. I guess I could always order the gasket online from Europe, but it's not what I wanted to do.

The only hope I have for google's A.I. assist is it works out I personally don't visit any of the ads, there's no point, they might well concentrate on promoting useful results from the local business instead.
by Brajeshwar | 2025-06-10 09:37:06+00:00
It was a fateful day in one of the Indian Monsoon in the late 2000s. I rode the ever-reliable tuk-tuk in the city of Mumbai to reach a coveted Indian outsourcing company that has taken on a multi-year, multi-billion-dollar contract. They had inherited a project and discovered that one of the programmers was me, as indicated by comments inside the code, and they had reached out.

Fortunately for me, they are stuck in the specific styling of an enterprise app that has been in operation for a quarter and is now starting to reflect in their P&L account.

After all the security check-ins through the gates, and after being seated and coffee-ed, I walked to a desk and spent as much time just staring at the codes. I pretended to be in some deep trance code-thinking thing. Then, as the clock ticked by, I did the hand-clap thing that Stanley did in Swordfish. I wrote a few lines of code - a utility CSS class to center align a block element, preferably a DIV.

I walked out with people clamoring for my autograph and selfies with their Nokia N95. Later that evening, I sent an invoice that was ten times the monthly salary of the project lead working on that project.

/s
by rock_artist | 2025-06-10 09:37:30+00:00
> if i have a 2019 imac (coffee lake) for ios mobile development, how long will i be able to use it for that purpose? i am going to face xcode limitations? will i be able to still push to the app store in the years to come?

Based on appstore accepting only last {#}os SDK (not deployment target). Usually Xcode (and Safari) gets support for the previous OS. meaning,

Xcode 26 min macOS is Sequoia 15.x.

So, Xcode 27 min macOS will be macOS 26.

That gives about 2.5 years for Intel Macs to allow complete AppStore integration.

I guess https://github.com/xtool-org/xtool might become more dominant. iiuc, it also valid to use it on "a Mac" even if it was phased out :)
by jbs789 | 2025-06-10 09:37:44+00:00
I think he stopped short of a more controversial observation (for this audience), that capitalising these expenses for tax purposes is actually closer to GAAP/what's happening in the financial statements, and the prior treatment could be viewed as a tax stimulant to encourage development.

When viewed through this lens, are growing companies trying to have their cake and eat it too - get the boost to GAAP net income for stock comp purposes etc, but defer the cash tax to future years. This perspective ties everything together for me, in terms of understanding the incentives of the players here.

I think the other piece mentioned elsewhere is the very real cash flow implications for fast growing companies, in particular those that might be smaller and with more limited access to financing (which also isn't free...). And the idea that it's a pretty blunt tool... 5 yrs for all development... every product is different and as others point out lifecycles are often much shorter.
by kgwgk | 2025-06-10 09:37:56+00:00
> And yet all of them seem to be subject to section 174, builders, maintainers, testers.

Do they?

Upthread one can read: > Activities that are not treated as software development vis-à-vis software developed by a taxpayer for use in its trade or business are as follows: […] • maintenance activities after the taxpayer places the computer software into service