MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by WhyNotHugo | 2026-01-10 13:33:17+00:00
Being closed-source isn't just an ideological issue, it bring about a lot of practical issues. E..g.: distributions aren't going to package it, so users need to download the tarball and install it manually. They'll also need to manually update it (unless they're including some dedicated service?).

Then, integration with the OS will be weird. If you're distributing binaries, you can't dynamically link system dependencies (they are either bundled or statically linked). Any distribution-specific patches and fixes will be missing. AFAIK the default path for the CA bundle varies per distribution; I'm not even sure how you'd handle that kind of thing. I'm sure there's hundreds of subtle little details like that one.

The audience ends up being Linux users, who are fine with proprietary software, have time and patience for manually configuring and maintaining a browser installation, and are also fine with an absence of proper OS integration.

I think Steam is the only popular proprietary software on Linux, and they basically ship an entire userspace runtime, and almost don't integrate with the OS at all.
by conartist6 | 2026-01-10 13:33:57+00:00
I'm writing OSS code with the intent to replace git. I know my position is very different, but to me openness is not a critical vulnerability when facing big companies but my secret weapon.

For me the best outcome is taking over all the market currently held by git and GitHub, and the worst outcome would be that Microsoft somehow pulls an embrace-extend-extinguish on us. But my goal, and I think I've been successful here, is to slam the door in the face of anyone who would be able to easily improve on my work and therefore would be able to undercut my value proposition with theirs. We want to be the first people offering a strongly differentiated service by building a platform that does not in any way sit on top of the MS platform, so that nothing we do is actually a direct benefit to them anyway and we actually get consumers excited about change!

This is the same death grip that Microsoft currently has on OSS. They made their tools so ubiquitous that even their most vigorous competitors make things that just feel like knock-offs because the competitors can't afford not to build on top of the same open core as MS: git and LSP. If you can't beat them you have to join them, and so I know exactly what I need to do to win: tweak the economic incentives until joining me is preferable to competing with me, and then instead of charity we'll simply take GitHub's billions in revenue as our revenue.
by bfrog | 2026-01-10 13:34:03+00:00
Show me time slicing or deadline scheduling would work with multiple priorities (InterruptExecutor's) involved. Show me how a task in an InterruptExecutor would priority boost a task of a lower priority, switch to it, then switch back to free up a locked resource. I don't see how these things are feasible in Embassy.

There's a large number of things that the cooperative scheduler can't do. Maybe you don't need those things, that's fine! Embassy really is quite nice for cooperative task scheduling. But to benchmark a context swapping RTOS which can and pays the cost for doing so, against a cooperative task queue scheduler... these are not at all the same things, and won't have the same performance characteristics in simple scenarios like the one in the blog post.
by imtringued | 2026-01-10 13:34:04+00:00
I don't get it. This entire article seems to be talking around the actual issue. You need to have a dynamics model inside your trajectory planner.

If you have non zero inertia, then refusing to model inertia isn't technically correct or optimal.

The turn penalty is a way to avoid having an explicit dynamics model, which is a nice hack that will probably return pretty good results.

There is also a missing reference to liquidity preference. People don't make expensive and costly plans, because they represent a commitment and obligation to follow the plan through. Unlike what economists say, people don't actually make lifelong commitments at birth and then just follow them. They usually make decisions on the spot with the information they learned during the course of their life.
by sallveburrpi | 2026-01-10 13:34:41+00:00
> which sees participation as entirely motivated by money.

I think it’s rather that people need to eat. He admits that some wealthy devs will continue to work for free (do charity basically) but for those who want to make a living from OSS it will be harder and harder.

But yea as you said ultimately it probably won’t matter that much.
by ben_w | 2026-01-10 13:34:42+00:00
Musk takes money to create criminal material, and spends that money to politically support someone personally accused of the same category of criminal conductand who has also definitely interfered with the investigation of criminal conduct regarding the same, where both material and conduct is in a category Musk himself states is worthy of a civil war for not preventing.

He's a hypocrite.

Or to phrase it the way you did:

CSAM when Musk or his allies do it: Musk claims freedom of speech.

CSAM when opponents of Musk have not pulled every lever to wipe it out: Musk calls for civil war and regime change.
by arnvald | 2026-01-10 13:34:43+00:00
That's cool, and I'm happy for you that you are in a position that allows you to get income from other sources, so that you can write OS code in your spare time.

Not everyone can or wants to go this way, though, and we got a number of fantastic tools and libraries thanks to people who tried and succeeded in making money from open source. Some folks live off donations, some are paid by their employers to write OS, and some added extra features that allowed them to both offer their tools for free and to monetize them at the same time. It's sad that the last path starts to disappear, at least for some tools. In the end it probably will result in fewer OS libraries, because some number of authors will have to either find another income stream, or abandon their projects.
by llm_nerd | 2026-01-10 13:34:55+00:00
Two things can be true-

a) sovereign nations can impose literally any rule they want on foreign businesses, even if those rules are ridiculous, arbitrary, or defy the "freedom" values of some other country.

b) This incredibly tired "I'm telling Daddy Trump!" bit is pathetic, and it, among with the fact that America is currently -- by far -- the most dangerous country on the planet, should yield garbage people like Price getting their ass handed to them.
by frackii | 2026-01-10 13:34:57+00:00
My OSS project wasn’t nearly as well used, but it also was making someone else money, and I also put a lot of time into it without getting paid.

I never had the time or understanding to setup a business around it, so in the end I just got rid of everything. No more open source unless it’s purely for my own enjoyment.

I’m VERY appreciative of free and open source projects and organizations that don’t try to make money. The FSF, GNU, Linux- I love these! I would love if the world just focused on these! I would use a Linux desktop and phone if they were in that Apple sweetspot (iOS 26 not included) of ease for techs and non-techs.

What I’ve noticed about successful open-source projects is that they have:

- a strong leader, who has dedicated their life to it, not as a secondary initiative, and who one day knows they must hand the reins to another

- a willing team that continues to bring in “new meat”

- a project that sells itself by filling a need that will remain for some time by many

- no need or desire for money

Those that end in failure involve:

- a leader/team that sees it as part-time volunteer work, and they do it because it makes them feel good about themselves; they are giving back

- the assumption that one day maybe they’ll get paid
by jampekka | 2026-01-10 13:35:32+00:00
The post mentions this:

> Some OSS will keep going - wealthy devs doing it for fun or education. That's not a system, that's charity.

I'm all for non-monetary motives, but the reality is that most people have to work for a living, leaving quite limited time/energy for volunteering. The scale of OSS that we have today would not (perhaps sadly) be possible without OSS development paying the bills.
by ghm2199 | 2026-01-10 13:36:03+00:00
Actually even when a Roomba(RIP) turns to follow the optimal plan like that, the time taken to pivot 90 to manage planb is pretty large.

My Roomba will take less time when it dead reckons as opposed to avoiding visiting tiles twice. I guess energy and time are still spent poorly by humans and Roomba for following the optimal plan.
by netsharc | 2026-01-10 13:36:16+00:00
It's a sad world (or sad Internet) that when people do anything there's always a question of how to monetize it. Upload videos of you being goofy? "You should start a series! Make them longer than 8 minutes and you can qualify for YouTube ad money!". Write a blog? Similar stuff. TikTok? Go viral and maybe you'll find someone to pay you for... something.

And there's incentive reversal, I once saw someone who vlogs daily, his aim was to qualify for YouTube ad money, so everyday he rants for at least 8 minutes about how his life sucks and girls hate him (but that's fine because they just want to scam him for alimony)"...
by datsci_est_2015 | 2026-01-10 13:36:31+00:00
Cringey and childish appeals to US government and billionaires aside, it’s funny how this is framed as “Magnanimous Free Speech Technology Company” vs “Evil European Bureaucratic Shadow Cabal” when the latter is more like “Massive Sports Monopoly Regulatory Capture”.

When corporate entities do something bad, like attempting to maximize profits by capturing regulatory entities and bending them to their will, it’s the government’s fault. It’s laundering agency: the corporation has no agency because it simply seeks to maximize profits, but the bureaucrats have agency and are therefore morally wrong (Cloudflare CEO appealing to morals in his tweet).

Very few comments in this thread decrying the root of the issue, which is that the football media empire has grown large enough that they’re imposing negative outcomes on the pubic hand that feeds them.
by KronisLV | 2026-01-10 13:36:46+00:00
> Look at Tailwind: 75 million downloads/month, more popular than ever, revenue down 80%, docs traffic down 40%, 75% of engineering team laid off. Someone submitted a PR to add LLM-optimized docs and Wathan had to decline - optimizing for agents accelerates his business's death. He's being asked to build the infrastructure for his own obsolescence.

So what are the actual solutions, now that the cat is out of the bag?

Much like in the post, you could make it source available and have a free license for non-profits and development, but ask money for commercial usage, or different feature sets (like iframe-resizer, which we recently bought for a project, saved a bunch of time, but the AI models still were trained on it and knew how to use it). Or provide support, like many FOSS DBs and OSes should, same for libraries, maybe to have PostgreSQL dethrone Oracle and the likes just a little bit more.

Or maybe some ask-for-funding stuff defined at library level with the expectation that the AIs would present this information to whoever uses them. I don't particularly celebrate https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/v9/commands/npm-fund but I get why it's there - similarly we might get IDE plugins and CLI tools and such to present a summary of what libraries or projects were used/suggested in a task/chat session and how to give them money, much like how you'd get references to website sources when trying to ask AI to research something.

> My prediction: a new marketplace emerges, built for agents. Want your agent to use Tailwind? Prisma? Pay per access.

This probably already exists in the form of MCP solutions for up to date documentation for specific libraries and so on, to mitigate hallucinations.

Either way, we need to start implementing actual solutions so we don't keep ending up with https://staltz.com/software-below-the-poverty-line.html all the time. And not just some "human contract" approach of expecting that someone will go to your docs manually and see the banner that they can give you money for more bells and whistles or something. To me, that feels like wishful thinking.

AI or not, people's work should be rewarded and that needs some sort of standardization - and I hold that view even in regards to answering feature requests on GitHub, like if someone demands something, they should immediately have the option to place money into an escrow for when/if a solution is presented to them (or get the money back if not). If they don't, you have no obligation to help them unless from the goodness of your own heart and the innate desire to do so. Similarly, if I use 10 libraries, I should be able to say "Okay I have 50 bucks, I want to donate to all of these projects by executing a single npm command and confirming a PayPal payment or something."

Incidentally, that's also the first step towards building the Torment Nexus (capitalist incentives will find a way to turn this into a hellscape), but go figure.
by wk_end | 2026-01-10 13:37:16+00:00
What an unnecessarily hostile comment. "Utter drivel"? I was talking about how I personally feel. Am I just imagining enjoying the things that I enjoy?

Writers have, obviously, written about how walking in nature is nice. Does me saying that now mean that walking in nature is awful?

Maybe you're doing other people a favour by staying away from them, sheesh.
by Ekaros | 2026-01-10 13:37:20+00:00
Money must come from somewhere. And by selling a product I mean a phone. Or box doing something. With Wine, well Valve sells games and want those games to run on something else than platform they were build for.

In the end product is being sold originally to fund that development. Software can also be pure product enabling company to do something or consumer to do something. But in that case open-source is likely incidental. Not the product.
by verdverm | 2026-01-10 13:37:46+00:00
I post a lot about it on Bluesky

https://bsky.app/profile/verdverm.com

The container stuff that backs it is built on Dagger

https://github.com/hofstadter-io/hof/tree/_next/examples/env

The entire extension and agent framework is in that repo too

extensions/vscode and lib/agent

I let my agent do whatever because I know exactly what it can and can't do. For example, it can use git, but cannot push, and any git changes are local to its containerized environment and don't get exported back to my filesystem where I do real git work. I could create an envelope where they could push git, and more likely I'll give them something where they can call GitHub ali, that's really more useful anyway
by ogogmad | 2026-01-10 13:37:56+00:00
The problem is unclear. I think you have a labelled graph G=(V, E) with labels c:V->R, such that each node in V consists of a triple (L, R, S) where L is a sequence of weights are on the left, R is a sequence of weights that are on the right, and S is a set of weight that have been taken off. Define c(L, R, S) to be the centre of mass. Introduce an undirected edge e={(L, R, S), (L', R', S')} between (L, R, S) and (L', R', S') either if (i) (L', R', S') results from taking the first weight off L and adding it to S, or (ii) (L', R', S') results from taking the first weight off R and adding it to S, or (iii) (L', R', S') results from taking a weight from W and adding it to L, or (iv) (L', R', S') results from taking a weight from W and adding it to R.

There is a starting node (L_0, R_0, {}) and an ending node ({}, {}, W) , with the latter having L=R={}.

I think you're trying to find the path (L_n, R_n, S_n) from the starting node to the ending node that minimises the maximum absolute value of c(L_n, R_n, S_n).

I won't post a solution, as requested.
by hasbot | 2026-01-10 13:38:02+00:00
I clicked only because I'm interested in doing a project related to MIDI, so I was surprised to immediately see that this project was built with Claude Code and unlike, most AI-assisted projects, includes the prompts. Skimming the comments here it appears most people have not noticed this. I suggest re-submitting this project again but with a headline that promotes it as a demonstration for vibe coding.
by ako | 2026-01-10 13:38:10+00:00
Not the generic concept of TUI sequencers (i know, have used sequencers on c64), but any weird slightly different idea.

In my case i wanted flexible way to display lyrics, chords, strumming, metronome, fingerpicking, scales, chord shapes, etc, with an easy way for LLMs to define the backing-track, so a backing track DSL.

I think we'll see a lot of these very specialized software popping up, instead of generic solutions that contain everything and the kitchen-sink, where you don't use 90% of the functionality.
by dnalang | 2026-01-10 13:38:16+00:00
I just implemented a 3D Layer Coding simulation via temporal vias. Check the repo. Great point on the topological protection. I agree—the Star Topology is a bridge for current planar (2D) hardware. I've actually just updated the repo with Protocol Z.X (The Hypercube), which uses temporal vias to simulate that 3D layer coding structure on the IBM Torino backend. I'm seeing if we can get that volumetric energy barrier to scale even on 'flat' NISQ chips. Thanks for the lead on 3D lattices!"
by jijijijij | 2026-01-10 13:38:51+00:00
We here are all guilty of this. Nobody is really aware of or grateful for all the things that enabled us to make a living.

Even if you are unloved, digging for gold with your bare hands, you were spared by people stronger, had people grow your food, teach you, build the streets,
make your meds, literally deal with your shit all your life. And let's not forget the people who endured cruelty, suffered and died for your jeans and coffee...

(There are some great scenes in Pluribus, which illustrate this ignorance very well.)
by DiabloD3 | 2026-01-10 13:39:22+00:00
I love how he blames OLED for this, but doesn't care to learn the actual cause: that isn't an RGB subpixel orientation. There are many OLEDs with correct subpixel orientation.

He bought a factory defective monitor. LCDs like this exist, Samsung sold them as AMOLEDS called Pentile. They are hideous.

Until subpixel is eradicated from existence, we shall continue to suffer this.

The problem is such:

1) Windows exists.

2) Windows invented Cleartype for Vista, it was ugly and fringed hard because they misunderstood human perception, the sRGB standard, and math.

3) Windows then readjusted Cleartype for DirectWrite. OSX before Retina and Freetype use subpixel tuning also compatible with human perception, sRGB, and math.

4) Many applications on Windows do not know how to ask Windows what the subpixel orientation is; either they assume RGB all the time (do not do this!) or they only read the first monitor (do not do this!). Windows can tell you per monitor, this is the only correct way. This API has existed since Vista.

5) This problem also effects DPI: they either cannot scale or only scale for the first monitor. Windows scaling for you causes _exceptionally bad_ color fringing for subpixel rendering. Again, the API for that has existed since Vista.

6) Many monitors do not list their subpixel orientation in their EDID. Ones that do and also are rotation sensitive do not set their EDID for RGB->VRGB->BGR->VBGR as you rotate them. Windows assumes RGB for any monitor missing that EDID field.

7) Windows only knows (V)RGB and (V)BGR. It does not know W+RGB, it doesn't know any sort of complex multi-row arrangement (such as Pentile).

8) Many applications ignore your Cleartype settings in Windows, and use RGB at default color weights no matter what you do, even if you turn subpixel off and do greyscale only.

9) And the worst sin of all: people embed screenshots in their documentation and websites, and they never update them. The Internet is full of Vista-era fringe-filled Cleartype text. This ties into 5, but is worth mentioning as its own.

Edit: On second reading, the author says they're on a Mac. Macs don't have subpixel rendering anymore. I don't understand the author's complaint, they have greyscale and avoid all these problems.

I will bitch about Apple's mistakes over the past decade, but removing subpixel rendering from their ecosystem was a smart move: makes all their text rendering compatible with all future monitors forever, and moving to HiDPI eliminates the need for it anyways.
by sgarland | 2026-01-10 13:39:38+00:00
It’s more that tired experience has taught that of the various disciplines, web devs are the most likely to have a shaky-at-best understanding of fundamentals, and thus do silly things like assume network calls will never fail, or store everything in JSON blobs and then wonder why their queries are slow.

I’ve also worked with some awesome web devs, to be fair.
by Zak | 2026-01-10 13:39:45+00:00
Play Integrity and Play Services are two different things.

Play Integrity is a remote attestation scheme by which apps can ask the OS to prove to a remote server that it is unmodified. It allows apps to refuse to run on devices with root or third-party ROMs.

Play Services is a set of libraries and APIs for things like network-based location, push notifications, and advertising. Nearly all Android phones include it, and users of third-party ROMs can add it at install time (but not later) with packages like MindTheGapps. There's an open source substitute called MicroG that allows most apps to run without it.
by woodpanel | 2026-01-10 13:39:48+00:00
This thing will be so old that the owner just needs to apply for a "historical" car license and then those eco-zones are irrelevant.

But yeah, the author's wrong on so many things. Starting with putting his stuff on mastodon in the first place. Or not withstanding that the same people he cheers on, are outlawing diesel engines.

Tbh though, a lot of the latter was fueled from US-industrial anti-diesel propaganda.
by sallveburrpi | 2026-01-10 13:39:48+00:00
> generate the premium with ease

I don’t think this will be possible for many open core projects. Often the premium features are the more complex and difficult ones.
If you could generate those you don’t need the project at all anymore you can just generate the whole thing.
Of course that is the wet dream of VCs and would make programmers completely obsolete but I don’t think it’s realistic (at least not anytime soon)
by ben_w | 2026-01-10 13:40:39+00:00
Closest, but not close. UK's "independent" nuclear deterrant is British made warheads in British made submarines, but the missiles fired from those subs and to which those warheads are attached, are American.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trident_(missile)

Still, plenty of times the UK has gone to bite, only to metaphorically boinked on the nose by a rolled up newspaper. Notably the Suez crisis.
by ajross | 2026-01-10 13:41:27+00:00
The preemptive "It doesn’t matter what I think or what you think" tells us that you know damn well this wasn't legal or appropriate. I stand by my analysis, you are defending this madness on the internet not because you know it's correct on principle but because you want it to be correct.

You want to live in a world where your enemies are afraid of gestapo-like goon squads who will shoot them in the face if they do the wrong thing. You think they deserve it, that the work of the goons is important and worth some violence to enable, and surely that such violence would never be used inappropriately.

Just be clear in your own mind what you're cheering for. It's not new. Historically this never ends at plausibly-justified-minutiae about law enforcement practice.