MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hagbard_c | 2026-01-05 00:53:41+00:00
Well, I build software for free just like I play guitar for free, repair stuff for free, help out organising events for my children's school for free, taught elderly people at the local care home how to use computers for free et ce te ra.

I do not get the feeling that I did nor do wrong by acting this way nor do I feel like I'm doing wrong by using free software. In what way would the world be a better place if I started charging money for the mentioned services and started paying some of it for software?
by AbraKdabra | 2026-01-05 00:54:25+00:00
I kinda feel the same way, don't get me wrong, I'm a developer at soul level, I absolutely love programming, but I love more getting shit done, automating things, taking the human out of the equation and putting the computer to do it, AI lets me do that. I work in cybersecurity as a WAF admin, my job is 100% that, but I'm also the only developer so anything that needs to be scripted or developed I get to do it. One week I created 4 different scripts with Gemini Canvas to automate some tedious work, it took my I don't know, 3 hours? Instead of 1 or 2 weeks? Yeah sign me in.
by MarkSweep | 2026-01-05 00:54:33+00:00
This and the other top story on HN right now ( I charged $18k for a Static HTML Page) [0] make it clear the the most important thing as a software developer is jumping through hoops and being agreeable. It does not matter if it makes sense to you. I’ve come to accept that I can’t always predict what is actually valuable for the business and should just go with the flow and take their money. The leetcode-style interview selects for this by presenting as an arbitrary hoop you have to jump through.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46469877
by pyottdes | 2026-01-05 00:54:34+00:00
It really depends on what your end goal & use case is. Resin printers are pretty phenomenal for any kind of product development and are very much a useful tool in the industrial design space.
That said, casual hobbyists should almost always start with an FDM (filament) printer as a first printer. Sorry to hear you had such a bad experience :/

https://youtube.com/@pyottdesign
by SilentM68 | 2026-01-05 00:54:57+00:00
Clearly, I've struck a nerve.

Throughout human history all we've had is regime changes. I am afraid, that these events are a matter of fact and not hallucinations.

As far as remaining silent, I believe where I live, it is not against the law to speak one's mind. One can't easily be arrested. Free speech, is in fact, encouraged and protected. Perhaps freedom of expression is different where you live? If that is the case, then I feel bad for you. You should do everything you can to get out.

Rather than compose another "Twitteresque" melody, I'll provide you with these two better options:

The best thing for you to do is to not engage with me or my post, downvote me or just ignore me, altogether.

If you find that you can't resist the urge to engage with my post, I advise you to then enhance endogenous testicular androgen production and subsequent neurobehavioral assertiveness via downregulation of excessive hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis inhibition of gonadal steroidogenesis.

Once this is accomplished you should be able to more easily navigate any differing points of view or discourse in any thread.

Sincerely,
Sol Roth

FYI: Getting banned from Hacker News is not a life ending event. Just ask my Twitter account :)

AFK: Eating Soylent Green Dinner
by spudlyo | 2026-01-05 00:55:16+00:00
Yeah, I should have split the final paragraph into two, but I kept it long thinking it would be a funny contrast; it wasn't. In retrospect, it probably would have been better not to have made fun of the poster's style at all. I also find it annoying when commenters complain about trivial stylistic issues in folks' writing rather than engaging with the substance.
by zahlman | 2026-01-05 00:55:17+00:00
I guess "anonymous IIFE" is the part that bothers you. If someone is nesting ternary expressions in order to distinguish three or more cases, I think the switch is generally going to be clearer. Writing `foo = ...` in each case, while it might seem redundant, is not really any worse than writing `return ...` in each case, sure. But I might very well use an explicit, separately written function if there's something obvious to call it. Just for the separation of concerns: working through the cases vs. doing something with the result of the case logic.
by mcswell | 2026-01-05 00:55:29+00:00
Anecdote for any runners reading this: I'm a 75 year old runner. (Some young runners might say I run at a jogger's pace, I just tell them to keep off my lawn.)

A couple decades ago, I stopped running on concrete or asphalt, and took up trail running, i.e. running on (mostly) dirt. It feels way easier than running on asphalt, much less on concrete. If you're skeptical that running on concrete or asphalt feels harder, give it a try. YMMV, but I'd bet you notice a difference.

And yes, I do fall sometimes, tripping over roots or rocks. But I recover quickly.
by simonw | 2026-01-05 00:55:36+00:00
The incremental cost of a carpenter giving away an extra table is the cost of the time and materials needed to build that table.

The incremental cost if duplicating and giving away a piece of software is nothing at all.

If you want to be generous to the world, open source is an incredibly cost effective way to do that!

(I remain extremely interested in ways we can ensure open source developers do get compensated for the huge amount of value they put out into the world, but that's the key difference between carpenters and software developers.)
by btown | 2026-01-05 00:55:42+00:00
We’ve had a solution for decades, for conflict resolution to ensure data is never lost to a misconfigured merge - it’s called a filesystem! Put a copy of anything pre-deletion into an archive that’s relatively hidden from view, but have a line of documentation saying: if something appears deleted, fear not, see this dot-prefixed backup.

The fact that Microsoft has stepped backwards from this is an intentional choice and should be criticized as such.
by stephenr | 2026-01-05 00:56:16+00:00
Or, given that OP is presumably a developer who just doesn't focus fully on front end code they could skip straight to checking MDN for "center div" and get a How To article (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/How_to/Layo...) as the first result without relying on spicy autocomplete.

Given how often people acknowledge that ai slop needs to be verified, it seems like a shitty way to achieve something like this vs just checking it yourself with well known good reference material.
by shagie | 2026-01-05 00:57:33+00:00
When I worked technical support in college I often worked nights and weekends (long uninterrupted times to work on homework or play games) ... there was a person who would call and ask non-computer questions. They were potentially legitimate questions - "what cheese should I use for macaroni and cheese?" Sometimes they just wanted to talk.

Not every text area that you can type a question in is appropriate for asking questions. Not every phone number you can call is the right one for asking random questions. Not every site is set up for being able to cater to particular problems or even particular formats for problems that are otherwise appropriate and legitimate.

... I mean... we don't see coding questions here on HN because this site is not one that is designed for it despite many of the people reading and commenting here being quite capable of answering such questions.

Stack Overflow was set up with philosophy of website design that was attempting to not fall into the same pitfalls as those described in A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23723205

Arguably, it succeeded at not having those same problems. It had different ones. It was remarkably successful while the tooling that it had was able to scale for its user base. When that tooling was unable to scale, the alternative methods of moderation (e.g. rudeness) became the way to not have to answer the 25th question of "how do I make a pyramid with asterisks?" in September and to try to keep the questions that were good and interesting and fit the format for the site visible for others to answer.

It wasn't good that rudeness was the moderation tool of last resort and represents a failing of the application and the company's ability to scale those tools to help handle the increased number of people asking questions - help onboard them and help the people who are trying to answer the questions that they want to answer to be able to find them.

The failing of the company to do this resulted in the number of people willing to answer and the number of people willing to try to keep the questions that were a good fit for the site visible.

Yes, it is important for the person answering a question to treat the person asking the question with respect. It is also critical for the newcomer to the site to treat the existing community there with respect. That respect broke down on both sides.

I would also stress that treating Stack Overflow as a help desk that is able to answer any question that someone has... that's not what it was designed for. It acts as a help desk really poorly. It was designed to be a library of questions and answers that was searchable. The questions were the seeds of content, and it was the answers - the good answers - that were the ones that were to stay and be curated. That was one ideal that described in https://blog.codinghorror.com/introducing-stackoverflow-com/
by dossy | 2026-01-05 00:57:44+00:00
Users unable to log into League of Legends due to an internal SSL certificate that was valid for 10 years expired today, 2026-01-04.

Temporary workaround is to set your computer's clock back to before the certificate expires, until a new client build is released with an updated certificate, presumably.

Surprisingly, not a DNS issue, for a change.
by deadbabe | 2026-01-05 00:58:40+00:00
Some people think clarity means abandoning language idioms and writing simple code that a first year computer science student could understand and follow.

If you do this, your team will write verbose, repetitive code, and put more emphasis on procedures instead of data structures and how they change over time.

Use the language features to write powerful concise code that really takes some skill and expertise in the language to understand. Force your team to become more skilled, don’t stoop down to the lowest common denominator. In time, this code will become as easily understood as any other simple program.

And when shit breaks down at 2 AM, you do nothing, because your code is clever enough to handle problems itself.

But don’t obfuscate.
by RagnarD | 2026-01-05 00:59:00+00:00
I pay for software and I bet everyone reading this, has as well. The question is which software, doing what, and how to get paid.

To take iPhone apps as a category, some are paid, but most are "free", because experience shows that people will easily try a "free" app, greatly preferentially even if the price is $0.99. But for many, probably most, of such apps, there's in-app purchases, designed to be an ongoing source of revenue.
by renewiltord | 2026-01-05 00:59:02+00:00
Yeah that's the difference between value creation and value capture. If you're not good at the latter then you're not going to get paid. You can capture value many ways:

- subscriptions that promise improvements or act as DRM

- vendor contracts

- becoming a platform and extracting rent

- using your audience as an advertising resource

But the reality is that the hard part with software is discovering what's useful. Actually writing software has been getting easier for a while. Once you've discovered what's useful, no one is going to pay you for that. They can replicate. I'd rather use podman than docker.
by ryandrake | 2026-01-05 00:59:03+00:00
There are plenty of things that are free and also provided for a fee. You can pay to go to a conference and hear someone talk, or you can just go outside and hear people talk for free, and often times enjoy it more than the conference talk. You can pay for admittance to a dance club or go to another one for free. You can buy bottled water or drink from the public water system for (mostly) free. It's not an either-or situation.
by dclowd9901 | 2026-01-05 00:59:06+00:00
I get it though. I'm the kind of person who's willing to learn slicing, architecting supports and all the other wonky shit that 3d printing begs of because it provides essentially priceless (read: nonexistent custom things) for me.

Someone who's already well steeped in a hobby as demanding as WH40k and who already has access to items they can purchase alternatively probably is not searching for something else they have to get their head around. And MSLA printing is not a chill hobby by any measure.
by protocolture | 2026-01-05 00:59:08+00:00
If the carpenter could build 1 chair, and then infinitely duplicate that chair to everyone who needed it, the economics would look similar to software.

I actually dumped a bunch of my project files into chatGPT, and asked it "Is there anything in here close to completion/close to marketable" and the answer was "Nope", which mirrors my own thoughts. My code is too niche, and the 10 or so people playing in the same space as my hobbies already have their own full working stacks and have no need for my stuff. One of my projects, I found 3 other people on a tiny discord, had already working prototypes with better software and hardware.

So I dump it all on my github for whatever minor assistance I can give anyone else with the same brainwoms that I have.
by ufmace | 2026-01-05 00:59:12+00:00
Okay, it makes sense that that's what it is. Still, it seems to me like that's more of an optimization technique that's applicable to certain specific scenarios rather than a mindset to view all software development as.

I have actually heard of something like that, as arena allocation, though mostly as something to use in a GCed language to either avoid or reduce the impact of GC cycles, also for certain specific scenarios.
by nikcub | 2026-01-05 00:59:15+00:00
I delayed adopting conductor because I had my own worktree + pr wrappers around cc but I tried it over the holidays and wow. The combination of claude + codex + conductor + cc on the web and claude in github can be so insanely productive.

I spend most of my time updating the memory files and reviewing code and just letting a ton of tasks run in parallel
by bagatelle | 2026-01-05 00:59:50+00:00
I recently read "The Sense Of Style", which explained the actual principle behind making an understandable run-on. The trick was to allow the brain to mentally store away the earlier parts of the sentence, and take it out of the parsing context into the logical connections context. Not going to try and remake the point from scratch, if you're curious go read the book!

(as a sidenote, trying to make a point about grammar made me very self-conscious about mine, this is why I had to read a good book!)
by ggm | 2026-01-05 01:00:15+00:00
Buffett didn't seem to mind suffering an opportunity loss. He would write it up in a "gee, I was stupid" mailout and move on.

A lot of people seem to believe an opportunity loss is equivalent to a real world loss, and can justify legal action, retribution, all kinds of bad. I've never understood this, and it makes me happy because Buffett and I could not be futher apart politically and philosophically in other ways (unless I am mistaken he wasn't an overt fan of the welfare state. I'd be delighted if he included that in a model of public finance utility function stuff)
by StopDisinfo910 | 2026-01-05 01:00:37+00:00
> Adding all of it together is too much. So you set the thermostat lower by 3 degrees. Pack lunches two to three days a week and cut down the coffee a certain percentage etc.

Yes, I understand, I'm not stupid. I'm sure you can understand what's implied by my comment. I am saying all of that together is a ridiculous amount for a top 5% earner once summed.

We are not talking scrambling family of four here. At some earning level, difficulty paying the bill is nearly always structural.

It annoys people because it's easier to cut a cup of coffee than to admit you over mortgaged and the solution is obviously far less simple.
by try_the_bass | 2026-01-05 01:01:49+00:00
> You have it or you don't.

To quote the Gorillaz:

> That's a fallacy

Self-control is not a "have it or don't" thing. It can be developed and exercised, often simply by trying and failing, and then trying again (like any exercise!).

I'm not saying it's not harder for some people than others. I'm also not saying that it isn't harder to exercise on some circumstances than others. However, it's absolutely not a binary thing, and it is achievable, in some form, for anyone.
by thechao | 2026-01-05 01:02:05+00:00
I took the test, and the results were completely meaningless. It said that I have a moderate or below average interest in science or engineering. This is patently wrong. This is a deep, abiding, long-term love-affair. It's why I've got a PhD in programming language theory, and have done all the course work, but not the dissertation for PhD's in Economics, Computational Biology, Statistics, Epidemiology, and Mathematics. So... yeah. Complete & utter baloney.
by danpalmer | 2026-01-05 01:02:05+00:00
Chatbots are rife with this sort of thing. I found a delivery company's chatbot that will happily return names, addresses, contact numbers, and photos of people's houses (delivery confirmation photos), when you guess a (sequential) tracking number and say it was your package. So far not been able to get in touch with the company at all.

At the very least these systems allow angry customers direct access to the credit card plugged into your LLM of choice billing. At worst they could introduce company-ending legal troubles.
by bfkwlfkjf | 2026-01-05 01:02:29+00:00
Because people enjoy coding.

And before you say "the carpenter enjoys making chairs too"... I'll believe that if you can show me that a substantial percentage of carpenters spend 8 hours a day making chairs even when they're not monetising them. A substantial percentage of developers spend 8 hours a day coding when they're unemployed because they enjoy it.
by nl | 2026-01-05 01:02:36+00:00
Actually it didn't

From the video summary itself:

> We’ll unpack why identical tools deliver ~0% lift in some orgs and 25%+ in others.

At https://youtu.be/JvosMkuNxF8?t=145 he says the median is 10% more productivity, and looking at the chart we can see a 19% increase for the top teams (from July 2025).

The paper this is based on doesn't seem to be available which is frustrating though!
by inkyoto | 2026-01-05 01:02:52+00:00
Meet TIMI – the Technology Independent Machine Interface of IBM's i Series (nèe AS/400), which defines pointers as 128-bit values[0], which is a 1980's design.

It has allowed the AS/400 to have a single-level store, which means that «memory» and «disk» live in one conceptual address space.

A pointer can carry more than just an address – object identity, type, authority metadata – AS/400 uses tagged 16-byte pointers to stop arbitrary pointer fabrication, which supports isolation without relying on the usual per-process address-space model in the same way UNIX does.

Such «fat pointer» approach is conceptually close to modern capability systems (for example CHERI’s 128-bit capabilities), which exist for similar [safety] reasons.

[0] 128-bit pointers in the machine interface, not a 128-bit hardware virtual address space though.
by sublinear | 2026-01-05 01:03:04+00:00
> The Uncle Bob approach of extractNameMatchingTransfersWithinSettlementWindow() doesn't actually help - now I need to know what settlement windows are anyway, and I've lost the context of why 3 days.

When the name is long, it should be more than one function. Finding the transactions within a settlement window seems distinct from matching them up.

The comment about 3 days isn't necessary when "numDays" is a variable in the SettlementWindow class (or other relevant scope). I'd be a lot more comfortable reading code that makes this concept a proper abstraction rather than just seeing a comment about a hard-coded 3 somewhere. Magic values are bad and comments don't demystify anything if they get out of sync with the code.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2026-01-05 01:04:11+00:00
> There is a whole company out there with people that depend on this app to pay their bills. Giving it away for free puts that whole company out of business!

This is part of competition. It's common for businesses to have their value proposition challenged, and they either have to justify their existence, or die. If your whole company can be replaced by a single person tomorrow, it wasn't that valuable a company. We benefit more as a society by competition causing companies to be more efficient, and people having access to more value for less money.

Also, those people potentially losing their jobs isn't the end of the world. We all lose our jobs eventually, for one reason or another. We all have to expect that and be able to find a new job.
by mystraline | 2026-01-05 01:05:23+00:00
Thats easy.

Its costs time to make a software thing once. Then once done, copying is basically 0 cost, and storage is near 0 cost, and bandwidth is near 0 cost.

If I make furniture, it costs resources for each thing I make. I can't copy a sofa 10e6 times for negligible costs.

Its also why "Shit as a service" is so popular in the commercial world. Selling the tool is a fools game - you sell access to a rental of the tool. Then you get recurring income, and can fuck over people who are firmly in your ecosystem.
by presentation | 2026-01-05 01:06:29+00:00
Well I couldn't do my workouts without a gym of some sort. Hard to find hundreds of pounds of resistance attached to cables I can align with muscles I want to work, just lying around the house (though now I transitioned to a home gym with a Beyond Power Voltra, and now that is lying around my house! But as I mentioned in the other comment, living spaces in Tokyo are small, so I paid a lot to get the most space-efficient setup I could come up with, and even with this I still envy some of the specialized equipment available at good commercial gyms).

It really depends on what kind of workouts you're talking about and what your constraints are outside the gym. Though I acknowledge many people are just on autopilot, get gym memberships they won't really use effectively, and waste their time and money.
by rubyfan | 2026-01-05 01:06:32+00:00
The carpenter comparison isn’t a good one. The output of the carpenter’s labor and (importantly) material resources yields a hard good and that process does not scale. Software on the other hand scales extremely well and the marginal cost of giving software away for free or selling it to the next person who wants it has next to no additional cost. The expense model of software enables economic models that would never work on physical goods.

Unlike hand crafted furniture, software has next to no durable value beyond the transactions it enables. Don’t get me wrong, software investment can be incredibly durable, e.g. banking and insurance mainframe apps built 50 years ago. But without a specific business application software itself is nearly worthless.

Writing open source software is probably better compared to published research. It’s an academic endeavor and also a way to put your name out in the world in a way that recognizes your contribution and may lead to commercial opportunities for you and/or your software.
by credit_guy | 2026-01-05 01:07:22+00:00
No, it does not work like that. The unit might be millions of dollars, but what matters is the cost of one shot, which is going to be in the cents (the cost of the electricity). Plus, the cost of one unit might start at millions of dollars, but in time it would go down a lot. For this anti-drone defense to work, you'd need many thousands or tens of thousands of these systems, and with large scale comes large economies of scale.