MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Cursor AI Hacked Growth and Re-Wrote Growth Playbook for Dev-Tools
by rishikeshranjan | 2025-06-24 06:06:49+00:00
Four MIT buddies forked VS Code, packed it with AI, and called it Cursor. It writes and fixes code like a helpful coworker. In under two years it’s already making about $200 million a year—with zero salespeople.

Why devs love it: -> It actually understands your whole project, not just the line you’re typing. -> You get 2,000 free AI suggestions to mess around with. Most folks hit “wow” long before they run out. -> It costs 20 bucks a month if you want more. No demo calls, no forms—just download and go.

How it blew up: -> Looks like VS Code, feels like magic. Same shortcuts, same plugins—so switching is painless. -> “Vibe-coding” moments. First time it fixes a nasty bug, people tweet the clip and their friends try it. Free marketing. -> Loud, happy community. Discord chats, YouTube how-tos, and devs at big AI shops bragging they use it. -> Credibility snowball. Backed by Y Combinator and OpenAI, so even skeptics gave it a shot. -> Gets smarter every day. Every accepted suggestion trains the system, so newcomers see an even better product.

Takeaways for the rest of us: -> Solve a real headache, not a minor itch. -> Give people a generous free taste, then let the product upsell itself. -> Build on tools your users already live in. -> Make the first “holy-crap” moment easy to share. -> Treat early users like teammates; they’ll scream your praises for free.

Read the full article here: https://www.productgrowth.blog/p/how-cursor-ai-hacked-growth
by pjmlp | 2025-06-24 06:08:10+00:00
Additionally Julia works on Windows, lots of its issues have been ironed out throught the last decade, and many folks are invested into it, instead of a single company product.

Yes many of the mainstream languages started as single company product, but lets put it this way, would anyone be writing one of such languages today, had those not been languages gatekeeped to access a specific platform?

So outside accessing Max and its value preposition as product enabler for XYZ, who would be rushing to write Mojo code, instead of something else.
by musicale | 2025-06-24 06:08:52+00:00
> Tandy otherwise kept all software technical information secret

> Read this BYTE article from two years after the TRS-80's release which complains about the complete lack of Tandy documentation that motivated the author to write the article in the first place.

This nice, well-written technical manual (including a complete schematic for the system) was published by Tandy in 1978, the year before the BYTE article:

https://archive.org/details/TRS-80_Micro_Computer_Technical_...

As this blog post notes, it contained enough information not merely to enable you to understand and program the system (it's very simple, but clever, hardware, which is part of the charm of the 8-bit era), but to actually build your own clone:

http://www.trs-80.org/trs-80-micro-computer-technical-refere...
by mcdow | 2025-06-24 06:14:19+00:00
Zoomer terminal maximalist here.

My thing is that most UIs use such poor use of the screen real estate. I get it, pretty is the priority. But when I want to do work, the padding on everything gets to be excessive. Additionally, it’s really nice to be able to host my dotfiles in GitHub and I can be in a 100% familiar environment within a couple minutes. I have a variety of machines I work on. Same thing goes for mouse usage. I’m much faster operating the keyboard, whereas I switch between mice and trackpads and sensitivities when I switch devices. Keyboards are mostly the same. Maybe it’s a skill issue on my part but oh well ;)
by hansvm | 2025-06-24 06:15:23+00:00
I mean, you're both correct.

It's kind of like how when selling a house your optimal strategy is rarely to try to appeal to the most people. Instead, modifications which greatly increase perceived value in a smaller subset (so long as it isn't too small for your personal goals) will alienate most customers but still increase the sale value in the same timespan.

When you're applying for jobs, some companies aren't willing to play that game, and if you're playing it then that's not just fine; it's ideal. You don't waste your time on companies who won't play ball. Enough will that the strategy still works.
by cocoto | 2025-06-24 06:15:28+00:00
Your phone feels slow either because you are now used to faster devices or because the software used is becoming bloated. There is no reason a phone feels slower except for these two reasons (or maybe if thermal got worse over time but it should not). Personally I don’t care if a phone feels slower compared to other devices as long as it is not becoming slower because of crap software updates.
by Lio | 2025-06-24 06:16:41+00:00
These are good points, in answer to them:

1. Yes this is true but Rails now comes with nice support for async UI built to push updates to the browser via Hotwire and Turbo.

You’d need something like that anyway anytime you’re calling an external service you don’t control.

2. Again this is also a good point but even running every request synchronously you still need good error logging because you don’t want to share details of an error with your frontend.

With background jobs you definitely need to be on top of monitoring and retry logic. I also think you need to be very careful about idempotency amd retry logic.

I see that as the engineering trade offs for that pattern. There’s very little in the way of silver bullets in engineering; different solutions just come with different trade offs.
by _cs2017_ | 2025-06-24 06:18:45+00:00
I agree that there maybe something we can't simulate. This has nothing to do wtih the paper. The paper makes no contribution to this discussion besides stating the obvious, with no definitions, no non-trivial insights. Moreover, it outright misleads the reader by claiming to "prove" something.

I can write a useless and poorly-argued paper about P != NP (or P = MP), and it would be twaddle regardless of whether or not I guessed the equality / inequality correctly by pure chance.
by pjmlp | 2025-06-24 06:19:58+00:00
They certainly were, because no one other than a few hardlines were writing Java or C# and VB code in bare bones editors and compiling from command line, as only the bare bones SDKs were free beer, and for the desktop.

IDEs, implementations for embedded and phones, were all paid products, IDEs by developers or their employers, the others by OEMs.

My point is the early days, JCafe, Visual Age, Visual Studio, Forte, before free beer IDEs for them became common.

Java side with Eclipse/Netbeans, .NET side with the Visual Studio Express editions.
by tomhow | 2025-06-24 06:19:58+00:00
> but the fans of renewables just flagged it

As moderators we can only guess why people flag things, but there are other reasons why people may have flagged that comment, the foremost being that it broke the guidelines due to its inflammatory style.

On Hacker News we want to be able to discuss difficult topics involving arguments people may find counter to their assumptions, but you need to express things in a way that's persuasive rather than combative.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by awkwardpotato | 2025-06-24 06:20:00+00:00
> How long can they keep running, another 5 or 10 years max?

NASA hopes to make it the 2030s with 1 remaining science instrument on each[0]. Currently, Voyager 1 has 3 remaining instruments (of 11) and Voyager 2 only has 2. ~2036 is the maximum cutoff, as then they will be out of range of the Deep Space Network[1].

[0] https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasa-turns-off-two-voyager-sci...

[1] https://science.nasa.gov/mission/voyager/frequently-asked-qu...
by debugnik | 2025-06-24 06:20:15+00:00
I don't see where you've read that they accepted donations. Every article and Reddit post I find says they didn't? It was indeed releasing on Steam for free, but I don't know if they had contacted LEGO before doing so.

Also, this wasn't the only Bionicle game that LEGO had endorsed, Quest for Mata Nui too, which makes this even more of a heel-turn. They won't have to shut down that one, though: the team went silent and then the main dev passed away.
by globular-toast | 2025-06-24 06:21:02+00:00
The point isn't really the lack of graphics, it's more about the use of a keyboard and text as a universal data format.

Graphical programs look nice but are a nightmare for interoperability.

Having said that, as an Emacs user I'm surprised that anyone goes to this much effort to not use Emacs. This is what it's made for and it's all built in the most hacker-friendly way imaginable.
by madduci | 2025-06-24 06:21:30+00:00
Some time ago it was written on their GitHub repository. Unfortunately JELOS stopped the development and Rocknix picked up the code and further maintained it. Hopefully it will last, but one should also say that the ecosystem is now also rich in alternatives to RetroPie itself. In fact, Batocera is also a strongly community-supported distribution for retrogaming
by koonsolo | 2025-06-24 06:22:27+00:00
I learned neural networks around 2000, and it was old technology then. The last real jump we saw was going from ChatGPT 3.5 to 4, and that is more than 2 years ago.

It seems you don't recollect how much time passed without any big revolutions in AI. Deep learning was a big jump. But when the next jump comes? Might be tomorrow, but looking at history, might be in 2035.

According to what I see, the curve has already flattened and now only a new revolution could get us to the next big step.
by matsemann | 2025-06-24 06:22:48+00:00
Yes, you're not understanding how it works: The oil profits go into the fund, not government budgets. So we're also not funding health care through oil profits, that oil money is locked away for the future in that fund.

I do think your attacks are quite unwarranted. Every time something good about the US is mentioned, should I then swoop in and mention how you're bombing the world, the tech profits are made on algorithms destroying society, your constant one-day delivery is flooding the world in plastics? How is that even relevant?

Also note, I only mentioned how the union here managed to remove non-compete clauses. Then someone else brought in health insurance and then oil. Not me.

For the record, I have been voting for the green party, that wants to disallow opening new oil rigs. Your beef isn't with me, don't harass a whole country, that's just unfair of you.
by duped | 2025-06-24 06:24:43+00:00
Why do you need to sync with the shaping engine?

TBH grapheme clusters are annoying but day 1 learning material for a text display widget that supports beyond ascii. It honestly irks me how many things just fuck it up, because it's not an intractably hard problem - just annoying enough to be intractable for people that are lazy (*).

(*) the actually hard problem with grapheme clusters is that they're potentially unbounded in length and the standard is mutable, so your wcwidth() implementation needs to be updated along with standards to stay valid, particularly with emoji. This basically creates a software maintenance burden out of aether.
by jakewins | 2025-06-24 06:24:49+00:00
I don't claim to know the details of reactive power management, but the primary mechanisms for grid stability in the EU is the "cascade" of services the TSOs procures:

- Fast Frequency Response (FFR), sub-second power adjustment following frequency table

- Frequency Containment Reserve (FCR), ~second power adjustment following frequency table

- Automatic Frequency Restoration Reserve (aFRR), ~second energy production following TSO setpoint signal

- Manual Frequency Restoration Reserve, ~minute energy production following TSO activation signals

My understanding is the primary failure in Spain was that 9 separate synchronous plants that had sold aFRR(?) to the TSO then failed to deliver, so when the TSO algorithms tried to adjust the oscillations, nothing happened. Everything else was kinda "as designed".
Show HN: I made Cursor for Reddit – an AI-powered Chrome extension
by ar0nbg | 2025-06-24 06:26:04+00:00
Hello HN!

Reddit is a great platform to engage and grow your products but I didn't realise back then how much effort it takes. Reddit doesn't really allow new users with low karma to post and direct promo is straight up not allowed on most subreddits.

That's why I built a little extension that uses AI to help you brainstorm ideas, refine content, and write posts or comments. You can input details about your product or topic, and the AI subtly weaves it into your content while keeping it natural and relevant.

The extension will not replace you but it will help you to get unstuck when you write your content.

Let me know what you think, happy to answer any questions.

Thank you!
by klank | 2025-06-24 06:26:09+00:00
Sorry for such a delayed response, life. :-)

But I wanted to agree with you very much. Lots of behind the scenes/tech stuff as well. Some of our protocols and technical approaches have lived on and very broadly. Exchange ActiveSync, for example. One technology that didn't live long (for obvious reasons) but I still had a lot of fun working on was recognizing when a phone was being dropped to automatically seat the hard drive heads to prevent head/disc damage. How else were you going to fit 2GB of mp3s on your phone if it didn't have a spinning drive?
by pjmlp | 2025-06-24 06:28:56+00:00
Historical accident, as until 1998 there was hardly any C++ standard library.

There was the C standard library that could be consumed by C++ applications, the C++ frameworks specific to each compiler vendor that sadly are no longer a thing, and the C++ ARM de facto standard with only iostreams, being used as the initial discussion for what would become C++98, a decade later.

Many of C++ warts are related to this historical evolution, like how many variations of string, arrays and other collection classes do you want to use in a single project?
by captainregex | 2025-06-24 06:29:02+00:00
ah yes. “park far away and simply walk 300 pounds of groceries to be stocked at the only corner store for miles” is a very clean and simple solution only you were smart enough to think of. There definitely aren’t hills or ruts making this impossible because everyone lives in perfectly paved suburbia and I’ve always heard tell of this obvious laziness of checks notes the men and women who actually deliver your prime packages at 4AM.
by globular-toast | 2025-06-24 06:29:04+00:00
I never wrote full sentences or capitalised in my msn messenger convos. I'm not sure if I always did, but certainly at some point I started capitalising my IRC messages. Still don't always write in full sentences, though.

For me it wasn't about being professional, it was just about learning to type. As my typing speed improved it just became second nature to capitalise where appropriate. In other words, I capitalise everywhere out of laziness.
by orbital-decay | 2025-06-24 06:29:17+00:00
My issue with the terminal is the exact opposite, everything is monospaced, hard to read, and space-inefficient due to that. Keyboard use is not a terminal-only thing either, it's a problem with some modern UIs that are hostile to power users. I feel it's at least partly because power users that create their own tools removed themselves from serious GUI development and are too busy with fancy TUI doodads and dark themes instead.
by AngryData | 2025-06-24 06:29:19+00:00
It isn't without risk, but when is the last time a US billionaire faced real legal repercussions for anything? US law is 90% based upon being able to outspend your opposition, and if you lose despite outspending them, it mostly involves paying some money, which they already have plenty of by the fact that they outspent their opponent. Even if you are fighting the US government, they government isn't willing to spend endless amounts of money for prosecution. Only if you can't afford the legal costs to keep trying will you face jail time, like the poor.
by eviks | 2025-06-24 06:30:17+00:00
> and touch typists end up having the movement keys under their right hand’s resting fingers.

This is false, h isn't in the resting place. So go back and spend more time trying to explain that historic tidbid of design before trying to defend it (I'd also be curious to know why they shifted left instead of using resting places)!

Or don't and use this obvious principle directly and change keybinds to jkl;

Or go with the muscle memory of inverted T and use ijkl

But whatever you do, prioritizing the original design is a common bad heuristic because there is no reason to think that the original designer was great (not perfect!, don't twist it), so trying to understand the original reasons is a waste of "productivity" time (but if you're curious, it's not a waste of regular time)
by o11c | 2025-06-24 06:30:34+00:00
`wcwidth` works by assigning all codepoints (strictly, code units of whatever size `wchar_t` is on your system, but thankfully modern Unixen are sane) a width of -1 (error), 0 (combining), 1 (narrow), or 2 (wide).

`wcswidth` could in theory work across multiple codepoints, but its API is braindead and cannot deal with partial errors.

This is all from the perspective of what the application expects to output. What the terminal itself does might be something completely different - decomposed Hangul in particular tends to lead to rendering glitches in curses-based terminal programs.

This is also different from what the (monospace) font expects to be rendered as. At least it has the excuse of not being able to call the system's `wcwidth`.

Note that it is always a mistake to call an implementation of `wcwidth` other than the one provided by the OS, since that introduces additional mismatches, unless you are using a better API that calculates bounds rather than an exact width. I posted an oversimplified sketch (e.g. it doesn't include versioning) of that algorithm a while back ...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43851532
by wtcactus | 2025-06-24 06:30:52+00:00
The idea of giving all the descendants of someone that lived hundreds of years ago some form of compensation because 1/32nd (or much lower) of their ancestors was harmed in some way, is completely bonkers for me. Virtue signaling at it’s best.

Harvard tried to do it (to virtue signal, I mean) and eventually found out that the maths for their little publicity stunt would get them bankrupt. They then proceeded to try and stop the all thing.

That’s the story here.
by hmcq6 | 2025-06-24 06:32:28+00:00
From their updates it looks like scope creep starting in 2021 and a lack of leadership.

In 2021

> Even so, we know that half a year is a long time to wait for an update. The reason that answers have not been more forthcoming this year is because, until recently, we did not have them.

2022

> we’ve made the decision to redevelop Hytale’s engine—both the client and the server—in C++

Winter 2023

> This year, we've brought engine development fully in-house and steadily expanded our team

2024

> As we mentioned in our Winter Update, the first half of 2024 has been focused on finishing that process and transitioning our creative teams into the new engine.

They're still transitioning to the new engine.

Summer 2024 future plans

> The rest of the year [...] the goal [...] is to verify that our engine, tools and processes are capable of supporting our gameplay and creative goals.
by jonplackett | 2025-06-24 06:33:03+00:00
No-one is saying many companies don’t suck. Obviously they do.

But to go into the world with a mindset of ‘everyone is an asshole’ is just sad.

Maybe in tech or wherever your experience is it’s like this. But many people in the world go about their business with a heart and soul.

Not everyone - but by assuming it’s everyone you are making it worse.
by toast0 | 2025-06-24 06:33:04+00:00
Plenty of Unix systems could be booted from NFS. Assuming no local storage, and that you need X, the question is, what's the difference in cost and capability between a X terminal and a diskless unix station that runs X? You've also got to consider costs to run a NFS server for your diskless unix stations vs costs to run a desktop server that backs all the X sessions.
by jeroenhd | 2025-06-24 06:33:42+00:00
You mean leave them off by default? Because that was what Windows did back in the day when the feature was introduced.

I don't know why they lowered the retention limit from 90 days to 60 days but I'm guessing it has to do with reusing old windows bootloaders to bypass things like secure boot (again). Could also be to prevent issues where you install a new vulnerable bootloader blacklist into your motherboard and do a system restore which tries to load a vulnerable bootloader and leaves your system unbootable.

Either way, in my experience Windows rarely kept over a month of system restore point anyway, as it keeps making new ones every time you install software (updates) or update your system. The default space assigned to the system drive has rarely been big enough to keep more than a week or so of system restore points for me.
by kazinator | 2025-06-24 06:33:44+00:00
Google are doing a massively weird thing with those AI overviews because ... it makes it look like Google's AI capability is poor.

It's understandable that Google can't run every search query through AI, but the hack they pulled in order to make it appear that way isn't delivering value, and looks bad.

That's either idiocy, or else part of some very clever master plan.

Just look at this submissions itself and thread under this topic. People are calling the AI overviews "Gemini".

But when you use the actual Gemini (e.g. free 2.5 Flash, at gemini.google.com), it's immediately apparent that it's in a different league compared to the search overviews.
by ericrallen | 2025-06-24 06:34:23+00:00
Switching search engines is a pretty low lift, especially if the one you are switching from is an ad-riddled mess where you can’t actually find what you’re looking for.

Switched to Kagi awhile back and 10/10 would recommend. The cost is easily worth having a good, useful web search experience again.

Swapping out mail and other service providers is definitely a bigger undertaking, though.
by yoz-y | 2025-06-24 06:34:56+00:00
I started coding using Borland Pascal on DOS. I went through many tools and in the end split the terminal / UI work depending on whether the language is actually bound to an IDE or a build system.

E.g.: not using Xcode for iOS dev doesn’t make much sense to me. At work we have a fully set-up IDE that works with our build system. I like QtCreator for C++.

But for web dev, scripting and blog writing, I find programs like VSCode extremely slow even with just minimal plugins. After a couple of years I got fed up and went back to vim in terminal.
by duped | 2025-06-24 06:35:07+00:00
In my fever dreams of maintaining utf8 supporting text widgets that work and never need to be updated, there's a zero-width whitespace grapheme cluster that represents the number of codepoints in the next grapheme cluster if they're different from the previous.

The situation today is basically the same as null terminated C strings. Except worse, because you can define that problem and solve it in linear time/space without needing to keep an up to date list of tables.
by OccamsMirror | 2025-06-24 06:35:29+00:00
They're not! But hopefully, they will be. How? No one knows. When? Soon!

I assume the plan is similar to how Hashicorp went. Which while never turning a profit was still acquired by IBM for a cool 6.4 billion dollars.

I love that product companies like this can exist. But it does surprise me.
Show HN: Supafine – Use simple prompts to generate or remix React UI components
by harshdoesdev | 2025-06-24 06:36:23+00:00
Hey HN!

Today I am releasing Supafine, a tool that lets you generate and modify React UI components using simple prompts.

When I build apps, I tend to think in blocks, and in React, those blocks are components. But creating and tweaking them manually often feels slower and more repetitive than it should be. I built Supafine to make that process faster and more intuitive.

Give it a try at: https://create.supafine.app

Thanks for reading - would love to hear any feedback!