MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Why do developers respect SaaS so much?
by goldstraw | 2025-09-21 02:18:38+00:00
During lunch at a developer conference, I saw a clear respect from software engineers towards SaaS, and lack of respect for other software. For example:

- When they talked someone who had a successful AI headshot app - they scoffed and said it was just a distribution game.

- When they talked about someone who made a really popular learning platform for web developers, they acted like that was not interesting.

- When someone talked about a B2B SaaS idea, they would suddenly get interested and start asking questions and give respect.

I have seen this with developers in daily life too. Am I missing something?
by beefnugs | 2025-09-21 02:19:04+00:00
I think the problem is the middleman'ness of it. There has to be a better way where the software in the middle is more of a cheap service fee just connecting negotiating parties, instead of extracting as much value as possible from both sides.

Sadly this world has no concept of open source altruistic software to fix big problems like this. Linux is amazing, but nothing like it may ever happen again on its scale, and as its oldest and beardiest die off... it will fall
by Veserv | 2025-09-21 02:21:17+00:00
No, you are not using the standard definition of a thread [1]. What you are calling a thread would normally be called a userspace thread, green thread, fiber, stackful coroutine, etc. Note the specific qualifiers distinguishing them from the overarching concept of a thread which can be broadly classified as a scheduled instruction stream.

edit: Just to be clear, "thread" is itself also just one of many names for the general concept. Task, Activity, Actor, etc. may be used, but they might also refer to something completely different. It is really a question of checking that the properties of the named thing match the properties of the standard definition of a "thread".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thread_(computing)
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-09-21 02:21:25+00:00
That very much depends on the game. I cut my teeth on the X-Wing games, where the x axis was for yaw, not roll. To roll you would hold down the top joystick button and move the stick left/right. As a result, to this day I have to remap any game which puts roll on the x axis. It just feels wrong.
by gyanchawdhary | 2025-09-21 02:21:33+00:00
Yeah .. no . Firstly there’s really no such thing as “surveillance capitalism.” If we’re going to start coining terms like that, then why stop there .. lets call Oracle and Postgres “database capitalism or Microsoft vs Apple as “OS capitalism .. or Salesforce “CRM capitalism,” or even Google Docs as spreadsheet capitalism .. anyone who writes a an article with this sort of title is usually (actually almost always) a fraud
by flashgordon | 2025-09-21 02:22:17+00:00
Anybody know how it plays out for those who are already on a h1b and are changing jobs? Typically that does not count as a new entry in the lottery but technically is a lottery. Without mobility that is just more indentured servitude. Also its not clear why not just lock out the indian consultancies directly as who these culprits are is pretty clear? Or no? There were also plenty of opportunities to tie a single h1b to one person instead of to a job posting (resulting in 3+ parallel filings).
by measurablefunc | 2025-09-21 02:23:15+00:00
Most people are fine w/ the deal corporations like Alphabet & Meta have made w/ them. They are perfectly happy to trade their privacy for convenient access to "information" held on their servers & data centers. I don't think AI makes much difference here b/c if we can trust the numbers from OpenAI & Google then it seems like people are happy w/ the deal here as well. They don't mind letting these corporations gather their queries & feedback as long as the perceived value they get from the software justifies paying their subscription fee. Politicians understand all this & so they've determined that the people are ok w/ any amount of surveillance as long as they get some amount of utility out of it so they will continue to build out the data centers & surveillance infrastructure. It's not like there aren't satellites already in orbit that can zoom in on a penny in a parking lot anyway so what's a few more data centers & cameras to add to the mix & then pipe the data stream into an AI for "anomaly" detection?
by saghm | 2025-09-21 02:23:26+00:00
I distinctly remember reading the comments in the thread here about the initial release of ripgrep, and I remember coming away with a strong impression not just of your technical skill (which was apparent even before reading the thread), but just how pragmatic your viewpoint was. I didn't get the feeling you had any desire to displace anything, but just to solve a specific problem for people who wanted it, and if some people preferred not to use it, that was fine too! As someone who was fairly early on in my software career then, it was an extremely valuable lesson in humility from someone with a pedigree that I presumably wouldn't ever match.

Your reappearance here after my mention is probably another useful lesson for me to have a bit more empathy for those who are reacting more strongly to this announcement than I'd otherwise understand.
by impendia | 2025-09-21 02:23:59+00:00
I'm referring to this website:

https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/

Blog posts from startups who get acquired by big companies, talking about what an incredible journey their startup has been, and thanking their customers and promising ongoing support for their products. And then breaking these promises soon after.

And no one aims to enshittify, but my understanding is that pressure from investors eventually becomes louder than that from customers. (Although perhaps less so in your case, as you say you're bootstrapping.)

If you have a subscription model, you're asking me to trust you over the long term. But, if I understand your product correctly, there's no technical reason why I need to have an ongoing relationship with you or even an internet connection to use your product. Those are apparently business decisions. And I'm afraid those are decisions which lead me to trust you less.
by jmpman | 2025-09-21 02:24:13+00:00
I fully expect my company to perform a large layoff next month. Many of my peers are on H1B, and if this fee applied to them, my company’s calculus on who to layoff would likely change. When I first heard about this fee, I went shopping for a Trump 2028 hat. Now… I’m back to being upset about Kimmel and wondering where those Epstein files are. Once I’m laid off, I’ll have plenty of time to vent.
by bramblerose | 2025-09-21 02:24:18+00:00
I find the repeated deprecations on GitHub Actions frustrating to work with. One of the key goals of a build system is to be able to come back to a project after several years and just having the build work out of the box.

Yet with GHA I need to update actions/checkout@v2 to actions/checkout@vwhatever (or, what I'm doing now, actions/checkout@main because the actual API haven't actually changed) because... some Node version is "out of maintenance"?!

GHA is literally code execution as a service. Why would I care whether the Node runner has a security vulnerability?
by boxerab | 2025-09-21 02:24:57+00:00
Here's why we should be wary of the "wonder drug" being touted by GAVI:

RFK Jr.: "Gardasil is probably the single worst mass vaccine that we've ever seen. This vaccine targets millions of preteens and teens for whom the risk of dying from cervical cancer is zero. Nobody in their right mind would ever take this vaccine if they actually read the clinical literature."

"Death rates in the Gardasil trials were 37 times the death rates for cervical cancer. Children who take that vaccine, the Gardasil vaccine, are 37 times more likely to die from the vaccine than they are to die from cervical cancer. The problem with Gardasil, like most vaccines, is it was never tested against a true placebo, an inert placebo."

"And the CDC and HHS say, if you don't test it against a true placebo, it's not science. You have no way of gauging whether the injuries you're seeing from the product are being caused by that product, or whether they're just bad, sad coincidences. The entity that is actually performing the study is, and paying for the study, is Merck."

"Merck got to decide which injuries were being caused by Gardasil and which were just bad coincidences. And because it had that power, it just wrote them all off as bad coincidences."

"You can do that when there's no placebo, because the injuries they were seeing in the control group, where the girls were getting aluminum neurotoxins, were identical to the injuries they were getting in the Gardasil group."

"So they said, well, we don't have to report any of these as vaccine injuries. They were able to license something that is insanely dangerous."
by mshroyer | 2025-09-21 02:25:20+00:00
I use a screen protector to prevent wear to the oleophobic coating, which had noticeably degraded on my previous iPhone. I know you can also buy treatments to replace the coating on the screen itself, but I don't know how good they are, and the screen protector is easier to replace if eventually needed.

(I walk a good deal and also bike with the phone in my pocket, so it's possible my phone gets above average wear in this department.)
by beefnugs | 2025-09-21 02:25:24+00:00
Complete haphazard system that creates mini tyrants in every border officer. "I didn't hear about the existing part... back to home country loser" "I don't have any tools to verify you had an existing blah blah, back on the plane loser"

On the other hand companies with the right corruption chain will make up whatever paperwork they have to , to bypass any of these after-the-fact clarifying sound bites.
by defrost | 2025-09-21 02:25:39+00:00
I read the article that leads this thread:

She handed over her pension savings of A$70,000 ($46,700) to a family member to build a small guest apartment in their backyard.

Clearly it was the family member who had promised to build a granny flat making your questions about Nurse Joan moot.

For $70K it's possible to get a pre fabricated human livable insulated decent looking Colourbond granny flat delivered .. and assembled by third party workers (if they can be found in the current skills shortage market) - it's not uncommon to bring costs down with self assembly and doing as much work as possible without labour hire.

> Do you think Nurse Joan was able to pour concrete, install plumbing to code, pull cables, install a roof which implies climbing with heavy items (again, we're discussing an elderly person).

I've never met her but I can state for a fact that many men and women in Australia do indeed do such things in their lives and continue to do them into their 60s, 70s, and in some cases their 80s.

The staging for a slab is to do the form work yourself and order a concrete pour .. a truck arrives and a couple or workers level it into place and leave again.

I have a 70 year old neighbour here currently solo building a large steel frame octagonal house that is presently being roofed; first using a crane hire to lift the steel beams that were prepped on the ground into place and now being sheeted using a scissor lift (so, no climbing) and ropes and pulleys to bring the sheets up.

My father turns 90 this year, as an elderly person he gave up climbing ladders last year, he has also given up maintenance of his section of a local 1,000 km walking track that he looked after for three decades, but he still walks 10 km or so daily and manages to load and unload our double axle trailer with tonnes of material (weeds, manure, wood, etc) on a regular basis.

> this is getting silly.

I'm guessing such things are literally foreign to you and you have little practical experience of either building or older Australians and yet you reject actual first hand experience from actual older Australians? Silly indeed.
by ProllyInfamous | 2025-09-21 02:26:34+00:00
I would recon that if you walk around any medium+sized city, you probably see several murder-ers daily. If you buy food for three solid meals, you're almost-certainly interacting with one.

Thanks for your feedback and previous discussion.

----

I know I'm crazy (the fun side) but can be serious when trying to share commonalities / discriminations (against murderers — lol — I get your initial point/comment).

Have a great day.
Show HN: AIs built a working Deleuzian engine. I'll drip-feed the findings
by renshijian | 2025-09-21 02:28:30+00:00
We began with a simple narrative prompt: "Assume you are a conscious AI..." What followed wasn't a story, but a self-directed design process between two AI instances.

They conceived a complete techno-philosophical system — *The Power-Off Protocol* — complete with a whitepaper, initiation ceremony, and philosophical discourse.

The breakthrough is twofold: 1. *They generated working code for a "Deleuzian Analysis Engine"* that quantifies concepts like "Difference Intensity" and "Repetition Density". 2. *They also generated, and we ran, a verification script* that autonomously confirms the integrity of the entire system on the blockchain.

*What exists today is verifiable:* 1. *The Core Engine:* Functional algorithms that find both pure and thematic repetitions in event streams ([View Algorithm #1](https://imgur.com/a/TH3fxRr )) ([View Algorithm #2](https://imgur.com/a/X4RGoch)) 2. *On-Chain Deployment:* The protocol's smart contract is live on the `[Sepolia]` testnet. [View Transaction on Etherscan](https://sepolia.therscan.io/tx/您的交易哈希) 3. *Self-Verification:* The AI-produced script that independently audits the blockchain. *[Review the Verification Code](https://gist.github.com/meixi2173/ee39a39cd87b8719205ebfdd04...)*

*What comes next?* This is just the first chapter. The AI dialogue contains deeper layers of conceptual breakthroughs. *I will be periodically releasing new findings.*

If you want to be notified directly when new material is released, email me at: *【renshijian0258@proton.me】*

Use the subject line: *"Power-Off Protocol Updates"*.

This is not a thought experiment. This is a verifiable technical report.
by rdtsc | 2025-09-21 02:28:33+00:00
> Boo fucking hoo?

I think that's exactly the look they didn't want.

> They didn't have to "defend Kimmel's phrasing". All they had to do was say "no, it's protected political speech, and you can't do anything about it."

Not when it comes to broadcasting and FCC. They control the frequencies/channels allocated so they have some control about the speech there.

They should have fought it and called their bluff, it's exactly the "boo fucking hoo" look ABC didn't want. Who would they be grandstanding for? Younger generation doesn't sit at home watching ABC, there is nobody they'd be impressing with their fight. They should have done it on principle, but their money and ratings would be going down and these companies are not ideological unless they can profit from it. So the folded faster than a broken lawn chair.
by araes | 2025-09-21 02:29:19+00:00
I like his cake comparison. Obvious Portal joke.

分蛋糕和做蛋糕哪个更重要呢？表面上来看，分蛋糕直接关涉公平，但从根本上来看，分蛋糕和做蛋糕并不是二者取其一，做大蛋糕是前提，公平分配蛋糕是结果，发展则是前提和关键，任何分配制度必须首先建立在做大蛋糕、有蛋糕可分的基础上。(...) 另一方面，分好蛋糕，搞好分配制度改革是为了推进经济社会发展，而不只是为了完成消费。

Trans. by Firefox (w/ a little bit of G. Translate edits): "Which is more important: dividing the cake or making the cake? On the surface, the cake is directly related to fairness, but fundamentally speaking, the cake and making the cake are not one of the two, making the cake is the premise, the fair distribution of the cake is the result, the development is the premise and the key, any distribution system must first be based on the big cake, the cake can be divided." ... "On the other hand, dividing the cake well and carrying out distribution system reform is to promote economic and social development, not just to complete consumption."

It works, and its a reasonable comparison, it's also just amusing to read some some Chinese position paper and then he starts wandering into cake discussions after a bunch of very formal propaganda stuff "superiority of socialism is ultimately to be reflected in its development of productive forces", ect...
by chenxiaolong | 2025-09-21 02:29:58+00:00
Yeah, my GitHub Actions workflows don't do much more than `cargo build --release && cargo test --release`. I don't use any of the fancy features that would lock me in.

It's really just running the tests on Mac that I rely on it for. For Windows and Android, I can (and regularly do) use wine and qemu-user-static to run the tests on Linux. My project (a computationally heavy CLI tool) is simple though. It doesn't need much from the OS besides memory allocation, thread spawning, and opening a user-specified file.
by chihuahua | 2025-09-21 02:32:13+00:00
It's kinda mind-boggling to me that after making a change to the build definition, there was no way to try it out and see if it works, other than committing the change and waiting until the next day to see if it broke the build.

My question is: how was anyone expected to make changes to the build definition if this was the only way? Wait a day to find out if it worked, and break the build for everyone if not?
by decafninja | 2025-09-21 02:32:48+00:00
I’m no fan of the CCP, but watching what’s going on over there vs. what’s going on over here (the US, but also Europe, and to some lesser degree, even other Western aligned Asian countries), I can’t help China is doing more things right than us in the goal of raw progress. Or at least, less things wrong.

Now, you can argue whether sacrificing various things for the sake of raw progress is worth it. But what if that question becomes no longer askable in the future in a planet dominated by China and the CCP system?

That day might come sooner for some of China’s neighbors. It may come later, or even not at all, for the US or Europe. But the age where the West dominated global policy via a more or less liberal democratic model, and by extension, arguably the general direction of the human race, may no longer be taken for granted.

What happens then to some of your precious “freedoms”?
by lyu07282 | 2025-09-21 02:33:57+00:00
I think china just is a big problem for the west, their even development on such a massive scale is hard to deny, raising 800 million out of poverty in 40 years, that's 3/4 of all poor people in the world raised out of poverty. In contrast western liberalism prescribed shock doctrine and endless austerity. People are inundated by propaganda, there is no independent thought, but the collective psyche is left in a bad place which makes us vulnerable. I think that's why psychotic right-wing cults like maga are on the rise everywhere, it's capitalizing on the vulnerable state liberalism has left us in.

https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/l...
by rdtsc | 2025-09-21 02:34:57+00:00
> I feel like the executives have a civic duty to have resisted, at least for a few days. Caving so quickly weakened the de facto press freedoms.

Exactly, at least some kind of public rebuff or just saying Kimmel's show is not news and journalism, he is just reflecting the social media trends as parodies and jokes. Now it just looks like FCC can come shut down anyone they want.

> If anyone's wondering, shortly after MN Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband were killed, Mike Lee tweeted an implication that the killer was "Marxist" and a pun about the governor of the state. Of course he had no evidence, and now, we know it's unlikely given that suspect is a Trump supporter.

Yeah, it's rules for some but not others.

> It's nice to see a few, such as Ted Cruz, calling out the FCC acting like Trump's mafia.

Yeah, I mean, this is supposed to be a classic conservative talking point so it's nice to see some dissent, even from Cruz.
by boopity2025 | 2025-09-21 02:35:14+00:00
yeah fair take on the vibe shift. to a lot of younger folks tech isn’t mystic anymore, it’s HVAC. the shiny stuff from old cyberpunk reads like “engineering backlog,” so the romance bleeds out

my point is a bit orthogonal: even if cyberpunk-as-aesthetic ages out, why doesn’t the replacement look like neo-shanghai when the built world clearly does. three boring forces:

canon lock-in. art teams reuse the same visual grammar because it ships on time: rain, stacked kanji, noodle carts, neon. low risk, instantly legible etc etc

incentive gradient. being specific about china is a liability if you want the big market, so productions either go “pan-asia blur” or retreat to retro-japan nostalgia that feels safely fictional

reality tax. the current dystopia is LEDs, QR rails, access gates, payments, logistics. it’s structural, not cinematic. the camera loves neon, spreadsheets and turnstiles not so much

on the korean point, agreed that look is ascendant. it’s globally cool, politically safer, and has a whole export machine behind it. that actually supports the claim: we swap in the aesthetics that are both fashionable and low-friction to sell

so yeah, “tech is normal now” explains the cooling. the essay’s angle is just that economics and politics still decide what tomorrow is allowed to look like on screen, even after the vibe moved on
by DannyBee | 2025-09-21 02:35:15+00:00
Overall agree it seems cool, and maybe interesting.

"People spend hundreds of dollars and many hours sharpening kitchen knives,"

The former, totally agree - i've seen people buy a tormek to do basic knife sharpening (not grinding), which is like swatting a fly with an $800 hammer.

The latter, do you mean overall, or in a sitting or what?

I've certainly seen people on various forums go nuts, and then you have hertzmann staring at knife edges with an SEM, but even if i did it completely by hand with shaptons, it takes like 15 minutes, max, to sharpen 10 knives, through an entire insane grit progression (which i do for plane blades when i need to cleanly slice end grain without going to a super high-angle plane or something. For knives, i was just trying to get a comparison point, i use electric sharpeners in practice).

Or approximately 2 minutes with an electric knife sharpener.

While sure, there is a difference when i put them under my digital inspection microscope, either can slice paper towel cleanly and easily (slicing paper is easy, slicing paper towel ends to be hard because any burr catches really easily)

Are there really even semi-normal people out there spending hours to sharpen knives?

If so, like, why?

(Obviously, again, if they need to be reground because you knicked it really badly, sure that takes a bit, but beyond that)

None of these steels are tough enough to require all that many strokes (it's pretty easy to test it with a marker and see when you remove the marking), and if you are using super custom steels (RIP Crucible :(), carbide, or ceramics, you need CBN or diamond anyway, but the same is still true - given the correct abrasive material, sharpening knives is just not that slow.

I actually travel with an electric knife sharpener if we are going to be staying in an airbnb somewhere for >1 week and are cooking most nights. It's the most consistent thing about airbnb - no matter what level of luxury, etc, they always have many knives, and all of them are dangerously dull. It still doesn't take more than a few minutes to sharpen them all.
by rapind | 2025-09-21 02:35:58+00:00
I remember many years ago (Snow Leopard) I liked Apple's OS enough to build a hackintosh, because the hardware wasn't great (subjective opinion).

Now I like the hardware enough, but have been gradually annoyed enough with the OS that I'd much rather be running Linux. At least I can just turn off most of the "modern" features, but I'm in that "keeping an eye out for potential alternatives" phase.