frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Open Source @Github

fp.

Open in hackernews

Herdr is joining Y Combinator. The runtime stays open

https://herdr.dev/blog/herdr-is-joining-y-combinator/
48•collinmanderson•1h ago

Comments

nlh•52m ago
I am a HUGE herdr fan - discovered it a few months ago and it's exactly what I need for my workflow. Thousands of others have discovered it as well, which is awesome.

I have such mixed feelings about this - YC means VC means commercialization means enshitification. I really wish that weren't the case, but it so very often is.

Here's hoping this one's different...

(PS I am a big YC fan in general! I don't mean to sound anti-YC or anti-VC or anti-capitalism. But when it comes to low-level essential development tools, I'll never forget what happened to Warp, which started out as such a nice clean terminal project and turned into an absolute money-chasing mess.)

tamimio•50m ago
Yeah, it’s great but with this, it’s probably the time to find an alternative, I probably can see where this will be in a year or so.
pecheny•44m ago
why “find” an alternative? if you’re a herdr user you’re perfectly capable of maintaining a fork just for yourself :)
sarky-litso•23m ago
I can't tell if this is sarcasm but in case its not, being capable of doing something and having the desire and resources to do it are not the same thing
an0malous•24m ago
It’s literally the VC playbook, the whole point of the funding is to undermine competitors with subsidized/free products and then raise prices/enshittify. Anyone who thinks it’ll be different this time is fooling themselves.
EGreg•50m ago
Wow, congrats! Can you discuss how you got YCombinator to select your open source project? I know they sometimes fund open source… I’ve been building several large platforms since 2011 but I have never considered applying like that.

Would something like this qualify:

https://github.com/Qbix

https://github.com/Intercoin

https://github.com/Safebots/Safecloud

humblepie•48m ago
Okay, back to tmux it is then.
lrvick•23m ago
I am going to be PRing herdr to stagex as it is my daily driver. This will give it a totally independent release process with multiple parties bootstrapping, reproducing, and signing deterministic binaries for it alongside our tmux releases.

We (the stagex team) will naturally patch out any corpo tracking bullshit that may or may not happen in the future, and follow the dominant community fork should it be needed, as we did with terraform -> opentofu.

As long as herdr does not enshittify though, we will be happy to provide very high supply chain integrity releases for it as-is starting with probably next months stagex release.

Absolutely no problem with FOSS developers finding revenue streams to give themselves more resources to make their projects better.

My own company is 100% FOSS with nothing held back and will stay that way, even though we are in the current YC batch with more customers signing every week. Admittedly this is atypical, but it can be done.

ValentineC•47m ago
> That’s why I recently switched it from AGPL to Apache: I want everyone to use Herdr freely, without any problem.

I'm curious what the actual problems with AGPL were.

rajangdavis•46m ago
Can't make money if people use your tool and are required to share their source code
spudlyo•29m ago
Radix enim omnium malorum est cupiditas. Enshitification is sure to follow in one guise or another.
rajangdavis•16m ago
I don’t know that this qualifies as enshitification… on one hand, the author created something that scratched his own itch, shared it, and now it’s become a tool that he wishes to steward into a way where he can make money.

I don’t know that these are terrible things inherently, it kind of depends if he wishes to extract as money as possible from his users by any means necessary or if he’s truly trying to scale it so it can help people. All we have is this article and infinite speculation.

I personally didn’t find herdr useful, so I have no stake in the direction of what the author decides to do with herdr.

koiueo•19m ago
No money from investors
tyre•18m ago
dominotw•44m ago
wtf is "runtime"
albertgoeswoof•18m ago
What does stays open mean
fwip•12m ago
It means the headline was vomited out by an LLM.
rvz•42m ago
Quick question: Would you have actually donated to Herdr if they were asking for donations? I don't think any of you would have, unless stated otherwise.

So this is another reason why developers do not pay for their tools and instead the developers of these tools go to VCs anyway. It's not the fault of the author, but most of the users (developers themselves) always want their tools for free at $0.

You have to pay and support the tools you use or else the VCs will do it for you so you can't complain when scenarios like this keep happening.

applfanboysbgon•36m ago
Yep. It's funny how much open source maximalists harm their own cause. Everything must be "free", ergo everything must be VC or big tech backed because free doesn't put bread on the table, so in the end devs just put more power in the hands of corporations and less power in the hands of themselves and other independent devs/small businesses, and then have the gall to complain when everything gets enshittified.
hx8•28m ago
I don't love this framing among software developers. This framing is very transactional, when many of the authors are explicitly trying to make their work free. The best thing a software dev can do is donate some of their time to do more open source development, and in that way we all benefit from having more and better open source tools. If someone wants to exchange code for money there are plenty of avenues to do that. Starting an open source project and using it to attract VC funding is one path.
bigyabai•21m ago
Are you lamenting the death of proprietary UNIX and paid compilers, too? This status quo is fine.
hx8•32m ago
I switched from tmux to Herdr about six weeks ago. It's a great bit of software, the UI is focused on switching between multiple agents quickly. I run Herdr to keep my opencode instances well managed, and it also works great for having a few terminals opens next to your agent. I find myself keeping opencode sessions open for longer like what happens with Codex and Claude code, which is great if I need to revisit a context to do some follow up work. I'm genuinely excited to see if the creators can bring even more value to the application.

If you're worried about enshittification I wouldn't be. It's relatively basic open source software that runs locally. A perfect candidate for a fork if the base app starts degrading.

asadm•29m ago
I am guessing this now directly competes with mitchellh's multiplexer / Superlogical.
barapa•26m ago
gary said gbrain's thick skills were agi. why are they still even funding new projects.
kar1181•26m ago
Oh man - herdr is great. This will not be net good. Sigh.
tyleo•24m ago
Tbh it doesn’t bother me entirely. I love this tool so much I’d pay for it.

VC funding can enshitify things but it can also improve them. Here’s hoping for the latter.

The copyleft licenses are toxic for adoption. Companies default away from them because there are a lot of murky unknowns (e.g. if you run a copyleft service and connect to it via API, is that extending it? Does that service’s source have to be shared?) that simply aren’t worth the hassle.

If you want your library to get traction with many real world use cases, you need to have a permissive license. If you want to stick to the principles, you’re going to sacrifice adoption.

Not saying one is better than the other, but there’s a tradeoff.

guywithahat•4m ago
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted, you're right. Using software that has requires people to contribute back is a huge liability, and hurts adoption, which is the most important metric for herdr right now.

Qwen3.8 Max now ranked as the best overall model by agentic index

https://artificialanalysis.ai/?intelligence=agentic-index
262•apitman•2h ago•131 comments

Quake – 30th Anniversary Update

https://slayersclub.bethesda.net/en-US/news/quake-30th-anniversary-update
41•dsubburam•30m ago•18 comments

Mario Meets Pareto

https://www.mayerowitz.io/blog/mario-meets-pareto
770•theanonymousone•9h ago•138 comments

Herdr is joining Y Combinator. The runtime stays open

https://herdr.dev/blog/herdr-is-joining-y-combinator/
49•collinmanderson•1h ago•28 comments

Launch HN: ProvenMetal (YC S26) delivers circuit boards in days instead of weeks

https://provenmetal.com
142•willcarkner•4h ago•102 comments

Almost no skill required to cook a steak

https://blog.sydorets.com/en/posts/almost-no-skill-required-to-cook-a-steak/
198•yusyd•5h ago•231 comments

Can you reverse engineer an ASIC?

https://blog.janestreet.com/can-you-reverse-engineer-an-asic/
22•bschne•1h ago•2 comments

Improving GPT-5.6 Sol in ChatGPT—and expanding access for free users

https://openai.com/index/improving-gpt-5-6-sol-in-chatgpt/
68•tedsanders•3h ago•50 comments

Learn how chips are made with this Rollercoaster Tycoon-inspired animation

https://laurentiugabriel.github.io/ChipTycoon/
52•laurentiurad•6d ago•9 comments

Taste Is All That's Left

https://notashelf.dev/posts/taste-is-all-thats-left
69•tsak•3h ago•56 comments

Japanese Govt Asks US Govt to Stop Using Mario, Pokemono, Naruto Meme Postings

https://mainichi.jp/articles/20260803/k00/00m/010/133000c
48•m463•1h ago•16 comments

Crime Pays but Botany Doesn't

https://www.crimepaysbutbotanydoesnt.com/reading-list
603•DarkContinent•16h ago•186 comments

How to Make a Nintendo 64 Game in 2026

https://phoboslab.org/log/2026/08/xibalba64-making-of
422•atan2•2d ago•185 comments

The Simple Elegance of the Integrated Timing Belt Loopback Fastener

https://danielmangum.com/posts/integrated-timing-belt-loopback-fastener/
71•hasheddan•4d ago•16 comments

GitHub Actions and Pages are experiencing degraded availability

https://www.githubstatus.com/incidents/qcvjkzcs7j74
196•Footkerchief•5h ago•178 comments

Show HN: The Channels SDK – Bring Any Agent to Any Channel (Slack, MS Teams)

https://github.com/CopilotKit/channels-sdk
70•davidmckayv•4h ago•18 comments

Pareto Front

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_front
204•binyu•1w ago•87 comments

Building progressively enhanced forms using Htmx

https://www.rafa.ee/articles/progressive-enhanced-forms-htmx/
32•mpweiher•6d ago•5 comments

Humans missed 1 in 3 threats approving AI agent commands across 40k game runs

https://scalex.dev/blog/ai-agent-permissions-stats/
213•Wirbelwind•8h ago•175 comments

The Triangle Game, from Zero

https://muchmirul.github.io/conjectures/multicolor-ramsey/
5•jdkee•4d ago•1 comments

Discovery Loop

https://www.discoveryloop.com/
895•xtreak29•1d ago•565 comments

Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs

https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/message-ceo/next-chapter-ai-momentum/
814•colesantiago•1d ago•863 comments

xAI, SpaceX, and the Race for AI Buildout

https://illegal.solutions/posts/xai_pollution
111•speckx•1h ago•67 comments

Zapscape (CVE-2026-64561)

https://github.com/V4bel/Zapscape
46•john_strinlai•4h ago•8 comments

Federal Communications Commission scraps limit on broadcast TV ownership

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/media/federal-communications-commission-scraps-limit-broadcast-t...
72•pseudolus•2h ago•61 comments

Unearthing my 1996 windowed OS in machine code for Am29000 homebrew computer

https://nanochess.org/the_am29000_computer.html
143•nanochess•5d ago•32 comments

Poles of Inaccessibility in the San Gabriel Mountains

https://notes.secretsauce.net/notes/2015/05/06_poles-of-inaccessibility-in-the-san-gabriel-mounta...
27•dima55•4d ago•20 comments

Dress made of living mycelium can renew and repair itself

https://www.dezeen.com/2026/08/05/dress-living-mycelium-renew-repair/
72•speckx•4h ago•46 comments

The title cards in Blade Runner are amazing

https://randsinrepose.com/archives/blade-runner-title-cards/
409•ExMachina73•23h ago•198 comments

Beating GPT-5.6 Sol on retrieval with 100x cheaper open models

https://neon.com/blog/how-castform-neon-beats-frontier-models-on-price-and-efficiency
415•moonikakiss•1d ago•114 comments