MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by utopiah | 2026-01-17 15:03:58+00:00
That's always been the case, in software and elsewhere.

Yet, Ford didn't copy Tesla, why not?

Checkout https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma but overall the idea is that large corporations have totally different goals and incentive than startups. Also check https://steveblank.com and his startup owner manual trying to clarify that a startup is NOT a small company, rather it's searching for a product/market fit.

So is it worth pursuing a (software) startup?

Honestly if you want to make money, no. It's much easier to work for a large corporation (big economical benefits) or a public institution (work safety). You might not get ridiculously rich either way but you will be safer than most.

If you want to make a ridiculous amount of money though, well you might have to make sacrifices you are underestimating. I don't want to promote the grind culture but checkout Silicon Valley, the TV show, in particular when they discuss VC and promises done. Basically if you ask for a very high valuation you have to deliver on those claims and obviously they investors are going to keep you accountable on that. You might have to work more than you wanted (which might make the whole process a nightmare more than a joy) but more dangerously you might lose the very raison d'etre of the company you founded. If it's "just" about making money, you won't care, if you have a genuine mission, those compromises are going to eat you alive.

So... is it "worth it" very much depend on who you are, who you want to be and how saturated the market is.

I wouldn't worry about the big corporations, I would worry about what you can actually deliver and how not being able to do so will change you along the way.
by eimrine | 2026-01-17 15:04:09+00:00
Your statement can be reversed amasingly. It is easier to proof that it is your side of frontline who does not care about searchability than what you have said. And therefore it is easire to suspect you in promoting an old Klaus Schwabbe's fairytale about DEI missvalues. There are no reasons of calling one person as "they" because we use to call a person who will always have hairs on his face as "male".
by derbOac | 2026-01-17 15:04:36+00:00
Except articles like this are doing it again, just swinging the pendulum in the opposite direction.

The best reading of the cardiovascular literature based on meta-analyses is not that saturated fat is better for you, but that it's probably not worse. Even there the literature is complicated by the fact many of the studies are done in people with preexisting cardiovascular disease, whose functioning might not be improved by dietary changes. There's kind of a paradox sometimes found, in that replacing saturated fat in RCTs with unsaturated fat improves metabolic profiles and decreases minor CVD outcomes, but doesn't affect major ones — but that sometimes depends on what someone's cardiovascular functioning is already like.

Their take on the diet literature in this article is pure nonsense. The best literature suggests overall no difference between types of diets, only overall actual caloric decrease, with a smaller effect of exercise.

There's also emerging evidence that all of this is individual-specific, so some people might respond best to a low-carb-high-saturated-fat diet, and others to a low-fat-high carb one. E.g.: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/05/19/1176905...

I've been to research symposia where they've replicated findings where they go back and reanalyze RCT data and show that longitudinally, people vary wildly in responses to different diets. So even though there's no difference in the RCTs between types of diet overall, specific people respond best to one or the other.
by koito17 | 2026-01-17 15:04:45+00:00
Right, the risk is encoding a vacuously true statement. I consider "false implies Q" and tautologies to be vacuously true statements, since both are truths that fail to convey any meaningful information.

In any case, the worst case scenario is having a vacuously true statement. I picked tautologies as an example since that and statements about the empty set are the first things that come into my mind.
by CodingJeebus | 2026-01-17 15:04:50+00:00
I sometimes wonder if the VC ecosystem creates its own confirmation bias by making it easy to see and aggregate companies it incubates. Whenever I look for jobs, I'm always surprised to find companies that have taken no VC funding and don't try particularly hard to market to the industry as a whole, preferring instead to stay relatively under the radar.

They tend to have more grounded financials (read: paths to profitability) and while the pay packages aren't quite aligned with the top end of the market, they also tend to manage headcount more responsibly than FAANG. I work with a fairly niche stack and I'm constantly finding new companies that I've never heard of and don't raise VC rounds.

Long way of saying that just because they're not easy to find doesn't mean they don't exist.
by intended | 2026-01-17 15:05:10+00:00
The big issue I’ve faced and seen others face is the use of LLMs induced skill atrophy.

For studying, LLMs feel Like using a robot to lift weights for you at gym.

——

If people used to get cardio as a side effect of having to walk everywhere, and we were forced to think as a side effect of having to actually do the homework, then are LLMs ushering in an era of cognitive ill health ?

For what it’s worth, I spend quite a bit of effort to understand how people are using LLMs, especially non-tech people.
by materialpoint | 2026-01-17 15:06:05+00:00
It's still the foundational underpinning of everything Microsoft does. It's just that the other revenues dwarf it.
What still shocks me is that the current developers and management on the Windows teams are so extremely bad at everything they do. It's not like they could not serve ads and shove CoPilot in your face, without making the UI so so sloppy and slow. It's not like they couldn't make Explorer use less memory and start faster, even with preloading, which was introduced in Vista, opening Explorer remains painfully slow.
by jchw | 2026-01-17 15:06:07+00:00
I don't really identify with any particular movement, but it's important to note that there are plenty of people who legitimately oppose the core concept of rationalism, the idea that reason should be held above other approaches to knowledge, this being put aside from other criticisms leveled at the group of people that call themselves rationalists. Apparently, rationalism isn't obviously correct. Unfortunately, I don't really have enough of a background in philosophy to really understand how this follows, but looking at how the world actually works, I don't struggle to believe that most people (certainly many decision makers) don't actually regard rationality as highly as other things, like tradition.
by breppp | 2026-01-17 15:06:52+00:00
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.1080/25785648.2023.2...

For example, this article goes over disinformation by polish nationalists on Holocaust related articles. There's a chart with 10 editors accounting for 50% of the edits and another chart that shows disproportionately citing authors that in reality are not academically are under-cited
by floatrock | 2026-01-17 15:07:27+00:00
It's not about cutting boards or temperature constraints. Yes, that applies at any scale. It's the stuff that legally mandates a minimum-size operation. Article talks about it:

> Relatedly, our health code regulations also effectively outlaw people from opening restaurants in small spaces. Most jurisdictions require at least 3-4 different sinks—one for washing dishes (usually a large three-part sink), separate ones for washing hands, one for mopping, and often another for prepping food. This makes small commercial kitchens in under 200 square feet much harder.

> America’s food regulations are also not set up for a single person to manage. The U.S. has 3,000 different agencies handling food regulations. The whole system, scattered across eight places in the municipal code, is basically uncoordinated and varies depending on where you are.

Meatpacking has the same issue. FDA regulations are designed for industrial-scale chicken, beef, and pig processing. And if you're processing hundreds or thousands of heads a day, it's absolutely needed. But what if you have just a few heads? What if you have a small flock you want to sell to your neighbors? A 1000-head-per-delivery processing plant won't even answer your call, and you even if they did you have zero negotiating power, so your only options are to go big or not be able to legally sell it.

A lot of people have amish or menonite communities that are able to process your livestock legally, but even those are disappearing. So small farmers have no way to legally get their product to market, and so they're being gobbled up by the large industrial farms.

The regulations use safety pearl-clutching to force a specific outcome that benefits a specific group, and it's not the small family farmer the commercials idolize.

Nixon's secretary of ag said it explicitly: get big or get out.
by ramraj07 | 2026-01-17 15:08:16+00:00
The bottom 50% has indeed gotten better (kinda sure but not everywhere) but technological progress is not guaranteeing they'll save everyone _anymore_. Fewer nations care about climate change and taking care of the poorer parts of the world (hope you dont expect me to show why too).

The billion is my number. Almost all scientists and officials underestimate deliberately and naively death tolls. I have a metric that whatever number the new york times publishes for an earthquake on day one, you should multiply it by 100 for the eventual total count. No one estimated a million plus deaths from covid in the US. The moment I read the first comprehensive report from China I assumed 1% of the population will die. Unfortunately in places like India that actually was true. So yeah I do think at the minimum a billion people will die due to climate change in the next 50 years, and billions more will suffer in unthinkable ways. Thats _my_ estimate.
by tejohnso | 2026-01-17 15:08:44+00:00
> My genuine trouble with this kind of post is that I don’t know if it is true.

Same thought I had. I mean, it sounds pretty bad but it's also making no attempt at all to report an unbiased view. I'd like to hear from officials. What are their goals, and why are they doing it this way? I don't think the majority of Trump voters wanted this kind of harm and chaos.
by senko | 2026-01-17 15:09:23+00:00
Ahh, a topic dear to my heart.

> Thinkpads are repairable [...], durable [...].

What's not to like?

> Thinkpads are “Cheap” because nobody who worships the things buys one new.

Confession time: over the years, I've bought 4: x200s, x270, t490s t14 (gen5). All were new when purchased. All were purchased for work + personal use. All run Linux. All are still in my household and still work - the x200s is old enough to drink in some countries.

For context, I also bought me one Macbook Pro (at a weird time where PC laptops were more expensive than an equivalent Mac), so it's not like I haven't seen the grass on the other side.

> [IBM and Lenovo] are typical companies, who just happen to have some good designers and engineers.

That sounds like a good thing.

> Yes, Thinkpads are good laptops.

I agree.

> -A saccharine twenty something.

My oldest, still working, ThinkPad is almost older than the author of this blog post?!? Get off my lawn!

I'm not sure what the author aims at: maybe "TPs are good if you buy them old, and nobody buys them new". Besides myself, I know a bunch of people who have bought new ones (and no, we're not in some crazy TP fan club).

I only have experience with X and T lines, though. Maybe others are crap, dunno.
by sebastiennight | 2026-01-17 15:09:24+00:00
Repeating yourself in ever-increasing proportions of uppercase words is not achieving the intent you're hoping for.

Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and in particular:

> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

> Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put asterisks around it and it will get italicized.
by eastbound | 2026-01-17 15:09:25+00:00
I’ve recently realized that behind each copycat, there is an entrepreneur. It’s not a big factory with written “Leading #1 in piracy” at the front. It’s someone with almost as many skills as the original entrepreneurs, trying to copy a few of them to see where there is traction, with hopes and dreams similar to the original, but too far away from the world’s center of activity to propose something relevant. Some of them probably do it with the “I can do it better than them” mindset.
by medunes | 2026-01-17 15:09:57+00:00
Hi and thanks so much for the feedback here

If I got it right, the summary is as such:

1- License: I'll add soon, forgot about it (literally)

2- Where is the solution: I hope you all read the contributing guide, I clearly mentioned solutions are not the MAIN point for this repository, it is rather giving problems which are intended to *guide* me/you through hands-on practical constraints on how to face those "go" weird scenarios. I also clearly stated I'm not that much top notch Go dev to provide you with solutions for now

3- No, this is neither chatgpt, nor claude code generated repo.

4- I'm till waiting until someone with enough experience that worked on these problems in real life can either suggest solutions or provide support

5- The project is a hands-on documentation, maybe on-going process. IMHO is better (for me at least) than a youtube video that I forgot about the next day. Struggling into the problem and implementing an okkeyish solution would force me ask and search for the foundational knowledge behind it, read books *with this goal in mind*, what videos *with that intention*, and so on. I'm very hands-on learning person.

6- Would be very nice to have these questions here in form of Github issues as well, then maybe seasoned devs can support both me and you better

7- I haven't expected it to escalate to ~ 1.7k stars in two weeks, with not much effort, and this is IMHO a proof many devs struggle with that exact gap I'm trying to tackle
by phtrivier | 2026-01-17 15:10:16+00:00
Managers are here to accommodate the need for cooperation, while compensating for lack of telepathy.

Put two people with a lot of expertise in different domain. Require them to come up with a solution to a problem you have.

That's three people. You'll get at the very least four opinions about each and every step.

Scale the complexity of the problems and the number of people.

You end up with full time jobs consisting purely in routing information from brain A to brain Z.

Unfortunately, the skills to do this job are never properly taught, but learnt in the job. (MBA don't teach management - they either teach the mechanism of some administration, or ways to get rich consulting.)

Problems occur because we conflate management, supervision, decision making, strategy setting, etc...

P.H.B. is an antipattern, a caricature, a stereotype like all other : it's funny cause there is truth to it. But we are by no mean condemned to fulfill our stereotypes (should I remind all engineers here about the stigmas attached to nerd in the real world ?)
by fhdkweig | 2026-01-17 15:10:17+00:00
This same guy, Nick Shirley, traveled to Ukraine and made a video about how there really wasn't a war and the Ukranians were just spending our money on luxury cars. A reporter, Caolan Robertson, who has spent years covering the war got an interview with him and called him out on his bullshit. If he lied about Ukraine, I am very disinclined to trust him about Somalians.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VaZYMeYWMic
by febin | 2026-01-17 15:10:37+00:00
I've vibecoded a Rust port of Pocket TTS using candle.

https://github.com/jamesfebin/pocket-tts-candle

The port supports:

- Native compilation with zero Python runtime dependency

- Streaming inference

- Metal acceleration for macOS

- Voice cloning (with the mimi feature)

Note: This was vibecoded (AI-assisted), but features were manually tested.
by diego_moita | 2026-01-17 15:10:48+00:00
Adams and his comics were childish, formulaic and repetitive.

Yeah, bosses are stupid and incompetent, I get it. But, guess what? Most people are stupid, one way or the other. Adams wasn't better than PHB, viz. the ridiculous polemics he got himself into.

And Dilbert was a crying baby incapable of taking action against his own misery.

Now, if you think it is so horrible to live under an incompetent boss, try being a peasant in a 3rd world country, living under a dictatorship, being a Palestinian in Israel, being an immigrant chased by ICE or being a minority in a democracy still beset by enormous inequalities; I'd suggest being a black and poor woman in Latin America. If you can't, read any book by Carolina Maria de Jesus[1]. It does give you a whole new perspective in "life sucks".

This dumb comics was "first world problems" all the way down.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolina_Maria_de_Jesus
by ajb | 2026-01-17 15:11:35+00:00
Don't know it, but this website attributes it to the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: https://theomarkhayyamclubofamerica.wordpress.com/extended-r...

(Edited on reading more closely) Or possibly some fan work, since this "Extended Rubaiyat" isn't entirely from Omar Khayyam. So this doesn't pin down the provenance of the phrase.
by helsinkiandrew | 2026-01-17 15:13:11+00:00
> Considering there is very little moat left in software and big companies can copy your product in no time?

Your task in a software startup (or any startup) is to produce the moat. If you can create something with little effort in a few weeks or months then so can anyone else.

If your product does something hard or useful that you know how to do because you understand the audience or business, or includes data or knowledge that others may not know about or have, or just you can put the effort in to great service to build a large customer base it becomes harder to be copied.
by hnarn | 2026-01-17 15:13:16+00:00
According to this link:

https://vonng.com/en/pg/pgfs/

> The magic is: JuiceFS also supports using PostgreSQL as both metadata and object data storage backend! This means you only need to change JuiceFS’s backend to an existing PostgreSQL instance to get a database-based “filesystem.”

Sounds ideal for your kind of situation where a filesystem is being abused as a database :-)
by therobots927 | 2026-01-17 15:13:44+00:00
I couldn’t agree more. In fact I think the exact opposite of the original statement might be true: Find a product made by a big corporation that is a great concept but has clearly suffered from an internal shitshow of a team for some time, and copy it. If other corporations are sloppily copying it - even better. That just means the product has actual market fit.
by littlestymaar | 2026-01-17 15:13:45+00:00
There's no such thing “as neutral account of factual events”, it's a “map and territory” thing, you always have to weight if something is relevant and this is always a subjective exercise.

And then you have to ponder the relevance with whether or not publishing may cause harm.

Let's take an example, unrelated to the topic: why aren't the addresses of stars, or the identification number of billionaires personal jets, listed on Wikipedia? Because it's not relevant, and can be harmful.

And it's the same thing for trans people's name. Most of the time, their birth name is irrelevant and can even be harmful. But sometimes, when it's important, the name will still be there, with the redirection and all, see https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradley_Manning

And, by the way, this isn't a Wikipedia thing, this is how press right works! Newspapers get sued all the time for mentioning irrelevant personal information about people, and lose.
by vladvasiliu | 2026-01-17 15:13:49+00:00
Do you have more info on this? It’s not at all the behavior I observe. After I shut down windows, which I do basically every time I use it since I usually use Linux on that machine, it is completely off. Turning the pc on boots Linux (it’s first in the boot order).

It has modern standby and most of its other defaults, which I know because if it goes to sleep it doesn’t: the fan stays on and it never gets cold to the touch despite the blinking power led. The other day it randomly installed the windows update and rebooted because I found it waiting for the LUKS pin.
by zczc | 2026-01-17 15:14:02+00:00
Yes, he was an idiot, but that doesn't contradict that he was smart. In his own words, from The Dilbert Principle book:

"People are idiots.

Including me. Everyone is an idiot, not just the people with low SAT scores. The only differences among us is that we're idiots about different things at different times. No matter how smart you are, you spend much of your day being an idiot. That's the central premise of this scholarly work. I proudly include myself in the idiot category. Idiocy in the modern age
isn't an all-encompassing, twenty-four-hour situation for most people. It's a condition that everybody slips into many times a day. Life is just too complicated to be smart all the time."
by eimrine | 2026-01-17 15:14:47+00:00
What a laugher, of course it is not like that. Especially funny sounds the return to base function.

Multi-frequency communication, a lot of retranslators making you to be able to fly inside of caves, refusing to use Starlink in the areas having a bleeding-edge anti-starlink antennas deployed. Or just receiving Netflix-grade picture from the optical cable while reducing to zero anything emitting radio-signals.
by giantrobot | 2026-01-17 15:15:04+00:00
Ah yes, grep's famous support of PDF and Office documents will surely come in handy. As will its image OCR capabilities.

Oh it doesn't have those things so is a non-option.

Tahoe in general sucks but Spotlight has been a pretty good local search for nearly twenty years. The image OCR added in Sonoma made it even more useful.
by iambateman | 2026-01-17 15:15:38+00:00
The opposite is increasingly true…

I spent the past 6 months rebuilding a medium-size company’s CRM.

They were on Salesforce for a decade, and now they’ll own their data based on the work of a single engineer.

For Salesforce, the moat is increasingly the inertia that comes from big-company contracts and the perceived safety of buying Salesforce.

Society is experiencing the first wave of the true Cambrian explosion of software and there’s never been a better time to be an indie maker. Never. This is like the iOS App Store moment, but multiplied by 100 and expected to last 10x longer.
by rossdavidh | 2026-01-17 15:15:42+00:00
A software startup has always, always been a longshot. This is still true. Also, vanishingly few companies of any kind, including software, ever get a "moat". Small companies survive, when they do, by being fast moving enough to keep making new things.

You certainly should not start a software startup to get rich, as that was never the most likely outcome. You should start one if you have an idea for software that isn't out there, which you think people would find useful, and you want to see what it's like to do a startup (enough to give it several years of your life).

I have, btw, never founded a software startup, though I have worked at some. I got paid in salary, not equity. It is now, always was, and probably always will be a longshot.
by nicoburns | 2026-01-17 15:16:10+00:00
> It’s too bad solar degrades over time... without it losing its efficiency over a 15 year period.

Google says they degrade to 80-90% capacity over 25-30 years, which is ~double your 15 year time period. I've also previously seen people claiming that they then stabilise around the 80% level, and that we don't really know how long their total possible lifespan is because many extant solar panels are outliving their 25 year rated lifespans.

Capacity reduced to 80% won't work for some high-performance use cases, but is pretty decent for most.