MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bayindirh | 2025-12-10 11:11:48+00:00
> Also I am interested what are some open source projects which became closed source...

The most prominent one is Solaris. It was open one day, and closed the next. Memo didn't say we're close-sourcing it, but moving to a cathedral (final release as open source only) model, but they never released the sources ever after.

Oracle lost all of the core developers over it.

This where Illumos took over.

> There must be some legal laws protecting it.

For permissively licensed code? Nope. Nothing. Even if you don't transfer the copyright, nothing stops someone from forking it and building on it closed source. That someone would be the company opening it or someone else.

In the olden days, when the internet was not that capable to allow collaborative software development, losing developers was a real threat. Now it's not. Developers are dime a dozen. You can close the source, hire some people and continue working on it.

However, this is Open Source model working as intended. Freedom to the developers! If a developer wants to work on a closed source fork, it's completely permitted, baked into the system.

This is why GPL (esp. v3), while viral, is superior. You can't change the license if there's a copyright holder other than you. You can't just fork and close the source. It's limiting to keep the freedom. A working (and arguably necessary) compromise.
by noirscape | 2025-12-10 11:12:06+00:00
For a lot of developers, the current biggest failure of open source is the AWS/Azure/GCP problem. BigCloud has a tendency to just take well liked open source products, provide a hosted version of them and as a result they absolutely annihilate the market share of the entity that originally made the product (which usually made money by offering supported and hosted versions of the software). Effectively, for networked software (which is the overwhelming majority of software products these days) you might as well use something like BSD/MIT rather than any of the GPLs[0] because they practically have the same guarantees; it's just that the BSD/MIT licenses don't contain language that makes you think it does stuff it actually doesn't do. Non-networked software like kernels, drivers and most desktop software don't have this issue, so it doesn't apply.

Open source for that sort of product (which most of the big switches away from open source have been about) only further entrenches BigCloud's dominance over the ecosystem. It absolutely breaks the notion that you can run a profitable business on open source. BigCloud basically always wins that race even if they aren't cheaper because the company is using BigCloud already, so using their hosted version means cutting less yellow tape internally since the difficulty of getting people to agree on BigCloud is much lower compared to adding a new third party you have to work with.

The general response to this issue from the open source side tends to just be to accuse the original developers of being greedy/only wanting to use the ecosystem to springboard their own popularity.

---

I should also note that this generally doesn't apply to the fight between DHH and Mullenweg that's described in the OP. DHH just wants to kick a hornets nest and get attention now that Omarchy isn't the topic du jour anymore - no BigCloud (or for this case, shared hosting provider is probably more likely) is going to copy a random kanban tool written in Ruby on Rails. They're copying the actual high profile stuff like Redis, Terraform and whatever other examples you can recently think of that got screwed by BigClouds offering their services in that way (shared providers pretty much universally still use the classic AMP stack, which doesn't support a Ruby project, immunizing DHHs tool from that particular issue as well). Mullenweg by contrast does have to deal with Automattic not having a stranglehold on being a WordPress provider since the terms of his license weren't his to make to begin with; b3/cafelog was also under GPL and WordPress inherited that. He's been burned by FOSS, but it's also hard to say he was surprised by it, since WP is modified from another software product.

[0]: Including the AGPL, it doesn't actually do what you think it does.
by mutkach | 2025-12-10 11:13:08+00:00
What language do you use parser combinators in, and what kind of grammar do you parse usually? Nom was terribly verbose and unergonomic even by Rust's standards. Haskell's Megaparsec/Parsec is good but yeah, it's Haskell, you need to handle multiple monads (Parser itself is monadic, then your AST state, and maybe some error handling) at once and that's where I got confused. But I appreciated the elegance.

I experimented with PCs in Haskell and Rust (nom), then moved on to parser generators in Rust (pest.rs), Ocaml (Menhir), Haskell (Happy) and finally ended up with python's Lark - the speed of experimenting with different syntax/grammars is just insane.
by disgruntledphd2 | 2025-12-10 11:13:51+00:00
> We are against the DSA because it is a de facto non-trade barrier to American services exports becuase of it's tax implications.

Hang on, firstly what are the tax implications?

Secondly, here's a summary of the DSA: https://www.williamfry.com/knowledge/the-digital-service-act...

I honestly don't see anything particularly strange about it. The only thing I can see that would actually impact any of the businesses is the requirement to provide a complaints procedure.

Note that I worked in one of the major targets of this law (Meta) for many years and I don't see anything there that amounts to a trade barrier to US service exports.

Can you help me understand the concerns here?

Like, to my mind, the DMA is a much bigger deal but US peeps are way more upset about the DSA.

And like, the US runs the Banking Secrecy Act and weaponises the dollar system on a completely regular basis, so I'm honestly flabbergasted that they object to other companies enforcing their laws extra-territorally.

> And it's doesn't matter that Trump is in office - a Harris administration would have played hardball against the EU as well, as was seen with the Biden admin perusing lawfare and lobbying to make an example out of Canada for their attempt at a digital services tax.

Yeah this I agree with.

But unfortunately, because most tech/pharma company profits are booked where the IP is located and this is easy to move, digital services taxes are going to happen over the next decade. I understand why the US government doesn't like this, but it's either that or actual trade barriers to these companies. (And I say this as a citizen of a country that benefits massively from these shenanigans).
by alecco | 2025-12-10 11:14:55+00:00
I often dislike Varoufakis' weird champagne Marxist with libertarian and nationalism bent. But he is spot on this time: American Big Tech are a vampire squid on the Western economies. They have a good product but they are tyrants. It would be good to break them up and make open fair systems. But the American top 10%, including most of Congress, put most of their savings in their stocks so it will never happen in the current system. Ever.

And now they are going all-in with AI. And I don't believe their official narrative. At all.
by disgruntledphd2 | 2025-12-10 11:15:02+00:00
> Nope. It's because we don't have to pay a digital service tax in any of those countries (except in Russia, where American companies no longer operate due to sanctions considerations). And it's always been about DST [0][1].

Then your government should pass BEPS Pillar 1, so that this doesn't happen. You can't have your cake and eat it.
by bayindirh | 2025-12-10 11:15:59+00:00
As others said, being able to audit software and point out bugs is thousand times better than hunting in the dark if there's no Open or Free alternative is available. Compiling it yourself and comparing with the binary you have (reproducible building) is billion times better.

I personally choose Free Software first and Open Source Software second. However, if I have to choose between two proprietary options, I'd choose the source available one. I might not be able to patch/touch it, but at least I can see and verify.
by quchao | 2025-12-10 11:16:07+00:00
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by glenjamin | 2025-12-10 11:16:15+00:00
A failure mode of ULIDs and similar is that they're too random to be easily compared or recognized by eye.

This is especially useful when you're using them for customer or user IDs - being able to easily spot your important or troublesome customers in logs is very helpful

Personally I'd go with a ULID-like scheme similar to the one in the OP - but I'd aim to use the smallest number of bits I could get away with, and pick a compact encoding scheme
by the_real_cher | 2025-12-10 11:16:41+00:00
> making America less attractive to brainy immigrants

This article is a hit job.

Only H1B visas have been affected by the entry fee for a SINGLE year.

The O1 genius visa and the student visa are still in place and the student visa can still convert to H1B with no issue same as always.

There are many who wish Trump had gone further with this.

Although it is weird that Trump doesnt have any econometric people giving us economic data.
by skissane | 2025-12-10 11:17:10+00:00
Life extension to make people live several times longer? Seems plausible we’ll get there eventually, simply by extrapolating current trends in science and biotechnology, and observing what is possible in other species.

Mind uploading? That’s a whole other level of sci-fi. It isn’t extrapolating what we already have, it is waving your hand and declaring “as far as we know it isn’t physically impossible so why wouldn’t we get there eventually?”

Plus it raises all these difficult questions about the philosophy of mind and theory of personal identity - is the backup actually you? Or do you die, and you are survived by someone else who isn’t you but thinks they are?
by charcircuit | 2025-12-10 11:17:17+00:00
I think it's unfair to think that growing a small service or operating system to a billion users doesn't require innovation. The skills and requirements to grow a company from 1 to 1,000, 1,000 to 1,000,000, 1,000,000 to a 1,000,000,000 are going to be different. It makes sense to me that there are companies who specialize in growing companies of a particular size. And innovating around the problems of doing so.

How is youtube's recomendation system, automatic subtitles (including translation), or content id system not innovative? These were key technological improvements required for the service to grow to a massive size.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-12-10 11:17:46+00:00
so does this go for companies which sell electronics like phone companies etc. or since I think resellers sell it on amazon, maybe we don't have MFN condition?

But like, my question is, Doesn't this cripple every company which sells electronics on amazon or something?

I think amazon tries doing it to say that you would only get the best price here, thus people might buy from amazon which can then increase the sales making retailers believe they need to be on amazon agreeing to MFN policy and then crippling their custom market too I suppose

Are there any loopholes to this? What if I am a seller and then I can have lets say my book be on amazon for 100 bucks as an example and I can create a website where I sell it for 110$

But when someone signs up they can get a voucher for 20$ and then they can apply it for what I am selling which for them becomes 90$

I think amazon's MFN is monopolistic especially for things like books which is what amazon first was created for.

I kinda wish if there was a service where I can buy one time right to publish a book from the authors directly for like the books price and then be able to download it or print it from local competing printing/tech service shops..
by Nextgrid | 2025-12-10 11:18:06+00:00
A handful of servers vs thousands.

Are you on Instagram?" is easy to understand for someone not on it; they search for "Instagram", install the client app, sign up and done.

"Are you on Mastodon?" doesn't work the same way as they would need to pick a server to sign up against, which seems like an important decision (what happens if I pick wrong? Do I have to pick the same server my friend has? And so on?).
by mytailorisrich | 2025-12-10 11:18:48+00:00
You highlight cultural differences to, frankly, labour your point. Cultural differences exist between every countries even of course within Europe itself. The point is the scale. The US and Europe are close culturally. As said, they created and are obviously part of the "Western Civilisation". Now, compare to, say, Afghanistan and suddenly all the cultural differences you highlighted between the US and Europe fade into insignificance. This is the whole point.
by dylanbeattie | 2025-12-10 11:19:19+00:00
No, it's about perspective - I know that 'cos I wrote the article, but perhaps it didn't come across very clearly!

Here's the specific problem that advice is intended to remedy, which I have seen happen many, many times:

Somebody writes a talk about, say, what's new in C# 13. It's a solid talk: they've done the research, they've prepared some good demos. At local user groups, it does very well. At regional and community conferences, it does very well.

But it doesn't have any personality. It's not a case study. It's not based on using those features in production, or applying them to a specific domain. The presenter has read all the docs, run all the examples, maybe found an edge case or two, and put together a decent slide deck and some engaging demos - but even if they've done a fantastic job, there are a thousand other tech presenters out there who could do exactly the same thing.

They then start submitting that talk to big conferences which have a .NET track, and it never gets accepted.

Why? Because those conferences have people like Mads Torgersen, the actual lead designer of C# at Microsoft, on speed dial. If NDC Oslo or CraftConf or Yow! wants to fly somebody in to talk about what's new in C#, they can get the person who wrote those docs to do it.

Now, consider that talk was "how I used C# 13 to rebuild my smart home dashboard", or "how my team used C# 13 to save $5000 a month in AWS bills", or "I built an online game server using C# 13". Those kinds of talks do well because they have personality; there's more there than just the technology itself.

That's what I mean by "a story nobody else can tell" - it's a presentation that's anchored in the speaker's own real world experience; detail and context that hitherto only existed in their head.

I run presentation workshops for software professionals, and one of the things I ask my students to do is to come up with something - doesn't have to be tech-related - that they know better than anybody else in the group. We've had folks talk about how to cook ragu, how to surf on a longboard, how to get their kid to fall asleep ("literally nobody else in the world can do this, not even my wife"), and it is always remarkable to me how much more engaging and animated people become when they are telling their own story rather than paraphrasing research.
by bgwalter | 2025-12-10 11:19:53+00:00
Yes, the insiders wanted to let him in, but he refused:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/may/03/yanis-varoufak...

He’s in Washington for a meeting with Larry Summers, the former US treasury secretary and Obama confidant. Summers asks him point blank: do you want to be on the inside or the outside? “Outsiders prioritise their freedom to speak their version of the truth. The price is that they are ignored by the insiders, who make the important decisions,” Summers warns.
by bayindirh | 2025-12-10 11:20:05+00:00
Yes, that's the entry of the rabbit hole, and reader is advised to dig their own tunnel.

I remember following the tension for a bit. Yes, there are other subjects about how things are done, but after reading it, I remember framing "code quality" as the base issue.

In high-stakes software development environments, egos run high generally, and when people clash and doesn't back up, sparks happen. If this warning is ignored, then something has to give.

If I'm mistaken, I can enjoy a good explanation and be gladly stand corrected.

This is what happened here. This is probably the second or third time I witness this over 20+ years. Most famous one was over CPU schedulers, namely BFS, again IIRC.
by arianvanp | 2025-12-10 11:20:06+00:00
Given that 50-70% of the critical services I use in my daily life (healthcare, government, banking, insurance) all go through Cloudflare this practically means everything that is important to me as an individual is being actively intercepted by a US entity that falls under NSA's control.

So for all intents and purposes it's equivalent.

My point is: it's very hypocritical that we as industry professionals are complaining about poor cooperates being MITM'd whilst we're perfectly fine enabling the enfringement of fundamental human right to privacy of billions of people by all fronting the shit that we build by Cloudflare in the name of "security".

I find the lack of ethical compass in this regard very disturbing personally
by gucci-on-fleek | 2025-12-10 11:20:30+00:00
> Yeah, one of the things which I always wished for when doing page composition was a way to visualize which paragraphs could be set a line or two longer or shorter while still being set reasonably nicely.

I wrote a LaTeX package [0] that does exactly this. The default settings automatically lengthen paragraphs as necessary, but you can configure it to only tell you which paragraphs can be easily lengthened [1] without actually lengthening any of them.

[0]: https://www.ctan.org/pkg/lua-widow-control

[1]: https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb43-3/tb135chernoff-lwc.pdf
by adrian_b | 2025-12-10 11:20:40+00:00
Yes. As someone who has grown up in a country occupied by communists and who knows how much worse is that than anything that can be imagined by someone without firsthand experience, I can say that the claim which was frequent in Western propaganda that communism is something opposed to capitalism is completely false.

There is a great difference between theoretical communism and practical communism. Theoretical communism was just a bunch of lies without any relationship to the practical communism that was implemented in any of the countries claiming to attempt to realize a communist society.

On the other hand, practical communism has been everywhere something not opposite to capitalism, but something equivalent with the final stage of unregulated capitalism, where the big monopolies have won in every market, leaving no alternatives.

During the last 25 years I have been dismayed to watch every year how the Western societies become more and more alike to the communist societies that they had criticized vigorously a half of century ago.
by fransje26 | 2025-12-10 11:20:53+00:00
> If you use qtcreator, it’s, and I hate this word, trivial. Most of the work comes from setting up the qt kit in qtcreator… which takes about 5 minutes.

And as QtCreator is first-class citizen for everything related to Qt, you'll have all the Qt types correctly resolved/unrolled/displayed/annotated by gdb, which makes your debugging experience a lot, lot more convenient.
by DiogenesKynikos | 2025-12-10 11:21:31+00:00
Even though firearms were well and truly established by the 17th Century, blade weapons remained important right on through to the mid-1800s.

Bayonet charges were a major aspect of Napoleonic warfare, and only really went away with the development of firearms that had higher rates of fire and were accurate out to larger ranges. In the Napoleonic era, soldiers would close to within 50-100 meters, fire off a few volleys, and then charge in with the bayonet.

By the time armies were equipped with breech-loading rifles that could fire half a dozen accurate shots a minute at a distance of a few hundred meters, the volume and accuracy of fire made the bayonet charge obsolete. But that was rather late (the 1860s or so).
by mvr123456 | 2025-12-10 11:21:34+00:00
> perfect distillation of a uniquely American problem [..] but how is this going to get power online faster than just installing solar and batteries?

I like the part where when considering a complex topic, "it became clear" to the guy after a few conversations. Confidence inspiring, no doubt innovative, we should probably not be asking impertinent questions! No idea if the tech is sound but I immediately get scam vibes just from how quickly it leaped into name-dropping Musk and Altman.
Show HN: Peaktech PSU Control from Emacs
by finaard | 2025-12-10 11:21:52+00:00
I have a Peaktech 6070 PSU - which has USB, a crappy Windows software, and no documentation. Over half a year ago I asked them about protocol documentation - and never got a reply.

Yesterday I wanted to download the latest Windows software to have a go at reversing it - and realized they put up protocol documentation shortly after my request.

That enabled me to relatively quickly control it from Emacs (also should work for a few other PSUs with the same protocol, and should work with minimal adjustments for some dual channel ones).

Thanks to the glorious eplot it then was trivial to add voltage and current graphing in a second step.
by IanCal | 2025-12-10 11:22:14+00:00
Most of this is very simply telling you what he's said. I'd recommend you read the link you pointed me to, because it contains exactly what I've told you is in there. Closed source transformer models and decision trees and yolo models have knowledge and are AI, chatgpt he argues does not. That's not an argument I'm trying to convince you of, I'm just telling you exactly what he's written.
by camel-cdr | 2025-12-10 11:24:12+00:00
> It's a shame though that Zcmp extension didn't get into RVA23 even as an optional extension

Zcmp is only for embedded applications without D support.

You wouldn't want an instruction with up to 13 destinations in high performance designs anyways.

If you want load/store pair, we already have that, you can just interpret two adjacent 16-bit load or stores as a single 32-bit instruction.
by trhway | 2025-12-10 11:28:25+00:00
Ultimately AI comes from space :) Just wait until Starship starts flying - with its projected $/kg launch costs the placement of solar + GPUs in space would be the cheapest option (10-20kg is 1 GPU, 5 m2 solar and 2 m2 radiator (at 70C radiating away 1.5 KW) - total launch cost would be around paltry $1-2K) .
by lm28469 | 2025-12-10 11:28:31+00:00
That's overly simplistic, people don't go out because they slack 24/7 in front of a screen, not because they're connecting with their friends through their smartphones. From my limited experience 70+ years old spend the whole day in front of youtube/facebook/alternative tv channels mostly watching infotainment that's at best brainrot and very often full blown conspiracy theories / propaganda. Boomers are even worse than teenagers when it comes to that, they're the most gullible and easily screen addicted demographic out there
by samuel | 2025-12-10 11:28:32+00:00
(IANAL) I don't think there is a simple response to that, but I guess that given that the employer:

- has established a detailed policy about personal use of corporate devices

- makes a fair attempt to block work unrelated services (hotmail, gmail, netflix)

- ensures the security of the monitored data and deletes it after a reasonable period (such as 6–12 months)

- and uses it only to apply cybersecurity-related measures like virus detection, UNLESS there is a legitimate reason to target a particular employee (legal inquiry, misconduct, etc.)

I would say that it's very much doable.

Edit: More info from the Dutch regulator https://english.ncsc.nl/publications/factsheets/2019/juni/01...