MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Windsurf Gambit: How a $28M pivot became a $2.4B Google acquisition
by schwentkerr | 2025-07-13 00:27:04+00:00
I think startups are basically like getting slapped in the face probably over and over again," Varun Mohan told Y Combinator just months before Google paid $2.4B for his team. The weekend of July 11-12 proved that sometimes those slaps redirect you toward fortune.

OpenAI's $3B Windsurf deal collapsed Friday. By Monday, Google had the founders.

The backstory reveals fascinating startup dynamics:

*The $28M Pivot (2022)*: Windsurf was crushing it in GPU virtualization - $2M revenue, 8 employees, profitable. Then GPT-3.5 dropped. "Weekend me and my co-founder had a conversation... we told the rest of the company on Monday and everyone started working on the new thing starting Monday."

*Speed of execution*: 2 months from pivot to shipping VS Code extension. Free product hit 1M+ developers. Enterprise customers like JP Morgan followed within quarters.

*The evaluation edge*: "Code you can leverage a property of code which it can be run right... you can take open source projects and find commits with tests attached." They built rigorous evals while competitors relied on vibes.

*Philosophy*: "Every single insight that we have is a depreciating insight." Constant paranoia about becoming irrelevant drove innovation cycles.

The acquisition structure is telling - Google paid for talent/licensing, not equity. Similar to Character AI ($2.7B), Scale AI ($14.8B), Inflection AI ($650M). New playbook for avoiding antitrust while acquiring AI capabilities.

Bigger question: Is Cursor next? The vibe coding space is exploding (Base44 → $80M Wix acquisition after 6 months), but sustainable moats remain unclear.

Full analysis with more Varun quotes and strategic implications: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/atomic-shifts-billion-dollar-movement-windsurf-gambit-schwentker-3qkbc/

What's your take on the "reverse acquihire" trend? Smart talent strategy or antitrust evasion?
by lucb1e | 2025-07-13 00:27:45+00:00
The smoke on the water!

More seriously, I'm a Firefox user since ~2006 but I'm about equally surprised by the statement that Firefox should blow Chrome/ium out of the water as that Firefox supposedly sucks. They're both browsers. I think Chromium is a bit faster in page rendering, whereas Firefox is more open, privacy-friendly, and customizable. Similar to how I wish consumers would not choose an anti-consumer organization (anyone who values a free market and general computation1 should not choose iOS), I think nobody should choose Chrome but, still, I can understand if someone does choose it because they've gotten used to how it works and they're not willing to change. It's about equal in practical functionality that 95% of people use, wouldn't you say? Or in what way is Firefox blowing Chrome out of the water?

¹ https://www.thekurzweillibrary.com/the-coming-war-on-general...
by pstuart | 2025-07-13 00:27:59+00:00
I did not suggest we don't defend ourselves.

Let me get this out of the way to quiet you down: I recognize the need for (and the value of) a strong military.

People rightfully worry about waste, fraud, and abuse of government funds, but that should extend to all avenues of the government -- not just the stuff you don't like.

A GOP Secretary of Defense had announced he was going to investigate two trillion dollars of funds that couldn't be accounted for; and then 9/11 happened. Oops. Last we heard of that.

We all know that the military can waste money like the best of us, so lets find a happy median where we protect ourselves but avoid setting piles of money on fire just because it's end of the budget cycle.

A somewhat validating concurrence: https://www.defensenews.com/opinion/commentary/2023/06/05/th...
by martey | 2025-07-13 00:28:30+00:00
While I think some details of your anecdote might be wrong (Dick died in early March 1982, which is probably too early for Reed College's commencement), I think it is clear that LeGuin had a lot of admiration for Dick.

She talked extensively about him in a 2012 interview with Wired (https://www.wired.com/2012/07/geeks-guide-ursula-k-le-guin/) and in the introduction to the Folio Society's edition of The Man in the High Castle (included in her essay collection Words are My Matter). In both, she mentioned the Phildickian anecdote that they were both students at the same large high school in Berkeley at the same time, but that none of her friends or acquaintances remember Dick.
by chrsw | 2025-07-13 00:28:43+00:00
I still find some pages don't work 100% correctly in Firefox. But not nearly enough to keep me from using it on my personal machines. (My employer doesn't allow any browser except Chrome and Edge). For me, the most important feature of a browser is the web experience. I guess it should be security but I try to be careful about what I do online, regardless of what browser I'm using.

Many years ago I used to run the Firefox NoScript extension exclusively. For sites that I trusted and visited frequently I would add their domains to an exceptions list. For sites that I wasn't sure about I would load it with all scripts disabled and then selectively kept allowing scripts until the site was functional, starting with the scripts hosted on the same domain as the site I wanted to see/use.

Eventually I got too lazy to keep doing that but outside of the painstaking overhead it was by far the best web experience I ever had. I started getting pretty good at recognizing what scripts I needed to enable to get the site to load/work. Plus, uBlock Origin and annoyances filters got so good I didn't stress about the web so much any more.

But all this got me thinking, why not have the browser block all scripts by default, then have an AI agent selectively enable scripts until I get the functionality I need? I can even give feedback to the agent so it can improve over time. This would essentially be automating what I was dong myself years ago. Why wouldn't this work? Do I not understand AI? Or web technology? Or are people already doing this?
by RockstarSprain | 2025-07-13 00:29:08+00:00
Would love to give Firefox a chance but one thing that stops me (apart from occasional website loading bugs) is inability to install PWAs. Not sure why it’s not implemented like it has been for a long time in Chrome and all its forks.

I have found a 3rd party extension that claims to facilitate this (0) but still feel uncomfortable to use this for privacy reasons.

(0) https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/pwas-for-fire...
by s1mplicissimus | 2025-07-13 00:30:53+00:00
I did not assume, I drew a conclusion from working on email marketing software and experiencing first hand the worldview that seems necessary to stay in this line of work while avoiding cognitive dissonance.

> At least in the general case it's hardly realistic to expect a sender to classify a message from the perspective of a specific recipient prior to sending it

I guess from the perspective of someone doing mass mailings that is true. A pointer to what I assume is your bias on the topic. But from the perspective of the recipient, who actually has to invest the cognitive effort of reading that message, I think it's only natural to expect a certain amount of average value out of that effort. And lets be honest, that mass mailing doesn't usually deliver that. It's just another trigger designed to manipulate people into buying shit they didn't even really want.

Let's rather have the default newsletter checkbox to be "off" and legal repercussions for repeated offenders, then I'll be on board for the term "reasonable conduct" too.
by alex1138 | 2025-07-13 00:32:08+00:00
1) A lot of ads are terribly overdone and even sometimes actively malicious (malware or tracking). It makes no sense to aggressively try to stamp it out like Google is doing

2) Aside from the Page/Brin stealing tech salaries thing (yeah it really did happen) what happened to Google? They've always been a bit incompetent but their behavior (ie Chrome and increasing censorship on Google/Youtube the last few years) has been really bad, I thought they were basically founded off idealism
by scrubs | 2025-07-13 00:33:17+00:00
You said that right! Absolutely. It's one thing to fix a mess in a culture that cares. It's darn near impossible to fix it if the culture around is hostile, indifferent, or any of the other 82 million other reasons organizations come up with to not care. In that situation you can end up being the pariah despite good intentions engineering and otherwise like satisfied customers.
by Manuel_D | 2025-07-13 00:33:44+00:00
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8039393/

All the studies among gender dysphoric children who are not prescribed puberty blockers show desistence rates over 70%

There are studies that show very low desistence rates - many in the single digits. But those are studies among children that are given puberty blockers.
by nfriedly | 2025-07-13 00:33:45+00:00
Yep, you can run Firefox on every Mac released for the past couple of decades. (Maybe more?)

Most of them also work with Linux, although it's a little more spotty on the more recent ARM-based ones ("apple silicon").

Macs are essentially "real computers" that you can run whatever software you want on, whereas iPhones and iPads are much more locked down. (Even when they have the same CPU.)
by enos_feedler | 2025-07-13 00:33:54+00:00
Are you a student of Robert Fritz? He says this exactly. The only two things you need is 1) a vision and 2) ability to see present reality clearly. Beyond this it’s all about the skill to nudge a creation towards the vision without being prescribed to a process. The art is knowing when to just use the status quo tool or try something new at any point during the nudging is key. Based on his teachings I can easily see vibe coding fitting into creation process quite easily. Where it becomes tricky is “seeing current reality clearly”. If you have been vibe coding for two weeks and perhaps a weak programmer or worse no technical ability, can you actually see reality at that point? Probably not. It requires understanding the software structure. Maybe. Its all up in the air right now. But I truly believe that LLMs make software creation more like creating art.
by leptons | 2025-07-13 00:34:07+00:00
>The C64 had good graphics and excellent sound but so much of it was behind a brick-wall learning curve of poking. Atari's native BASIC at least provided some rudimentary access. You want something where the user can get a win on day 1, or it's getting buried in the closet with the rock tumbler.

This was not my experience at all.

I started with an Atari 400 when I was 11, and there was little to no documentation about the machine. I took a BASIC programming class taught on a Vic 20 when I was 10 years old. But then I saved up and got an Atari for my 11th birthday. I cut my teeth on Atari Basic, but it seemed so limited to me. I wanted full access to all of the machine but there was simply no documentation my 11 year old self had available, the internet was not a thing, and there were no books about it at my local library in the early 1980s. The BASIC cartridge didn't really offer much in the way of using the machine to its full capacity.

Then I got a C64 and everything changed. The C64 manual I had included BASIC programming, as well as how to program the sound chip to make simple music and sound effects. There was a complete memory map of the C64 including all the chips, the VIC, the SID, the CIA chips - everything. All the pinouts for all the I/O ports were mapped out.

And in the back of the manual were all the opcodes for the CPU, with detailed information about how they work, A, X, and Y registers, status registers, program counter, address modes, etc, etc... it was absolutely fantastic how much was documented, literally everything about the computer. The book even had a full schematic of the C64 in the very back as a large fold-out poster. Atari had nothing like this.

It was like night and day compared to the very closed Atari platform. I quickly ate up BASIC on the C64 and moved right into assembly language, when I was 14. I got very into the European "demo scene", while being a teenager in America in the mid/late 1980s. Atari 8-bit just seemed like a toy compared to what was going on with the C64 in the world at the time.

https://archive.org/details/c64-programmer-ref/page/n425/mod...
by nwienert | 2025-07-13 00:34:47+00:00
It's definitely worse on the left, the group that's constantly inventing new ways to censor and exclude talk, not just action, the right leans far more libertarian in that regard. Most conservatives hate Reddit though so I doubt that's a sample of anything. I don't think X is a good example either, it's far less censor prone under right-leaning leadership than before.

And I'd never downvote something that's not entirely dumb as long as it's written in good faith.
by dlcarrier | 2025-07-13 00:35:36+00:00
I wonder if AMD systems were affected, too. Also, Intel still dominates the prebuilt-computer market, and they tend to have less robust cooling solutions than custom-built computers.

Meanwhile, anything with an Apple A-series processor needs to be in the shade, if it's over 100 °F outside. There's a company that makes an electronic flight book that only works on Apple A-series devices, and in many parts of the world, it's unusable in the summer in airplanes with bubble canopies.
by TheAlchemist | 2025-07-13 00:35:51+00:00
Really hard to know - as the numbers are not public, it's all guestimates.

Musk said in late 2023 that they achieved 'breakeven cash flow', but Bloomberg reported that they were actually loosing money on ground terminals.

It's also a lot of accounting game - Starlink satellites have a really short lifespan and will need to be replaced on a regular basis. SpaceX being a private company, there is no way to know how they account for that.

As for launches - most of their launches are for... themselves (Starlink) and quite a lot of the rest is for government / military - which are partly classified.
by lucb1e | 2025-07-13 00:36:37+00:00
There is also an argument to be made that adblocking is immoral. I think the idea is pervasive enough to fill a team of willing people, especially if you pay them 100k/year to at least go along with it for the time being

I haven't made up my own mind about it yet, just that this might be a factor in why one would move the facilitating technology backwards in this way (and forwards in other ways, apparently: some people in the thread are reporting that uBlock Lite is faster. Not that I can tell the difference between a clean Firefox without add-ons (I regularly use that for work reasons) and a Firefox with uBlock Origin (my daily driver) except if the page is bogged down from all the ads)
by MrCoffee7 | 2025-07-13 00:37:46+00:00
I haven't seen anything like that. https://www.nvgpu.com/blog/gpu-pricing-trends-2025 discusses pricing trends and has current prices: https://www.nvgpu.com/?gpuType=H100&num_gpus=1

https://www.shadeform.ai/instances also has current prices.

Epoch AI has some general hardware trend charts, eg. https://epoch.ai/data/machine-learning-hardware
by ffin | 2025-07-13 00:38:40+00:00
The way you experience puberty is (to some extent) a result of the hormones in your body. Generally the hormones in your body are a result of your sex, however, it is possible to stop your body from producing certain hormones, and replace them with different hormones. In this way, one can have a puberty more similar to a different sex than one’s own.

Why do you think you can’t experience the wrong one? Also, unless you are saying there is only one sex, how could there only be one puberty?
by lonk11 | 2025-07-13 00:39:34+00:00
This is definitely doable and anyone can build such a feed using Bluesky's APIs.

As an example, I built a "For You" feed https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:3guzzweuqraryl3rdkimjamk/fe... that finds the posts you liked, finds other people who liked the same posts and shows you what else they liked.

To help me debug the algorithm I built a simple web UI that allows you to see the feed for any user by plugging their account id: https://linklonk.com/bluesky

You can switch perspective to other users and explore how the would experience the feed.
by jz10 | 2025-07-13 00:40:50+00:00
I use CF tunnels all the time at work and for my side projects but I've always found the web ui for remotely managed tunnels a bit hard to use. I recently asked Claude to help me build a TUI so I can easily create and manage them:

https://github.com/justingosan/tunnelman

Just yesterday I added support for adding a traefik reverse proxy that has (just) basic auth (for now) for a little bit of added protection
by sillysaurusx | 2025-07-13 00:43:23+00:00
It is explicitly dehumanizing them by saying they’re not allowed to be pilots despite having issues. Claiming that it’s not is again part of the problem.

You can’t imagine what it’s like to worry about losing your career because of something you’re forced to keep secret, and is entirely treatable. That’s the kind of barbarism that future generations will look back on us and shake their heads at.

I hope you never have to worry about being de-yourjob’d. In the meantime, let the people who are worried about it campaign for change.

I imagine women had to face similar discrimination when campaigning to be allowed to fly. There were likely a bunch of people saying that the current system was fine, and besides, they didn’t trust a woman to do the job. Just because we’ve moved from discrimination against sexes to those with mental health issues doesn’t mean the system is perfect.
by lelanthran | 2025-07-13 00:43:48+00:00
> Government run did not always mean majority ruled.

Right.

> Many times rights of the minority have been ruled to be important, as in cases like abortion.

Correct, but it was with the agreement of the majority of voters! IOW, the majority opinion still prevailed.

We are not talking about tyranny of the minority by the majority; your example is literally the majority agreeing that those specific minorities rights be granted to them.

TBH, the opposition that we are seeing is opposition to medical intervention on minors who by definition alone cannot give informed consent.

Stop fighting that battle and I guarantee that this entire "issue" turns into a nothing-burger.

There is no reason to argue for medical interventions on someone who is unable to consent.
by furyofantares | 2025-07-13 00:45:27+00:00
Protecting the system prompt with text in the system prompt is basically the same impossible task as preventing prompt injection, which nobody knows how to do / seems impossible. Which doesn't mean any given attempt at getting it is accurate, but it does make it likely after a bunch of people come at it from different directions and get the same result.

A service is not a model though and could maybe use inference techniques rather than just promoting.
by dminik | 2025-07-13 00:45:59+00:00
I feel that I have to point this out once again, because the article goes so far as to state that:

> With this last improvement Zig has completely defeated function coloring.

I disagree with this. Let's look at the 5 rules referenced in the famous "What color is your function?" article referenced here.

> 1. Every function has a color

Well, you don't have async/sync/red/blue anymore, but you now have IO and non-IO functions.

> 2. The way you call a function depends on its color.

Now, technically this seems to be solved, but you still need to provide IO as a parameter. Non-IO functions don't need/take it.

It looks like a regular function call, but there's no real difference.

> 3. You can only call a red function from within another red function

This still applies. You can only call IO functions from within other IO functions.

Technically you could pass in a new executor, but is that really what you want? Not to mention that you can also do this in languages that don't claim to solve the coloring problem.

> 4. Red functions are more painful to call

I think the spirit still applies here.

> 5. Some core library functions are red

This one is really about some things being only possible to implement in the language and/or stdlib. I don't think this applies to Zig, but it doesn't apply to Rust either for instance.

Now, I think these rules need some tweaking, but the general problem behind function coloring is that of context. Your function needs some context (an async executor, auth information, an allocator, ...). In order to call such a function you also need to provide the context. Zig hasn't really solved this.

That being said, I don't think Zig's implementation here is bad. If anything, it does a great job at abstracting the usage from the implementation. This is something Rust fails at spectacularly.

However, the coloring problem hasn't really been defeated.
by ffin | 2025-07-13 00:46:10+00:00
I think this question concedes that there is some possibility that one could experience an incorrect puberty.

Given the definition of maturity is being fully grown, this comes across as an inherently unhelpful thing to ask. If we say “only once someone is fully grown they are able to determine if they experienced the incorrect puberty” then this makes it impossible to help children who are going to experience the incorrect puberty. Unless we have some way to determine a child is trans without any input from them, there becomes no way to help them.
Show HN: I made a private, portable, virtual LLM OS with JavaScript and Gemini
by oopismcgoopis | 2025-07-13 00:46:34+00:00
OopisOS is not a website; it's a complete operating system simulation that runs entirely on your machine. There is no backend server. Every file you create, every user you add, every command you run is processed and stored locally. Your world is yours alone, governed by a robust security model that you control.

This project began as a question: Can a complex, stateful, multi-user system be built with nothing but the native tools of the web? The answer is a resounding yes. OopisOS is a living demonstration of what's possible when modern browser capabilities are wielded with disciplined, framework-free architecture.
by lucb1e | 2025-07-13 00:47:33+00:00
I'd rather send money to the people I want to support than fund a middleman

> which a majority of the developed world uses

... the USA? It's not a majority in any other country that I'm aware of

I've got a Eurocentric view though, I have e.g. no idea if Singapore or China has a majority of Apple users or where you draw the line on 'developed' (critique on the term: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Factfulness&oldid...)