MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hodgesrm | 2026-01-18 00:26:40+00:00
> FOSS software that many rely on that has been around for a while were non-VC: VCS, Linux / GNU / BSD, web browsers, various programming languages, various databases...

It's honestly hard to pick a pattern out for older open source project contributions. PostgreSQL started at UC Berkeley but people contributed to it from all over. Key engineers like Tom Lane worked a number of companies in the database field, some dependent on VC funding, some not. He's currently at Snowflake. [0] A lot of recent innovation around PostgreSQL today (Neon, Supabase, etc.) is VC funded.

That pattern changed with projects like Hadoop, which was about the time that VC funds recognized a standard playbook around monetizing open source. [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Lane_(computer_scientist)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloudera
by irishcoffee | 2026-01-18 00:28:46+00:00
I would be completely down with kids only allowed to own flip phones without apps or internet. Phone calls and texts, bring back the infamous T9, kids under 16 are not allowed to be sold a non-flip phone.

Of course this doesn’t address tablets, netbooks etc.

So the actual answer is good parenting, which I posit is one of the bigger problems in the US today and has been for a long time.

Or we keep pretending that pushing education and passing laws about cell phones will somehow be a substitute for bad parenting. The US has been doing that for a long time as well, isn’t working.
by qcnguy | 2026-01-18 00:30:01+00:00
It getting hotter since 1996 doesn't imply there is any climate crisis. It's also compatible with regular overlapping cycles, or with natural cycles + a small amount of change from CO2 levels that doesn't rise to the level of being a problem.

The temperature records are genuinely fraudulent. Investigate them in detail and anyone will see that it's true. They overstate the amount of warming considerably and try to hide the actual cycles that they once showed before climatologists started rewriting the past. But that also isn't incompatible with there being some warming. Probably the world got warmer since 1975, but before then it was getting cooler. That's why there was so much discussion of global cooling between 1945-1975. It's a history incompatible with industrialization having big effects.
by dvt | 2026-01-18 00:30:01+00:00
The AI doom and gloom is so weird, and it's just turning into a bizarre echo chamber. AI is orders of magnitude more useful and transformative than Facebook was in 2005, and Meta is now one of the most valuable companies on the planet. Even if OpenAI has a down round or defaults on some loans, the technology has already proven to have dozens upon dozens of practical applications.
by bigyabai | 2026-01-18 00:31:04+00:00
Your life's work is only worth what someone will pay for it. You can't sell a $100 C compiler when the free one works just as well (or better).

If you want to make software that is valuable, you should compete for market share by doing it better than anyone else. Otherwise, your work kinda is worthless. Stallman noted this in the 1980s, acknowledging that the cost of manufacturing software is only limited by the cost of storing it on-disc and transmitting it over the internet. He was right.
by piskov | 2026-01-18 00:31:29+00:00
Why though?

You don’t see a for loop? Or don’t know where is the variable and where is the method? The list goes on. Never in my life I need a color to differentiate between a class name and a variable (they already differ in first-letter case). Or between language keyword and a variable (I’m not 5, I know those keywords by heart).

There is a reason we use nouns for variables, verbs for methods, stuff like isReady or hasAccess for booleans and what have you.

Color is overrated (or rather very nice for stuff that matters: like comments).

I like cursive though to highlight variables that are assigned more than once (bold cursive if it is a parameter, god forbid): instant attention to what is usually a code-smell.
by KronisLV | 2026-01-18 00:31:40+00:00
> I however, run an IDE and can run a simple refactoring tool to add a parameter to a function, I can “follow symbol” to see where something is defined, I can click and get all usages of a function shown at a glance, etc etc

I am so surprised that all of the AI tooling mostly revolves around VSC or its forks and that JetBrains seem to not really have done anything revolutionary in the space.

With how good their refactoring and code inspection tools are, you’d really think they’d pass of that context information to AI models and that they’d be leaps and bounds ahead.
by qcnguy | 2026-01-18 00:31:41+00:00
There's billions being made from promoting the idea of a climate crisis. If you go down the road of "anyone with financial interests can't be trusted", then the number of people you can listen to is very small.

Fortunately there are a few. Climate crisis skeptics are mostly pensioners who take down bogus science for free, as a retirement hobby. It's about as close to the platonic ideal of a neutral third party as you can get. Look into them, you'll see for yourself.
by Esophagus4 | 2026-01-18 00:31:53+00:00
That wasn't the conclusion of the article (I'm assuming you're reacting to the headline and haven't read the article).

The author's prediction is that OpenAI will get bought.

I know it sounds kind of crazy, but there actually is precedent for that: Reid Hoffman sold his AI startup after he realized there was no possible way for an AI startup to compete with the Googles of the world with $100B in cash and giant free cash flow machines given how capital intensive it is to build AI.[1]

To me, it's not that outlandish to think that if OpenAI really does need to spend a ton of money to survive, they will probably have to either raise or get bought (or find that magic money tree by monetizing their business). Because right now, they don't have the cash flow to compete with Google.

Could obviously change, but I think that's where the author is coming from.

[1]https://www.eesel.ai/blog/inflection-ai
by mapontosevenths | 2026-01-18 00:32:01+00:00
If there is scientific consensus that this is worth trying, and that the risk/reward ratio works out then I'm in favor of it.

Right now though, my own limited guess would be that the risk/reward doesn't justify it. The climate is a chaotic system which exemplifies the concept of sensitive dependence upon initial conditions. We could easily kill millions or even billions of people with a little "whoopsie". It might be better to wait until the alternative is worse than that potential cost.

I would, of course, defer to a consensus of experts on the subject if such a thing exists. I am not one.
by pmontra | 2026-01-18 00:33:23+00:00
I use mixed mode: editor and terminal on black background (and US keymap) everything else on white background (and my country keymap.)

There is no particular reason for that except habits. I started programming on black background terminals and the first anything else happened on Unix workstations or Windows PCs with white backgrounds.

I adjust the overall brightness of my screen according to the light level of the room and I use night mode. When I happen to use some other computer in dark mode it's usually too dark: white characters are often too thin and don't enjoy enough light to be readable. Maybe dark mode is for young eyes or for people that are very sensitive to glare.
by novok | 2026-01-18 00:33:49+00:00
IMO I think the better solution is to make a full feature smartphone an 18+ item, much like beer. If you are under 18 you only get a very limited 'call mom' phone with no video camera, chat limited to your family, maps to find your way home with and an otherwise very restricted set of apps. Police can take contraband phones from teens much like they can take contraband beer. They would have a distinct design so the types are identifiable.

No identity checking system needed for using the general internet as a result.

You can still have a family ipad, TV, xbox, switch, laptop, school chromebook, large clunky semi-pro digital camera for movie club, a separate dedicated audio recorder, etc but the key is to stop gossip networks with video recordings / snapchat and make the digital experience similar to what millenials grew up with, the last generation who didn't get a huge spike in anxiety and depression.

Yes many teens will still get around it, but the idea is to add a lot of friction so you stop the network effects that are causing this in the first place.
by jandrewrogers | 2026-01-18 00:34:19+00:00
This is connected to the equivalence relationship between optimal indexing and optimal AGI. The "best" way is optimal for the entire universe of possible queries but has the downside of being profoundly computationally intractable.

Requiring perfect knowledge of how information will be used is brittle. It has the major benefit of making the algorithm design problem tractable, which is why we do it.

An alternative approach is to exclude large subsets of queries from the universe of answerable queries without enumerating the queries that the system can answer. The goal is to qualitatively reduce the computational intractability of the universal case by pruning it without over-specifying the queries it can answer such as in the traditional indexing case. This is approximately what "learned indexing" attempts to do.
by linguae | 2026-01-18 00:34:27+00:00
I lean libertarian and I resent the nanny state, but I’m sympathetic to the idea of restricting social media access to children for two reasons:

1. Even in the 1990s, there were problems with child predators using chat rooms and Web forums to talk to minors for inappropriate, illegal purposes.

2. Social media “algorithms” (recommender systems) that are designed around increasing user engagement are a big problem.

I’m very cautious about poorly written legislation with too-broad definitions of social media that restrict useful forms of Internet access for children. However, I believe that algorithmic social media is harmful, especially to minors, and I am sympathetic to restrictions for minors provided that the laws are well-written.
by R_D_Olivaw | 2026-01-18 00:34:38+00:00
I wonder if regions that do this will see obvious signs of improvement that signal to the masses that "hmmm, maybe it IS worthwhile to compensate labor fairly and not just the gamblers at the top". And that novel, groundbreaking idea might spread to other regions.

Or, will top percent gamblers use their gambling earnings to create misinformation and dissuade other regions/areas to not even dare try this.
by wolpoli | 2026-01-18 00:35:03+00:00
In the face of productivity increase and lower barrier of entry, other professionals move to capture the increase in productivity for their own members and erect barriers to prevent others from taking their tasks. In IT, we celebrate how our productivity increase benefited the broader economy, how more people in other roles could now build stuff, with the strong belief that employment of developers and adjacent roles will continue to increase and how we could get those new roles.
by barrysaunders | 2026-01-18 00:35:52+00:00
Any truly popular art relies on finding an emotional hook that’s specific enough to identify with strongly but broad enough that most people can see themselves in it. Everyone’s felt their boss is an asshole and their underlings are idiots, so they identify with that emotion rather than the specifics of Dilbert being an engineer. Most of Dilbert’s complaints map pretty well to the conflict between any other kind of individual contributor role dealing with management.
by aleph_minus_one | 2026-01-18 00:36:05+00:00
> Are you in a completely different world than me? Because even the CEO of Boeing is not an engineer. Larry Ellison The CEO of the biggest bank in my country holds a masters degree in business economics, but nothing related to finance, econometrics or risk management. The CEO of US steel is an accountant.

Specifically the CEO is more like the figurehead of the company; this role is to present and "sell the value" of the company to investors and important customers and partners. So often it is not too worrysome if the CEO has a different background; sometimes this can even make sense.

What should worry one much more is if the leadership layers below come from a very different background than what the company's industry is.
by verdverm | 2026-01-18 00:36:28+00:00
For sure, I just turned down a gig because the company saw devops as an afterthought, not as something they would invest in. They wanted me to come in and "fix some issues quick" on a short-term contract. What they really need is 1-2 FTE ops people who think about their problems every day. If you are pushing past 3-4 devs to 10 and you have no intention of hiring a FTE ops person, you are not doing it right and shall reap what you have sown before long
by gerdesj | 2026-01-18 00:37:09+00:00
"Kip (meaning "grammatical mood" in Turkish)"

I'm not sure what a grammatical mood is, so I tried a couple of well known translation services and got: kip == "mode". However big G did also manage "modal", "paradigm", "tense" and "module".

For my money: "tense". Just to confuse the issue, tense has several meanings in english! Here I think we are talking about a verbal tense:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/articles/zh4thbk#zyh2s82

Tense can also be synonymous with emotion: dangerous/exciting and also as a measure: tension/tight.
by hodgesrm | 2026-01-18 00:37:10+00:00
ClickHouse effectively has a number of personas. Time series is one of them, and ClickHouse has steadily absorbed market share from pure play time series databases over the last few years. Other personas include real-time observability backend (the single biggest use case in my experience) as well as real-time data lake engine. Time series support, column storage, and real-time response are key underlying capabilities. It's quite versatile and fun to use.

Disclosure: I run Altinity, a vendor in this space.

(Update: Disclaimer -> Disclosure. Sigh.)
by tialaramex | 2026-01-18 00:38:15+00:00
> If you have heard of the Handmade community, you likely think...

I think that "the Handmade community" are people who mistook Casey for a messiah, in a sort of "Life of Brian" scenario.

The best part of "Handmade" is when somebody who'd otherwise doubt their ability makes a video game. The resulting games are usually at least interesting, and video games are art so, interesting is enough. If Steam had a dozen interesting crap games for every asset-flip cash-grab piece of junk it would have a very different reputation.

The worst part of "Handmade" is the mob of people who can't and won't make useful software but feel Casey (and much worse Jon Blow and Ginger Bill) has given them permission to criticise anybody who does because the software didn't meet their sky-high expectations.
by rpdillon | 2026-01-18 00:39:15+00:00
Anyone with experience reading research papers professionally will tell you that one of the responsibilities of a paper's abstract is to meaningfully convey the level of evidence and certainty that the paper is backed by. This paper did very well at that, by having the abstract indicate its more of an essay/opinion piece than an a more scientific piece. This is blindingly obvious, and was a simple observation that everyone for some reason dismissed not on merit, but because the person who said it hadn't read the whole paper, which for a 40 page document is an incredibly high bar that is likely not met by 90% of the people commenting here.

Anyway, I'm tired of this now.
by toomuchtodo | 2026-01-18 00:39:31+00:00
Total fertility rate is below replacement rate (~2.1) in most of the world, and continues to fall. There is no appetite to spend what is required to even try to materially impact these rates upward. Developed countries are already seeing labor shortages, which will continue as the world rapidly ages. There is no appetite for mass immigration from India and Africa to solve this, and India itself is already below replacement rate (1.9 tfr as of 2025). Cost of labor curve will rise into the future, so socioeconomic misinformation and propaganda is no match for structural demographics. We’ll run out of surplus labor before we run out of misinformation and propaganda.

The median age of a billionaire is around 67 years old, with data from recent years showing averages in the mid-to-high 60s. While 10% are under 50, over 40% are over 70. Everyone dies eventually.

https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/Slides_London.pdf

https://www.bis.org/events/conf160624/goodhart_presentation....

https://www.deccanchronicle.com/nation/dont-panic-over-falli...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45647855 (additional citations)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45029303 (additional citations)
by aleph_minus_one | 2026-01-18 00:41:08+00:00
>
I did not expect to see big-company apologia on Hacker News.

In the comments I see little apologia. The article rather brings up some points which are contrarian to the common view on HN, and the people on HN discuss whether these points have some truth in them, or the author missed some important considerations, or whether the author is wrong.
by robocat | 2026-01-18 00:43:39+00:00
It's a hard call to name root causes.

If they hadn't taken the money, what would the counterfactual article have said?

Everybody creates narritives and belief-systems, where causes and effects seem so clear.

Perhaps I'm far too skeptical about their self-analysis. I've met very few people where their own analysis about themselves has matched what I have read in them. So many people misread their own minds and emotional drives. So I have learnt to cynically look for excuses and rationalisations and justifications.

The article is brilliant because we too rarely hear about people's doubts and negatives.

Some people (whether successful or not) do know themselves, but it is uncommon in my experience.

I helped bootstrap a business and we were in an incubator. There I saw some of the side-effects on businesses and founders from taking investment. We were just lucky that we couldn't be bothered with doing the distracting pony-show to get an investor onboard: we would have taken investment if it weren't so costly to do so.

Money and ownership causes weird pressures.
by akst | 2026-01-18 00:43:42+00:00
I’ve said to a few other replies, but tbc I wasn’t promoting other mediums as alternatives.

> I don't think people tend to blindly trust Wikipedia any more than they do for other sources of information

I actually disagree or at least I think the extent to which people do is higher than it warrants. Especially to the degree people invoke it’s contents online

> I find this type of snap negative reaction boring, tiring, and unhelpful.

I didn’t ask for this to be the top comment, nor did I make you read it. I also don’t think it’s useless, just less useful than its proponents claim it is. And I think people do themselves a disservice in not looking beyond it when looking into a topic
by dvt | 2026-01-18 00:44:01+00:00
Your brain processes (visual) information at a resolution of >= 80ms[1]. The idea that you can tell the difference between 10ms or 50ms latency when typing is simply untrue (both events will appear instantaneous). I say this as someone that has played Counter-Strike professionally and have a sub-200ms reaction time. (Auditory perception is processed at a higher resolution, but the article is decidedly not about that.)

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9851611/
by VerifiedReports | 2026-01-18 00:44:38+00:00
No, it isn't. Making your entire screen dark for all content isn't a solution for a dumb GUI color scheme.

"Back in the day, light mode wasn’t called “light mode”. It was just the way that computers were, we didn’t really think about turning everything light or dark. Sure, some applications were often dark (photo editors, IDEs, terminals) but everything else was light, and that was fine."

Several incorrect statements there. "Back in the day," computers displayed white text on a dark background (usually a blue background) out of the box. This was deemed the most legible. The opposite was called "inverse." The Atari 8-bit and Commodore 64 computers (and possibly others) even had dedicated keys that toggled between regular and inverse text; it is called that in the manual.

Word even had a checkbox option in it entitled "Blue background, white text." It wasn't removed until 2007, concurrent with lots of other UI regressions in Windows. Microsoft also removed the color-scheme editor from Windows, with which people had been able to set up global color schemes (including "dark" ones) since 1991.

When people finally realized how dumb it is to read dark text off the surface of a glaring light bulb all day, companies had to run around slapping hard-coded "dark modes" onto everything... after abandoning better solutions (user-defined system-wide color schemes) that had existed since the early '90s on every platform except the vaunted Mac.

So how did we end up suffering through decades of inverse GUIs? I've always attributed it to

1. The "desktop publishing" fad of the late '80s / early '90s, which sought to make the screen analogous to a piece of paper.

2. The Mac, which imitated Xerox's GUI, which was inverse. Possibly related to #1.

3. Windows defaulting to an inverse scheme (although it provided a way to easily change the global scheme), as it imitated the Mac.
by verdverm | 2026-01-18 00:44:45+00:00
You're still thinking "good enough". I'm advocating for the "we can do so much better" attitude

The current popular config choices cause a lot of extra work, bugs, and effort. Is improving the status quo not a worthy goal anymore? Are we at a point in history throwing our hands up and saying meh, I deal with this... is basically where people are today? (I'm somewhat a believer of this based on anecdata and vibes)
Show HN: My way – 18-agent autonomous workflow for ClaudeCode – issues to deploy
by anotherCodder | 2026-01-18 00:45:08+00:00
Built a plugin that runs my entire dev cycle autonomously after I approve the plan.

/next-task pulls from GitHub issues, scans the codebase, ranks tasks, I pick one and approve the plan – then 18 agents handle exploration, implementation, code review, CI, and deployment without intervention.

Other commands: /ship (PR to deploy), /reality-check (detects plan drift), /project-review (multi-agent code review), /deslop-around (cleans AI slop).

Running parallel sessions this way. Open source, works with Claude Code, Codex CLI, and OpenCode.

npm install awesome-slash

https://github.com/avifenesh/awesome-slash
by rpdillon | 2026-01-18 00:45:19+00:00
Every new generation of moral panic assumes that all the children are using their time fantastically if it were not for the latest issue. Except we've gone through this like five times before so if you did the math on that then probably no kids are using their time fantastically, so social media is probably taking away from time-watching TV. Or maybe playing video games. Or, if you're a satan worshipper, Dungeons & Dragons.
by terminalshort | 2026-01-18 00:45:25+00:00
Biden was a great campaigner and speech maker. Similar to Trump in that he wasn't afraid to piss people off. Don't let the dementia addled version that you saw in his 80s fool you into thinking he wasn't a man of extreme outlier political talent to get where he was. So was W Bush. You think going up on stage and acting like the smartest guy in the room (as many who worked with Bush say he actually was) is going to win you any votes? But acting like Bush will. That's not something just anyone can do. And you think calling 3 men out of 300 million "master persuaders" cheapens it? Any player in the NBA is a master basketball player and there are hundreds of them at any given time.