MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Is Azure DevOps Effectively EOL?
by sam256 | 2026-01-28 12:58:44+00:00
I don't hate Azure DevOps. On the contrary, it's been a phenomenal tool for our organization over the past 5+ years. It's been fairly easy to secure, we have tons of great pipelines that check our code, do deploys, integrate with third-party services, etc. We get great visibility into our organization.

But... I can't help but feel like it's not keeping up with GitHub and am now facing the question: do we basically have no choice but to do a painful migration over to GitHub Enterprise if we want to stay relevant?

In particular, pain we've felt:

1. Where's the Copilot PR review? In GitHub I just click a button and I get an instant first level review of any PR by Copilot. Sure, it's not perfect, but it's more or less free.

2. MCP? Ok there finally is an MCP server for DevOps and it's actually pretty good. But it took forEVER to come out. Is this a pattern that's going to repeat? We have to wait a year for tools GitHub users get right away?

3. Claude Code. On GitHub I can give Claude Code assignments from anywhere -- browser, desktop, phone -- and it runs off in a little dev container and comes back to me with with a PR. Again, not always perfect, but neither are PRs from junior devs. And Claude Code doesn't care if I give it the assignment on a Friday night.

So the titular question: Is ADO effectively EOL?

I'm hoping the answer is no, and we can just hold on till things get better. I'm starting to worry, though, that this is just the sunk cost fallacy. Anyway have hope to offer?
by koe123 | 2026-01-28 12:59:48+00:00
This question is always strikes me as a false dichotomy, i.e. "we have to tax them, or else they leave". The issue is in my view is that constructing a system where the existence of such a rich class has become necessary to raise enough tax revenue. Organizing your country with more sustainable growth where income disparities aren't so high means you don't have this problem to this extent.
by alamortsubite | 2026-01-28 12:59:52+00:00
I'd like to get a little pedantic here and suggest it's not reading the news that's so problematic, it's 1) watching it, and 2) scrolling it. Not that print can't be effective propaganda, but it's less optimized to the task than 1 and 2. The passive pawns can't get enough of either.
by halfcat | 2026-01-28 13:00:00+00:00
> Then as a programmer, you have to find workarounds in Django instead of workarounds with programming.

The mental unlock here is: Django is only a convention, not strictly enforced. It’s just Python. You can change how it works.

See the Instagram playbook. They didn’t reach a point where Django stopped scaling and move away from Django. They started modifying Django because it’s pluggable.

As an example, if you’re dealing with complex background tasks, at some point you need something more architecturally robust, like a message bus feeding a pool of workers. One simple example could be, Django gets a request, you stick a message on Azure Service Bus (or AWS SQS, GCP PubSub, etc), and return HTTP 202 Accepted to the client with a URL they can poll for the result. Then you have a pool of workers in Azure Container Apps (or AWS/GCP thing that runs containers) that can scale to zero, and gets woken up when there’s a message on the service bus. Usually I’d implement the worker as a Django management command, so it can write back results to Django models.

Or if your background tasks have complex workflow dependencies then you need an orchestrator that can run DAGs (directed acyclic graph) like Airflow or Dagster or similar.

These are patterns you’d need to reach for regardless of tech stack, but Django makes it sane to do the plumbing.

The lesson from Instagram is that you don’t have to hit a wall and do a rewrite. You can just keep modifying Django until it’s almost unrecognizable as a Django project. Django just starts you with a good convention that (mostly) prevents you from doing things that you’ll regret later (except for untangling cross-app foreign keys, this part requires curse words and throwing things).
by m000 | 2026-01-28 13:00:01+00:00
Kubernetes and Helm cover a lot of these cases: Pods of the new version are started one by one, while the pods of the new version are shutdown. For a short period, you have pods of both versions running.

When you add new stuff or make benign modifications to the schema (e.g. add an index somewhere), you won't notice a thing.

If the introduced schema changes are not compatible with the old code, you may get a few ProgramingErrors raised from the old pods, before they are replaced. Which is usually acceptable.

There are still some changes that may require planning for downtime, or some other sort of special handling. E.g. upgrading a SmallIntegerField to an IntegerField in a frequently written table with millions of rows.
by samirillian | 2026-01-28 13:00:19+00:00
At least by analogy with sound, it doesn’t make sense to me to use the golden ratio. If you consider the tonic, the octave, the major fifth, you have 1:1, 2:1, and 3:2. It seems to me that the earliest ratios in the fibonacci sequence are more aesthetically pleasing, symmetry, 1/3s, etc. but maybe there is something “organically” pleasing about the Fibonacci sequence. But Fibonacci spirals in nature are really just general logarithmic spirals as I understand it. Would be interested to hear counterpoints.
by simoncion | 2026-01-28 13:01:42+00:00
> They're trying to "nudge" everyone.

Once again, Gentoo Linux proves (somewhat regrettably) to be one of the best Linux distros out there. OpenRC and Xorg as defaults, with SystemD and Wayland as supported options is quite a lovely way to do things.

> Gnome just removed the middle-click paste option.

Gnome removes useful things all the time. "The Gnome folks do something user-hostile just because they feel like it" isn't news; that's been going on for decades. This habit of theirs is a big reason why I've been using KDE for a very long time.
by mkeeter | 2026-01-28 13:01:47+00:00
oh hi ChatGPT

The giveaway is that LLMs love bulleted lists with a bolded attention-grabbing phrase to start each line. Copy-pasting directly to HN has stripped the bold formatting and bullets from the list, so the attention-grabbing phrase is fused into the next sentence, e.g. “Potential for abuse Attestation enables blacklisting”
by 7777777phil | 2026-01-28 13:02:02+00:00
Thanks for sharing doener, and thanks everyone on HN for participating. We put a lot of work into this over the past week. Here some of the key findings:

- 69% now use Claude Code as their primary AI coding tool

- 90% report productivity gains from AI assistance

- 55% spend more than 75% of their coding time with AI tools

- 86% say their usage is increasing over the past 6 months

- Adoption is uniform across experience levels — veterans with 20+ years embrace AI at the same rate as newcomers

We plan to run this on a regular basis and track evolvement over time. Obviously all data is self reported and to be taken with a grain of salt but if you want to participate in a future survey feel free to leave you contact on the website.
by farseer | 2026-01-28 13:02:38+00:00
Their competitor is Google, which has already baked AI into search and allows you to talk to Gemini separately as well. Google already makes a hundred billion a year from text search and won't stop a free Gemini which adds value to their search. What makes you say that?

Also Deepseek and Alibaba would love to capture OpenAI users.
by shrubby | 2026-01-28 13:02:51+00:00
Local wealth tax works to some extent, but some will dodge as long as this is not universal.

But universal is what we need as humanity.

The will seems to be building up, even in the UK (Polanski) and US (Mamdani, AOC, Sanders).

I'm betting that the success will be replicated in other countries soon and after that its only a matter of time for this to go global.

But this will be interesting show.
by samiv | 2026-01-28 13:03:36+00:00
In a healthy economy flow of money is like the flow of blood in the arteries. It is what stimulates the economic activity. You can't earn a dollar without someone spending that dollar. Spending = earning = economic activity.

People are always defending rich people (capital owners) that they invest their wealth. But actually if someone has a billion in the bank the fact that they have that billion is a proof that they didn't invest it. (If they did spend it or invest it the would not have it, now would they?)

A billion that circulates in the economy is much better than a billion that sits in someones bank account. Someone who spends 100% of their income is much better economic citizen than someone who doesn't.
by jstimpfle | 2026-01-28 13:03:39+00:00
> That's where the standard should come in and say something like "starting with C++26 char is always 1 byte and signed. std::string is always UTF-8" Done, fixed unicode in C++.

> I never said always

Yes you totally did. And regarding "add some new methods for which it has to be UTF-8", there is no need at all to add UTF-8 methods to std::string. It would be a bad idea. UTF-8 is not bound to a particular type (or C++ type). It works on _any_ byte sequence.
by chipgap98 | 2026-01-28 13:03:45+00:00
Who said "we have to tax them, or else they leave"? That doesn't seem to be what anyone is saying. The issue is that this group is threatening to leave if they are taxed.

I agree you should want to avoid having an income disparity like this, but we are where we are. The goal of this tax is to help correct that disparity.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-01-28 13:03:52+00:00
> every bit of data collected through a google-analytic, doubleclick, etc. link can potentially be abused for this as well

I’m confused by this shoehorning.

This article is about actual, not potential, abuse. It involves healthcare data the government owns being used in a novel and disturbing way. The only nexus to the private sector is in Palantir, but they aren’t bringing the data, just some analytic tools.
by tomcur | 2026-01-28 13:04:04+00:00
Optimization can work well for interactive CAD usage, because geometric sketches tend to be close to the intended solution, and it's fast. It also has the nice property of stability (i.e., with optimization, small changes in parameters tend not to cause large perturbations in the solution). Doing more gets into what you mentioned, and is called chirality or root identification in the literature. That's much more intense computationally, but could be useful especially if cheaper approaches like optimization failed.
by laffOr | 2026-01-28 13:04:16+00:00
Definitely maybe - but then we are discussing (2), i.e. "what is the right technical solution to solve (1)".

Your previous comment was arguing that (1) is great (which no one denies in this thread, and it is a different discussion about what products are desirable rather than how to build said product) in an answer to someone arguing (2).
by dolni | 2026-01-28 13:04:29+00:00
When a significant share of the taxes you pay are mishandled or lost to fraud, yes it is a punishment.

That's been happening for a long time in the US. Staggering military industrial complex. Tens of billions lost in COVID relief. Billions lost in Minnesota due to unchecked privatized social welfare fraud (which has been known about for a decade).

Some mistakes will happen. What we have is unacceptable. If the government can't handle the money responsibly, it has no business collecting the money.
by forty | 2026-01-28 13:04:32+00:00
I put any sufficiently complex command to scripts/<command>.sh and keep the package json as light as possible.

One very big upside I have to use package.json is that we use pnpm which has very sophisticated way of targeting packages with --filter (like "run tests from packages that had modification compared to master and all their transitively dependents packages" which is often exactly what you want to do)
by nsoonhui | 2026-01-28 13:05:23+00:00
Let's do a thought experiment and take it to the extreme: why not tax at the maximum?

We have already tried that in human history, it's called communism. No one is allowed to take private profit, everyone contributes to the best of their own ability, and everyone consumes according to their needs. It should be utopia because there is no wealth gap and wealth is maximally redistributed. Which is exactly what taxation is designed to do, only to the most extreme.

And I think everyone will agree with me that communism is a miserable failure. The rich may not leave physically but mentally they are checkout -- not willing to work as hard or take as much risk. So the answer is yes, if you tax them, most certainly they will leave physically for haven with lower tax, all things being equalled. Or leave mentally.

But not all things are equalled, so you can still tax them at a somewhat higher rate provided that you can provide other incentives. But still, too much tax will make it more likely for those who are able to to leave. This is almost an axiom.
by theshrike79 | 2026-01-28 13:05:25+00:00
It is.

Getting poor software made by Indians is a cycle that takes months.

With AI you get the first poor version within hours. Then you can iterate. In a week of hourly iteration you'll most likely have something usable.

The Indians are still having meetings about when to have meetings and you can see from the logs they haven't accessed any of the documentation you gave them for the issue. Billing is on point though.
by tomaytotomato | 2026-01-28 13:05:36+00:00
How are Palantir so effective (as this article is alluding)?

From a cynical British perspective, when I think of government departments and civil servants. I think inefficiency, data siloing, politics and lack of communication between departments and also internally not communicating between teams. Not withstanding a lack of cooperating and willingness to change.

Did Palantir have a political mandate, or can they just cut through the bureaucracy or bypass it with technology?
by virgilp | 2026-01-28 13:06:05+00:00
This is an interesting thing that I'm contemplating. I also do believe that (perhaps with very few exceptions) there are no "10x engineers" by themselves, but engineers that thrive 10x more in a context or another (like, I'm sure Jeff Dean is an absolutely awesome engineer - but if you took him out of Google and plugged him into IBM - would he have had the same impact?)

With that in mind - I think one very unexplored area is "how to make the mixed AI-human teams successful". Like, I'm fairly convinced AI changes things, but to get to the industrialization of our craft (which is what management seems to want - and, TBH, something that makes sense from an economic pov), I feel that some big changes need to happen, and nobody is talking about that too much. What are the changes that need to happen? How do we change things, if we are to attempt such industrialization?
by samiv | 2026-01-28 13:06:29+00:00
Communism has never been tried at a large scale. Soviet Union didn't have it. China doesn't have it.

Just because someone has "communism" on paper doesn't mean the society actually functions according to the communist idea.

Social democracy has been tried in many places and it has produced things such as the Nordic Model and the Nordic states that have been very successful.

After the 2nd World War USA was very close to socialism. High wealth taxes, workers unions etc. As a result your average worker had a lot of purchasing power which of course fuels economic strength.

In fact many if the world's best performing companies are a kind of exercise in socialism since the RSU programs share ownership and results of the company to the workers (even if it's a small share)
Show HN: SimpleNet – A modern BBS moderated by local LLMs
by cruicky | 2026-01-28 13:06:50+00:00
Hi HN,

I’ve always missed the high-signal, community-centric feel of old-school Bulletin Board Systems, but the moderation overhead for small communities is usually what kills them. I built SimpleNet to see if we could bring back the BBS vibe using modern tech.

The Tech Stack: The core of the platform is a modern BBS architecture, but the "secret sauce" is the moderation layer. Instead of relying on big-tech APIs or an army of volunteers, I’m using open source LLMs to assist with content moderation and community health. This allows for:

Privacy: No user data is sent to OpenAI or Google for sentiment analysis.

Speed: Instant feedback for users on community guideline adherence.

Sovereignty: The community rules are baked into the local model weights, not a corporate TOS.

Why .directory? I want this to be a jumping-off point for niche communities that want a "back-to-basics" text-heavy interaction model without the doom-scrolling algorithms of modern social media.

I’m a software engineer by trade, but this is my first foray into a public-facing community platform of this scale. I’d love your feedback on the latency of the moderation and the general "feel" of the UI.

Check it out: https://www.simplenet.directory
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-01-28 13:06:52+00:00
> Any use or benefit obtained via the state apparatus should be viewed from the lens it will be wielded

This is nonsense. Given the same tendency is shared by large private organisations, this is throwing one’s hands up with extra steps.

Regulations and laws work. The fact that a section of the INA seems to compel pretty ridiculous amounts of inter-departmental data sharing is the issue.
by MSFT_Edging | 2026-01-28 13:06:59+00:00
The greater issue is we allow the richest to basically print money via their stock based compensation, which allows them to turn unrealized gains into loans backed by these stocks. They can spend that all they want to influence politics and wield illegitimate power. If they can spend this wealth, they can be taxed on it.

Make stock buybacks illegal again too. Overturn Citizen's United unless the head of the company can face charges for the actions of their company.

The concentration of wealth into the highest strata is a recipe for societal collapse seen multiple times in history.
by gpderetta | 2026-01-28 13:07:07+00:00
That means that the black_box is working correctly. If it was possible to optimize it away, then it wouldn't work.

At the end of the day the black box is literally doing:

asm("" : : "r"(&mut dummy) : "memory" : "volatile");

so 'mov rcx, rsp' is simply storing the address of dummy (at this point stored at top of stack) into rcx (which has been chosen to match the 'r' constraint) to pass it to the inline asm. The address doesn't change and rcx is not clobbered, so it is loop invariant can be hoisted out of the loop.

But the mov cannot be removed totally, because the compiler doesn't look inside the asm, and as far as the compiler is knows, the rcx might be used by the asm body. As far as the compiler is concerned, the address of dummy has escaped, so stores into it cannot be optimized either, hence 'mov dword ptr [rsp], 3 ' appears in the final generated code.

If the compiler knew that the address was not used, then it would also be able to remove the store to dummy, as it would be able to prove that it is never read from.
by jmkd | 2026-01-28 13:07:43+00:00
Nice, except, first game I clicked is now only pay-to-play on major platforms. I'm not against that, but it doesn't feel like a Show HN game anymore which I kind of expect to be a little rough and ready and certainly free to play. Perhaps this could be noted in the listing? I mean it's a success for the developer, not a downside. Game was Holedown.
by Dev_Master | 2026-01-28 13:07:46+00:00
Desktop puzzle generator built with Python + Tkinter + ttkbootstrap.

Generates several logic puzzle types (Futoshiki, Hidato, Arukone, Tents & Trees, No-Four-In-Row), displays them in a live grid, and exports layered SVGs for print/design workflows. Also includes barcode generation (EAN13 / Code128) and JSON save/load.

This started as a personal tool for creating printable logic worksheets and evolved into a general-purpose puzzle studio.

Features:

Multiple puzzle generators

Dark-themed GUI

Layered SVG export (background / grid / numbers)

Barcode generation

Theme + color customization

Save/load puzzles as JSON

Feedback and contributions welcome.
by obruchez | 2026-01-28 13:08:20+00:00
> Are there really people who "spend weeks planning the perfect architecture" to build some automation tools for themselves? I don't buy that.

I understand that it's not the main point in your comment (you're trying to determine if the parent comment was written using an LLM), but yes, we do exist: I've spent years planning personal projects that remain unimplemented. Don't underestimate the power of procrastination and perfectionism. Oliver Burkeman ("Four Thousand Weeks", etc.) could probably explain that dynamic better than me.
by fancyfredbot | 2026-01-28 13:08:28+00:00
If we want to invest in independence then that's fine - let's not confuse it with nurturing a successful business.

I felt OP was suggesting that a European manufacturer would have flourished if properly supported by a visionary government, and I think that argument is mistaken.

You are arguing that globalised supply chains are risky, which is something I can agree with. If europe protects its DRAM manufacturer it is going to be less reliant on China but we should not confuse that with the European company flourishing. It seems likely such protection would be an expensive venture which absent any global conflict would produce more expensive products and make a loss while doing so.
by ifwinterco | 2026-01-28 13:08:30+00:00
Short term: no

Long term: yes, especially if you combine really high taxes in the 40+% range with consistently rubbish public services

But the real question is not whether people will leave, the question is how many talented hard working people chose not to move to your country in the first place because your taxes were too high. It won't show up in any data, you'll just experience worse economic growth and have to tax everyone else more