MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zamadatix | 2026-02-02 21:23:49+00:00
HN in a bit odd when it comes to paywells. You're not allowed to complain about them and everyone reading is individually expected to figure out how to access the content (which usually involves finding a top comment linking to a workaround for everyone or the usual users all going with their preferred tools silently).

https://archive.is/Lh2QY
by thisislife2 | 2026-02-02 21:23:51+00:00
> But nobody will get sued, and that's the only thing that matters.

Do you really want to bet your business on that? Vizio thought the same when using GPL code, and now they are in court. Software Freedom Conservancy sues Vizio for GPL violations - https://www.zdnet.com/article/software-freedom-conservancy-s...
by Towaway69 | 2026-02-02 21:24:23+00:00
Aeon[1] just published a piece on the topic. It discusses the victim versus villain aspect.

Having read that, it seems that the only remedy would be a Chinese government intervention (as it seems to be Chinese criminal gangs that run these facilities). That intervention might be triggered by the international image lose for the government in being associated with these scams.

[1]: https://aeon.co/essays/inside-the-criminal-world-of-southeas...
by nix0n | 2026-02-02 21:24:24+00:00
If you are looking for another self-hostable alternative to Slack, Rocket chat[0] is also worth looking at.

I wasn't involved in any of the Dev Ops aspect when my former employer used them, but the search function actually worked which is better than I can say for Slack.

[0]https://github.com/RocketChat/Rocket.Chat/blob/develop/LICEN...
by lovich | 2026-02-02 21:24:40+00:00
Companies don’t step up and do things for the common good. They do things for profit. Occasionally that looks like they are charitable if the value of the PR is worth it for them.

No one[1] changes what product they are using based on funding or not of open source software. Companies will step in and fund it if they want control, like with Rust, or if the maintainer finally stops giving them free labor and they actually need the software.

[1] not enough people to alter finances
by JohnMakin | 2026-02-02 21:24:50+00:00
I worked very briefly at the outset of my career as a sales engineer role selling a database made by my company. You inevitably learn that when trying to get sales/user growth, barrier to startup and seeing it "work" is one of the worst hurdles to leap over if you want to gain any traction at all and aren't a niche need already. This is my theory why so much of the "getting started" stuff out there, particularly with setting up databases, defaults to "you have access to everything."

Even if you put big bold warnings everywhere, people forget or don't really care. Because these tools are trained on a lot of these publicly available "getting started" guides, you're going to see them set things up this way by default because it'll "work."
by ecshafer | 2026-02-02 21:25:02+00:00
I have literally never looked at github stars as a measure of quality or had it affect my decision. I have looked at git logs, websites, issues, etc. But I would be genuinely worried if someone used github stars as an indication. So many honestly stupid projects have a lot of stars, and stellar ones have next to none.

https://github.com/EvanLi/Github-Ranking/blob/master/Top100/...

proof here. The top are taken by chinese educational repos. Elastic Search and Spring Boot are the only projects actually used by anyone in the top 10. But why would I trust the stars for spring boot over the fact its used in every java shop on the planet?
by cyberax | 2026-02-02 21:25:23+00:00
The problem here is more fundamental.

Lennart refused to make all the /etc/fstab options available in regular mount units. And yes, there was an issue, no I'm too tired to look for it. The wording was pretty much: "Give up, and gtfo, this is not going to happen. Just because."

I'm convinced that systemd can't be fixed by its current team of maintainers. They are just... untidy.

I don't know about you, but if I end up writing low-level code that _needs_ to know whether the mounted file system is "remote", I won't do that by comparing against a hard-coded list of filesystems inside PID0. Or by using wild heuristics ("if it's on a block device, then it's local").

I would put these heuristics in a helper tool that populates the default values for mount units. Then allow users to override them as needed. With a separate inspector tool to flag possible loops.
by throwaway150 | 2026-02-02 21:25:30+00:00
I have used many open source tools and I have convinced my company to buy the commercial license of the said tools to get the enterprise version and support. Win-win for both parties. I use and improve my skills on the open source version of the tools I love. Our company uses great tools. The project maintainers get paid.

But I don't think I'll ever buy an enterprise version of the software which can't get the simple matter of open source licensing right. It isn't that hard. Thousands of developers are doing it.

If the tool was totally enterprise version only, I'd probably have less qualms about it. But to advertise a tool as open source license but then violate the open source licensing method both in spirit and the letter of the law is just too unprofessional for me that I'd steer clear of them in future and discourage anyone I know from spending their money on them.
by 1dom | 2026-02-02 21:25:53+00:00
I'm not saying companies can't do fine in many respects after experiencing hypergrowth, but like you said, that's after hypergrowth - the hypergrowth isn't sustainable.

And I disagree: outages are a fairly literal example of tech breaking. A few outages aren't catastrophic though, and I agree are fairly common. I know it's cliche, but "move fast and break things" might get growth, but it also gets broken things along the way.

Hypergrowth is growth and churn at the expense of sustainability and stability. It can definitely be fun though!
by beklein | 2026-02-02 21:25:57+00:00
This will actually work well with my current workflow: dictation for prompts, parallel execution, and working on multiple bigger and smaller projects so waiting times while Codex is coding are fully utilized, plus easy commits with auto commit messages. Wow, thank you for this. Since skills are now first class tools, I will give it a try and see what I can accomplish with them.

I know/hope some OpenAI people are lurking in the comments and perhaps they will implement this, or at least consider it, but I would love to be able to use @ to add files via voice input as if I had typed it. So when I say "change the thingy at route slash to slash somewhere slash page dot tsx", I will get the same prompt as if I had typed it on my keyboard, including the file pill UI element shown in the input box. Same for slash commands. Voice is a great input modality, please make it a first class input. You are 90% there, this way I don't need my dictation app (Handy, highly recommended) anymore.

Also, I see myself using the built in console often to ls, cat, and rg to still follow old patterns, and I would love to pin the console to a specific side of the screen instead of having it at the bottom and pls support terminal tabs or I need to learn tmux.
by Night_Thastus | 2026-02-02 21:25:57+00:00
I agree with some parts, at least.

After my recent layoff, I realized I had become too narrow. I knew one language and one subject matter well, and couldn't quickly switch to something else. I was lucky and found an exact fit within a week - but there's no guarantee that will happen again.

Definitely doesn't hurt to know a few languages, a few subjects well. Even if you're not an expert, you can fake it for a bit while you get the details down.
by mncharity | 2026-02-02 21:26:03+00:00
> where an LLM can be useful [...] RAG, summarizing, filling gaps

I'd also emphasize onboarding. To smooth "oh joy, yet another ux", and simplify/speed/clarify "yes, that'd be nice - but no, we don't support it yet". One might imagine a pkm ui where you just start telling what you want, and it executes keyboard-visualizer style. And clearly characterizes what it can't do. Rather than 'intro-doc:"to do X, fiddle Y" -> human:"ok... I need to fiddle... Y?" -> ui:fiddle-Y-event"'. Keybindings as efficiency "expert mode", rather than onboarding barrier.

> If you were to try a small fragment, what would you pick as the smallest useful scope[?]

Last month's items which each prompted a "I really wish I had better tooling for this" search for something to try, were: A largely self-contained todo space, with lots of fiddly bits (life todos for another person). An exploration of a project idea - chats, notes, links, papers, sketches (MetaPaint: given stickers for ui elements, a custom paint app UI is simply another kids painting). A nudge on a backburnered area of interest - chats, papers, jupyter (towards a didactic perceptual color space, where the features you notice are real features of human vision, not mere model artifacts).

I actually looked at Obsidian for the first one, but I really wanted lightweight hierarchical task decomposition with implicit but overridable dependencies. Currently doing a one-big-markdown with frequent manual-ish passes. Tempted to fork an existing "mutant-markdown as executable literate-Julia" kludge.

But "smallest useful scope"... hmm. Of those, "project" and ""log"" seem for me plausible - "team" perhaps more a follow-on. But... I've been wanting better so often for so long, I'm mostly gated on there being a either a clearly satisficing task fit up front, or some hope of a plateau escape. A slog of extending/kludging/adapting in hope of incremental gain has diminished appeal. Hmm, a thought: having just looked at several pkm docs, current onboarding seems more "start with the basics, and build out", rather than a clear "with a fully tricked out set of extensions, here is the envelope what you can/cannot/by-workaround manage with us today".

I'd really like a plateau escape. Outliners, Hypertext, tiny manual force-directed graphs... it's been a fun half century, but I'd like to move on now. I wonder what an old tidlywiki-style self-hosted pkm bootstrap might look like, in a time of git, whisper, discussion and coding LLMs, extensive community code repos, and graph libraries less hopelessly behind graph HCI research. 1080p HMDs, head-tracked 4K, and gestures. Hmm...
by Hamuko | 2026-02-02 21:26:09+00:00
It's not AGPL 3.0. The binaries are MIT, the codebase (from where the MIT binaries are built from) is AGPL 3.0, except for the bits of the codebase that are Apache 2.0, and there's some kind of a promise about not enforcing a part of AGPL if you don't link to their platform directly and exclusively use the bits of the code that are Apache 2.0, and also don't make a modified version of the software. And also you can just license it commercially too.
by ImPostingOnHN | 2026-02-02 21:26:21+00:00
Like I said:

> Beware of falling victim to the easy dismissal of 'more people are less rational and/or less informed than before', a variant of 'this person who doesn't agree with me must be less rational and/or less informed than me'.

Your explanation doesn't actually explain any difference in root cause between now and a mere 5 years ago, so it doesn't explain the difference in behavior.

Something else must be different. Try asking some of the folks you "oppose" what it might be.
by NBenkovich | 2026-02-02 21:26:21+00:00
Agreed on cloud IAM. AWS, GCP, and Azure handle fine-grained access well.

The problem is higher-level platforms and SaaS. Once agents need feedback from deployment, CI, logs, or config tools, permissions often collapse into “full token or nothing”. Vercel is just one example.

That’s the gap I’m pointing at.
by tavavex | 2026-02-02 21:26:24+00:00
No. Bringing up stages of grief in a debate (rather than an account of personal experience, like in the post) is an argument-killer, because any negative response from the alleged grieving side is instantly taken down by smugly categorizing their negativity as a stage of grief. It's not just reserved to LLM arguments too, this is a common wrapper for the less dignified "you disagree with me which proves I'm right" position.
Ask HN: How many hours do you work per week?
by jsattler | 2026-02-02 21:26:31+00:00
Germany is currently debating part-time work and whether we need longer hours overall. I do 40h/week and it feels sustainable. I don't think the hours I put in are proportional to the value/output I produce.

When people bring up the 996 model, I genuinely don't get it. How does anyone sustain that? I get that sometimes you need to push harder for a few weeks. That's normal. But longer than a few weeks does not seem healthy at all - neither for the person nor for the business.

Here's what I'm actually curious about: how does the hours-to-value ratio change as you work more? Where would you say is the sweet spot? With 996, you're getting almost 2x the hours, but what's the actual increase in value/output? Would be interesting to hear from people who actually did this 996 thing for longer and share your experience.
by easymuffin | 2026-02-02 21:26:36+00:00
Yeah, I was thinking about those major providers, or basically any LLM API provider. I’ve heard about the reasoning traces, and I guess I know why parts are obfuscated, but I think they could still offer an option to verify the integrity of a chat from start to end, so any claims like „AI came up with this“ as claimed so often in context of moltbook could easily be verified/dismissed. Commercial argument would exactly be the ability to verify a full chat, this would have prevented the whole moltbook fiasco IMO (the claims at least, not the security issues lol). I really like the session export feature from Pi, something like that signed by the provider and you could fully verify the chat session, all human messages and LLM messages.
by lefstathiou | 2026-02-02 21:26:44+00:00
Someone tried to shake our company down once. They posted all this stock imagery on the web, waited for someone to use it with an ambiguously worded attribution policy, then have a third party chase you down and demand $100k but will settle for $5k.

It turns out we did attribute the right way (in our terms of use) and could prove it with logs of when we added the language and when it was removed after we removed the image, but I am sure they nail people all the time with this strategy. This didnt stop them from sending 20 emails, demand lawyers get on the phone, etc.

There are a couple of similar scams like this out there.
by paxys | 2026-02-02 21:26:45+00:00
I dug around for ~10 minutes and it's probably not an exaggeration to say that Mattermost might have the most confusing licensing of any software product in existence.

From the license page on their repo (https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost/blob/master/LICENSE...):

> 1. You are licensed to use compiled versions of the Mattermost platform produced by Mattermost, Inc. under an MIT LICENSE

So just the compiled versions, not the source code. Ok, at least that is clear. But - the MIT license explictly allows for modification and redistribution. So can I do that?

The next line.

> See MIT-COMPILED-LICENSE.md included in compiled versions for details

Except this file doesn't exist anywhere in the repo or outside.

> You may be licensed to use source code to create compiled versions not produced by Mattermost, Inc. in one of two ways:

> 1. Under the Free Software Foundation’s GNU AGPL v3.0, subject to the exceptions outlined in this policy; or
> 2. Under a commercial license available from Mattermost, Inc. by contacting commercial@mattermost.com

What does "may be licensed" mean? Do I have to contact them for a license? Or is an AGPL license implied?

> You are licensed to use the source code in Admin Tools and Configuration Files (server/templates/, server/i18n/,
server/public/, webapp/ and all subdirectories thereof) under the Apache License v2.0.

Sure, let's throw another license in there, because there weren't enough already.

> We promise that we will not enforce the copyleft provisions in AGPL v3.0 against you if your application ... [set of conditions]

WTF does a "promise" mean here? Is this actually AGPL or not?

Then they have copy pasted the entire Apache License, even though the project isn't licensed under Apache. Why??

Oh but that's not all.

There's a separate license page at https://docs.mattermost.com/product-overview/faq-license.htm..., which says:

> Mattermost Team Edition (Open Source) - Open Source MIT License.

Uh, what? That goes against everything said in LICENSE.txt. So now we are back to fully open source?
by jerf | 2026-02-02 21:26:53+00:00
This game assumes the computations run to completion on systems that will never run out of resources. No one in this universe will ever compute Ackerman's Number, BB(6), or the final answer given in the post. Computations that never complete are infinite.

If you are playing this game and can't produce a number that doesn't fit in this universe you are probably better suited playing something else. That's just table stakes. If it even qualifies as that. "Inscribe every subatomic particle in the universe with a 9 every planck instant of the universe until the heat death of the universe" doesn't even get off the starting line in games like this.

Another general comment: It feels like a lot of people are really flailing around here, and need to understand this is a game. It has rules. If you change the rules, you are playing a different game. There is nothing wrong with playing a different game. It is just a different game. The game is not immutably written in the structure of the universe, or a mathematical truth, it is a human choice. And there isn't necessarily a "why" to the rules any more than there's a "why" to why the bishop moves as it does in chess. You can, in fact, change that rule. There are thousands of such variants. It's just that you're playing a different game than chess at that point. If you don't want to play the author's game, then that's fine, but it doesn't change the game itself. And proposing different solutions is equivalent to saying that you can win a chess game by just flipping over the board and yelling "I win". You can do that. Perhaps you've even won some game. But whatever game you just won, it isn't chess.
by seanmcdirmid | 2026-02-02 21:27:26+00:00
I'm all for immigration, but the world isn't producing enough people to make that a very viable long term solution. Eventually we have to reduce our demand for labor, especially when our civilization is lopsided for awhile with older people and not enough young people (a problem that will fix itself eventually as the old people die off, I guess).

I'm OK with robots driving cars like I'm ok with not needing an elevator operator anymore to use an elevator.
by jodrellblank | 2026-02-02 21:27:29+00:00
If debugging is not a separate skill then there is either:

- the author wrote it (including 'debugging') until it worked properly. Therefore they were clever enough to write it that way.

- the author can't make it work (including 'debugging') and therefore they aren't clever enough to write it that way.

And there cannot be a state where they (are clever enough to write it but it doesn't work properly) and they (are not clever enough to debug it), because the fact that it doesn't work properly and they can't make it work properly refutes the claim that they were clever enough to write it that way, and it becomes the second state above. Which puts you on the side of what I'm saying?
by lukevp | 2026-02-02 21:27:33+00:00
Samsung Magician checks the drive to see if it’s genuine, I haven’t heard of any thwarting of that so far and it’s mentioned in the article that it correctly identified the counterfeit. What I do is check Samsung Magician genuine check first, then do its performance test, then use h2testw to fill it and verify that it passes fully. It’s a lot of work but it’s better than ending up with counterfeit stuff!
by Y-bar | 2026-02-02 21:28:13+00:00
Geothermal (and airbased) pumps theoretically do not have unlimited heating capacity. For example my pump (Daikin Altherma Geo 3) has a 180 litre water tank so it can ”only” supply 180 litres hot water at 65 degrees Celsius and takes about a minute to heat two additional lites.

So if I want to quickly scald myself in a 400 litre pool at fifty degrees I can’t. But if I had a gas heater that would be possible!
by rcxdude | 2026-02-02 21:28:25+00:00
It does create confusion because adding extra clauses onto whether you can use the AGPL kind of defeats the point of the AGPL, and creates a contradiction because the different flavors of the GPL generally all have language that tries explicitly to prevent such a thing, which is a pretty classic piece of confusion (I've had it when negotiating employment contracts and it's shocking how many people seemingly just never read the documents they're offering).

(EDIT: though, having read the whole document, it seems like there is just a trademark carve-out, which is explicitly allowed under the AGPL, so this seems reasonably straightforward, except for the strange 'we promise not to enforce copyleft if you don't modify the code' which seems entirely redundant. Oh, and the 'licensed to use source code to create compiled version' which seems like a very strange phrasing)
by hazn | 2026-02-02 21:28:28+00:00
Jurata | Software Engineer (Frontend/Fullstack) | Zurich, Switzerland | ONSITE | Full-time
Jurata is a LegalTech startup building an online one-stop shop for legal, accounting, and tax services. We help thousands of SMEs get fast, affordable access to professional support. Heavy focus on automation and AI.
We're looking for versatile engineers who thrive in a TypeScript environment and enjoy owning features end-to-end.
What you'll do:

Build and maintain Next.js frontends
Migrate legacy apps from no-code tools (WeWeb/Retool)
Deliver fullstack features (backend: Nest.js, Python)
Own problems from idea through release and monitoring

Stack: TypeScript, Next.js, Nest.js, Python, MongoDB, Vercel, AWS
Looking for:

TypeScript and Next.js experience
Strong eye for design (you can build beautiful UIs without a Figma file)
You actively use AI coding tools (Cursor, Windsurf, etc.)
Builder mindset, comfortable working autonomously

Benefits: 25 vacation days, ESOP, free gym membership, team lunches, central Zurich office with snacks and drinks.
EU/EFTA citizenship required (or willingness to relocate to Zurich).
Apply: https://join.com/companies/jurata/15604453-fullstack-softwar... (mention HN)
by SpicyLemonZest | 2026-02-02 21:28:38+00:00
It says you "may be licensed" to use the source code under AGPL v3.0, but never actually makes an unambiguous statement that suchandsuch code is licensed under AGPL v3.0.

The concept of MIT licensing a compiled software artifact, but not the code used to generate the artifact, is also extremely strange.
by FireBeyond | 2026-02-02 21:28:39+00:00
I was interviewing with a company that has done ETL migration, interop and management tools for the healthcare space, and is just dipping their toes in the "Could AI do this for us or help us?"

Their initial answer/efforts seem to be a qualified but very qualified "Possibly" (hah).

They talked of pattern matching and recognition being a very strong point, but yeah, the edge cases tripping things up, whether corrupt data or something very obscure.

Somewhat like the study of MRIs and CTs of people who had no cancer diagnosis but would later go on to develop cancer (i.e. they were sick enough that imaging and testing was being ordered but there were no/insufficient markers for a radiologist/oncologist to make the diagnosis, but in short order they did develop those markers). AI was very good at analyzing the data set and with high accuracy saying "this person likely went on to have cancer", but couldn't tell you why or what it found.