MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
A client wants to buy old SaaS app – smart move or risk?
by AbbeyRoadRunner | 2025-07-04 20:41:32+00:00
We’re a small software house that’s been developing a niche SaaS platform for cultural events over the past 15 years. The product works well, but we were thinking to rebuild it for the next year.

Recently, a well-known national brand — not in tech, but operating in retail — approached us. As part of their PR strategy, they run a medium-sized cultural festival once a year in their home country.

They want to use our platform — but with a hard no to licensing. They’ve had bad past experiences where vendors either raised prices or disappeared, leaving them stranded.

We’re currently in a bidding process, alongside other companies. From what we understand, most competitors are creative agencies likely to: • build something from scratch, or • white-label past projects from similar events.

We estimate that building this kind of event app from scratch would cost around $60,000.

The options we’ve considered so far are:

1. Give them a snapshot of our current codebase, with no support, onboarding, or guarantees. This isn’t ideal — they would need to hire someone else to burn time understanding the architecture and logic before they could even begin implementing or customizing it. It’s slow and wasteful, considering we already know the product inside-out. 2. Give them a snapshot of the code and charge separately for the extra features they’ve asked for (that we don’t yet support). Based on our estimates, development would cost them between $13,500 (optimistic) and $38,000 (pessimistic) if done externally. 3. Same as above, but instead of giving them the code directly, we place it in escrow with a law firm of their choice. If we go out of business, or suddenly triple our rates to lock them in, they’d have the right to release the source and continue working with another vendor. This gives them peace of mind without requiring a full transfer up front.

*Ask HN: What would you do in our shoes?* Any strategic, technical, or legal insights are welcome. Has anyone navigated something similar?
by sandreas | 2025-07-04 20:41:40+00:00
While I get your point about size, I'd not use RAID-5 for my personal homelab. I'd also say that 6x2TB drives are not the optimal solution for low power consumption. You're also missing out server quality BIOS, Design/Stability/x64 and remote management. However, not bad.

While my Server is quite big compared to a "mini" device, it's silent. No CPU Fan only 120mm case fans spinning around 500rpm, maybe 900rpm on load - hardly noticable. I've also a completely passive backup solution with a Streacom FC5, but I don't really trust it for the chipsets, so I also installed a low rpm 120mm fan.

How did you fit 6 drives in a "mini" case? Using Asus Flashstor or beelink?
by Kesseki | 2025-07-04 20:42:31+00:00
This is, in turn, making the world of comment and forum spam much worse. Site operators could tag all user-submitted links as "nofollow," making their sites useless for SEO spammers. But spammers have learned that most LLM content scraper bots don't care about "nofollow," so they're back to spamming everywhere.
by saulpw | 2025-07-04 20:42:36+00:00
You say this like you can just talk with the VP and CFO and have a nuts and bolts conversation about big systems things as an pre-hire IC. You can't negotiate with even medium-sized companies at that level. They have a fixed idea of what the 'role' looks like, and almost always it's full-time, long-term. You can negotiate maybe 10-25% salary increase, but that's it. Good luck even getting more PTO (the "standard" amount is always "generous" and if you got more it would complicate "team dynamics").
by vunderba | 2025-07-04 20:44:26+00:00
From the article: "When using AirBending for pitch control, you can lock your gestures to specific musical scales and keys. This ensures every note you play is perfectly in tune with your composition"

Reminds me of the Moog Theremini - that was a fun bit of kit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theremini
by throw0101d | 2025-07-04 20:45:10+00:00
> Deflation is a good thing when you are parking value.

And is deflation a good or bad thing for the livelihood and well-being of human beings?

How many people in the US has a mortgage or some kind of debt (student, medical)? Inflation makes the burden of debt easier, deflation makes it worse.

And the Top (0.)1% already has an easy enough time with parking/generating value. Deflation would only help them more (and make things hard for everyone under them).
by ww520 | 2025-07-04 20:45:21+00:00
Nice video. I especially like the new 'labeled switch' feature providing a freeform control flow, and the watch/incremental compile feature. I used to use Rust's watchexec to do zig build on changes; now the watch feature is built natively in zig. The IO based async/await stuff seems to be the right direction; it's following the familiar Allocator pattern. The integrated fuzz testing into the compiler tool chain is fantastic; I can write much less unit tests now.

Zig.day looks like a wonderful way to do laid back hackathons. Looking forward to one coming up.
by johnfn | 2025-07-04 20:46:10+00:00
Everyone is like "Haskell is such a cool language, it's so much more clear concise and understandable than that stupid language you like so much" (their words, not mine). Then you ask them how they write `foo.bar.baz = 1` and you get 50k words of documentation, 113 new operators[1] like `<<<>~`, and a library with 20 new dependencies. I make fun of them only because I love them - I think Haskell has brought us a lot of cool things like Maybe and Either - but how has no one ever taken a step back and gone "wow, this seems a tad complex for what we're trying to accomplish"?

[1]: I'm not even exaggerating - https://hackage-content.haskell.org/package/lens-5.3.5/docs/...
by vbezhenar | 2025-07-04 20:47:03+00:00
Apple trusts their hardware to do their own checksums properly. Modern SSD uses checksums and parity codes for blocks. SATA/NVMe include checksums for protocol frames. The only unreliable component is RAM, but FS checksums can't help here, because RAM bit likely will be flipped before checksum is calculated or after checksum is verified.
by adamiscool8 | 2025-07-04 20:48:36+00:00
I don't think this article makes a good case for why you should.

>The more of us who incapacitate Google's analytics products and their support mechanism, the better. Not just for the good of each individual person implementing the blocks - but in a wider sense, because if enough people block Google Analytics 4, it will go the same way as Universal Google Analytics. These products rely on gaining access to the majority of Web users. If too many people block them, they become useless and have to be withdrawn.

OK - but then also in the wider sense, if site owners can't easily assess the performance of their site relative to user behavior to make improvements, now the overall UX of the web declines. Should we go back to static pages and mining Urchin extracts, and guessing what people care about?
by perching_aix | 2025-07-04 20:48:37+00:00
If you disagree with the assertion that people generally have an easier time understanding language (correctly or not) than producing it, that's one thing and that's fine. But if you consider it a claim outright, and find it incorrect, then that's gonna need some beyond-anecdotal supporting evidence, or you should ask for some from the other side. Digging into each others' backgrounds is not this.

Keeping to anecdotals and opinions though, I only speak one foreign language sadly, that being English, but this effect is very familiar to me, and is also frequently demonstrated and echoed by my peers too. Even comes up with language loss, not just language learning. Goes hand-in-hand with reading, writing, listening, and speaking being very different areas of language ability too, the latter two being areas I'm personally weak in. That's already a disparity that a cursory read of your position says shouldn't exist (do correct me if I'm misinterpreting what your stance is though).

And all this is completely ignoring how even the native language output one produces can be just straight up wrong sometimes, and not faithful to intentions. I've been talking about it like there's a finish line too, but there really isn't. This is why things like mechanized math proofs are so useful. They are composed in formal languages rather than natural ones, enabling their evaluation to be automated (they are machine-checkable). No unintended semantics lost or added.
by beloch | 2025-07-04 20:48:41+00:00
I too formed memories by playing EQ in a way that was, in retrospect, dumb, and learning from the experience.

e.g. I created an Erudite wizard (who could not see in the dark) and insisted on leveling up in Toxxulia forest, the default "newbie" zone for Erudites. It was dark there, even during the day, and pitch black at night. I kept my monitor at the calibrated brightness level because I didn't want to "cheat". Monsters of an appropriate level were spread out and often hard to find. A troll NPC roamed the forest and randomly killed players. I spent many hours getting lost (and killed) there before leaving the island, only to discover the comparatively easy newbie zone that stood outside Qeynos, a short, safe, free, ship voyage away.

The game was full of stuff like this. If you wanted to do something, there was usually a very bad way to go about it and other ways that were much better. Finding those gave you a sense of accomplishment that was far sweeter than mere levels.

Modern games tend to be more balanced so you can be assured that, however you're doing something, there probably isn't another way to do it that is vastly easier unless you're doing something really weird. This "wastes" less of your time, but somehow feels less realistic. In real life, different strategies for doing things are seldom equal.
by cyanydeez | 2025-07-04 20:49:55+00:00
I've had a synology since 2015. Why, besides the drives themselves, would most home labs need to upgrade?

I don't really understand the general public, or even most usages, requiring upgrade paths beyond get a new device.

By the time the need to upgrade comes, the tech stack is likely faster and you're basically just talking about gutting the PC and doing everything over again, except maybe power supply.
by sebkur | 2025-07-04 20:51:19+00:00
I found the jediterm library and noticed people asking for releases but the team didn't seem interested (see https://github.com/JetBrains/jediterm/issues/299 and https://github.com/JetBrains/jediterm/issues/303). I noticed there are even working examples in the source tree though for a standalone terminal application (https://github.com/JetBrains/jediterm/tree/master/JediTerm/s...) so I thought "let's just package that up into binaries, maybe add tabs to make it convenient to use".
by thankyoufriend | 2025-07-04 20:51:37+00:00
The newness or novelty of thievery isn't relevant to whether it's thievery or not.

The difference is that, for better or worse, our society chose to follow the model that artists own the rights to their work. That work was used for commercial purposes without the consent of the artists. Therefore it's theft.

I actually do believe all industries should be worker owned because the capitalists have proven they can't be trusted as moral and ethical stewards, but I'm specifically talking about GenAI here.

I think it's disingenuous to say that people have a choice to publish data or not in an economic system that requires them to publish or produce in order to survive. If an artist doesn't produce goods, then they aren't getting paid.

Also this is kind of a pedantic rebuttal but the GenAI software technically does first have to copy the data to then train on it :) But seriously, it can be prompted to reproduce copyrighted works and I don't think the rights holders particularly care how that happens, rather that it can and does happen at all.
by ajb | 2025-07-04 20:51:51+00:00
I'm not saying he made a PR just saying "Fixes" like a rookie. What I'm saying is that in there should have been something along the lines of "heads up - I know this doesn't comply with the usual process for the following commits, here's why I think they should be given a waiver under these circumstances" followed by the justifications that appeared after Linus got upset.

The PR description would have been fine - if it had been in the right stage of the process.
by Animats | 2025-07-04 20:53:19+00:00
Right.

They discovered something real. LLMs turn scientific papers into business-speak, and that there's a lot of that going on. Then they tried to dress up that result for publication, ineptly. Doing so probably improved their chances of getting published.

The word list I posted above is from their additional data PDF file. The paper itself doesn't contain it. Once you see their word list, it's obvious to anyone who follows business news what's going on. Scientific papers are being run through a process that converts them to press releases.

That's a good result, made worse by running it through the process the paper derides.
by rufus_foreman | 2025-07-04 20:53:34+00:00
Dogs kill orders of magnitudes more humans than coyotes. Orders of magnitude more children are killed by dogs than by coyotes.

Chill, dude.

I don't know if we should kill dogs. That's not my call. But at least relocate them out of cities?

Would you ever want a predator as large as a dog living inside a city?

I wouldn't, I'm a cat person.
by mopenstein | 2025-07-04 20:54:40+00:00
The only difference is that the people getting upset about this stuff is money. They hate the idea that someone is making money off their work. Even if the sum of their work amounts to a penny. They're just angry.

In 50 years they'll be useless anyway when computers are just plotting every iteration and combination of 1's and 0's that might be.

I too see no difference in machines learning from the works of others than man standing on the shoulders of those before them to reach higher plateaus.

It's all a big to-do about nothing.
by archagon | 2025-07-04 20:55:05+00:00
> If you make and save enough money - you can create your own safety net.

Once they finish gutting Medicare, Medicaid, and the ACA, your little pile of gold is gonna get plundered quickly if and when you get sick with something that requires long-term care. Creating "your own safety net" is nothing more than an illusion unless you happen to be one of the lucky few oligarchs.

I'd rather live in a country where I know (with high certainty) that I won't die on the street for reasons outside my control.
by alganet | 2025-07-04 20:55:16+00:00
I win either way.

If AI takes over in the predicted scale and timeline, I'll be one of the members of the last generation of developers who never felt even a single drop of impostor syndrome. People like me will be essentially walking legends.

If AI fails, then my skeptical predictions become true, and I'll be a visionary that saw through the bullshit while everyone was full of wool in their eyes.

Both of these scenarios provide people like me plenty of opportunity. If it doesn't pan out for _me specifically_, then it's just a statistical fluke, probably not related to the whole thing.

These concerns about employability are quite misguided. These are 2-3 years ahead, highly volatile unknowns. I try to think decades ahead, sometimes more, and quite more broadly.
by eschneider | 2025-07-04 20:56:40+00:00
You're going to HAVE to give them support, if only to get them setup. Think long and hard if selling this sort of on-prem version of your product makes sense for YOU. If not, it's likely going to be an expensive distraction and just tell the customer no, you don't sell and support product X that way.

They very likely will be back and if not, no hard feelings.
by sandreas | 2025-07-04 20:58:49+00:00
Understandable... Well, the bottleneck for a Proxmox Server often is RAM - sometimes CPU cores (to share between VMs). This might not be the case for a NAS-only device.

Another upgrade path is to keep the case, fans, cooling solution and only switch Mainboard, CPU and RAM.

I'm also not a huge fan of non x64 devices, because they still often require jumping through some hoops regarding boot order, external device boot or power loss struggle.
by BriggyDwiggs42 | 2025-07-04 20:59:17+00:00
My dad lives in Silverlake LA and there’s a coyote den up the hill a bit from his house. He’s got two huge dogs, but sometimes when you walk em they’ll get super excited to go after a coyote standing in the middle of the street. Thing is, they’re damn smart, and you can be sure that if you see one in the street, there’s another one the opposite way down the street, usually hiding under a car. They 100% know when they have numbers on a larger animal and when they don’t.
by Animats | 2025-07-04 20:59:18+00:00
Because it's noise.

We got rid of interlaced TV. We got rid of the low-bandwidth color changes of NTSC. (NTSC video can only go through the color gamut about ten times per scan line, which is why colored text on NTSC is truly awful.) We got rid of projector film transport jank. (Except for really bad Youtube videos which use a filter to produce fake film transport jank.) Nobody wants any of those back.
by genewitch | 2025-07-04 21:00:08+00:00
Since installing it on firefox on this computer (18 months ago or so) Ad Nauseam has clicked ~$38,000 worth of ads, that i never saw.

Between this and "track me not" i've been fighting back against ads and connecting my "profile" with any habits since 2016 or so. I should also note i have pihole and my own DNS server upstream, so that's thiry-eight grand in ad clicks that got through blacklists.

https://www.trackmenot.io/faq
by sebkur | 2025-07-04 21:00:40+00:00
yeah, the jediterm library provides a Swing component (JediTermWidget extends JPanel) so it seemed natural to create an app around it that is also Swing based. I guess it's possible to integrate Swing components into JavaFX apps as well, so that should work too.

You're right, I'm not doing much except adding some build logic for creating executables really. I also added tabbing and light / dark mode. I guess we could also at least add more options that are readily available for the jediterm widget (https://github.com/JetBrains/jediterm/blob/4cef2840aed5ec1d6...)
by anon1685212382 | 2025-07-04 21:01:00+00:00
Since I became 30yo, I suffered various health issues. I see people much older than me including my parents who were in much better shape, and I kept thinking what was wrong with me. I’m 37yo now and in almost the best shape of my life, and there was so much I learned - I’m sharing here in case it can help others.

First: With the exception of extreme health issues (e.g. Cancer), you likely have a good chance of resolving your health issues. Don’t be discouraged by your chronic pains and think you have to now live with the pain or health issues for the rest of your life. Tackle your health issues like any other engineering problem: understand the problem, make a plan, execute, monitor progress, and iterate over this process (e.g. revise your plans). If you do not take action, nothing will change.

Second: Stress is a killer. I’ve had to visit the emergency room twice because I thought I either had a heart attack or I was dying from high blood pressure. I was way too into my work (due to both passion and commitment), that delays with my projects gave me high mental pressure. Upon re-evaluating my life, I asked myself: which is more important, my work or my health? Once I started prioritizing my health and started pushing back on unreasonable timelines, my stress is gone and none of the chest pain, headache, and high blood pressure issues have come up again.

Last but not least: Your body is a very complex machine and you need to learn how to use it correctly. I had a very sedentary lifestyle and had many chronic pains, e.g. heels, ankles, knees, hip, elbow, wrist, etc. My body was so weak that I even injured my neck and back once just by sleeping in a not-so-great position. I found an awesome PT who specialized in holistic physical therapy and he helped address issues from my feet all the way to my neck. I am now able to resume all the activities from my younger days such as DDR & tennis. There’s too much to explain here but I have two key takeaways: one is my body was extremely tight & inflexible and PNF treatment from my PT was needed for recovery, and another is I just didn’t know my body and muscles well. I did not know how various muscles work, how to use my body & muscles effectively, and what exercises to do and their correct form. Learning and doing the exercises properly and frequently changed my life. Btw: I highly do NOT recommend all the YouTube fitness videos - you simply just cannot tell if what they’re saying is correct and whether their suggestion is even the correct remedy for your problem.

That is all. I wish everyone good luck in addressing their chronic pain!
by agentultra | 2025-07-04 21:01:07+00:00
It's not a meme, it's history. The machine breaking was a form of collective action by violence to form solidarity among workers who were under threat of losing wages and their livelihoods by the policies and actions of capital holders, not the machines themselves.

The capital holders spun the tale in retrospect that the movement was about the machines. "They just can't see progress! How daft do you have to be to not see the value of these wonderful machines! The productivity allows these people new leisure and the chance to do meaningful work... and they want to tear it down! How backward!"

It was about rights, liberties, and solidarity of workers. Some people did care about the quality of the textiles. But that's not enough to spark violent action in order to negotiate for better... textiles? No, it was for better working conditions, abolishment of child labour, etc.

Consider also that at the time, England was fighting Napolean on the European continent as well as the War of 1812 in North America. The textile industry was not good at allocating capital to survive the ups and downs: the factory owners only allocated enough to produce the next order. Layoffs were frequent, workers were over worked, and often paid little. Children were often employed because they were cheaper and had no bargaining power.

And where did the textile workers get displaced to? The myth from the capitalists is that they'd find new productive work elsewhere! It turns out... workhouses, the legally sanctioned indentured servitude that lasted up until the 1930s.

Had the Luddites won I doubt they would have destroyed all of the looming machines and forced us back into the days of hand-crafted textiles. The idea is preposterous. But maybe the workhouses wouldn't have developed, maybe there would have been more sensible labour laws earlier on. And we'd still have a more predictable and sensible textile industry.

Machines aren't the problem, people are.
by gwd | 2025-07-04 21:01:15+00:00
> You're just having some abstract, theoretical conversation that has no basis in what has happened

I'm having a conversation about principles; and my principle is that there should be a path to redemption. When people screw up, instead of just knee-jerk piling on because we can, we should ask, "What would be a reasonable thing to expect them to do to make it right?"

> Whatever the path is - could even be paying or even hiring the original dev

Sure, this would be a strong action on the "making it right" direction.

> they haven't done ANYTHING in that direction.

This just isn't true. They said they said they were in the wrong. They changed the license, removing all traces of the illegal license. That's not nothing.

Yes, they also downplayed their mistake, which kind of undermines the "admit fault" step. Yes, they could have gone much further to make things right, by for instance hiring the original dev.

They could have done better, but they also could have done worse.