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I didn’t like the tone of this. Building a company is hard. Building an VC-backed open source product is really, really hard. I know on HN we don’t always love

I didn’t like the tone of this. Building a company is hard. Building an VC-backed open source product is really, really hard. I know on HN we don’t always love CEOs, and that’s okay… the ethos of startups has changed over the past 10 years, and tech has shifted away from tinkerers and more toward Wall Street. But Ryan Dahl isn’t doing that; he’s a tinkerer and a builder. I dunno, I just don’t like this vibe of “what have you done for me recently” in this post, especially given he skipped over the company and is calling out Ryan directly for some reason. Ryan is responsible for many of our careers; Node is the first language I really felt at home with. Comparing him to Nero is gross.

simonw 7mo ago
Yeah, the tone felt off to me too. It felt a bit too much like a celebration of "look how right I was" concerning their earlier posts.
echelon 7mo ago
Fuck this blog post. I'll say it. This author is being an asshole and punching good people when they're down. We live in a land of goddamned hyperscalers and megacorps trying to minimize how much they pay us (or get rid of us). Trillion dollar Zeuses that skirt by antitrust regulations for decades on end, crushing any would-be competition. Pilfering from open source while encrusting it in proprietary systems that cost an arm and a leg. Destroying the open web, turning every channel into an advertising shakedown, monitoring us, spying on us, cozying up to the spy apparatus in every country they do business in... How dare anyone throw rocks at an open source effort? I don't even like JavaScript, but I applaud what these folks are trying to do. At least they're trying. Can't even get a decent round of applause.
- gkoberger 7mo ago
  Yeah, I was being nice, but this writer upset me. He sees Ryan Dahl as Nero, but he’s a lot closer to Robin Hood.
  - wahnfrieden 7mo ago
    If Robin Hood was CEO presiding over a hierarchy of wage workers, with VC backing to shoot for unicorn status
    - gkoberger 7mo ago
      He may have the same title, but he’s way closer to an engineer than Elon/Bezos/etc. My analogy was taking VC money and using it to build an open source tool.
- saghm 7mo ago
  > We live in a land of goddamned hyperscalers and megacorps trying to minimize how much they pay us (or get rid of us). Trillion dollar Zeuses that skirt by antitrust regulations for decades on end, crushing any would-be competition. Pilfering from open source while encrusting it in proprietary systems that cost an arm and a leg. Destroying the open web, turning every channel into an advertising shakedown, monitoring us, spying on us, cozying up to the spy apparatus in every country they do business in... > How dare anyone throw rocks at an open source effort? According to the article, Deno raised over $25 million from venture capital. Unless you're disputing that, it seems a bit disingenuous to criticize corporations but call this an "open source effort"
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
  - echelon 7mo ago
    I'm sick of open source "purism" too. It's almost all caused by the OSI. The OSI is owned and operated by the hyperscalers, who benefit from this in-fighting and license purity bullshit. Is the only open source free labor? Some people think so. Are open core and fair source licenses invalid? Yeah - let's make everything BSD/MIT so managed versions can go live inside AWS and GCP and make those companies billions, while the original authors see limited or no upside. The fact is - open source needs salients to attack the hyperscalers. It needs to pay its engineers. It needs to expand and grow. One of the ways to do that is building a business around it. Another way is building an open core plus services that drive revenue to sustain and grow the business. Having VC money doesn't invalidate what's being done. It helps the experiment evolve faster. Nobody's here complaining about Google and Microsoft and Amazon, yet that's where 99.9% of our ire should be directed. And yet we're pouring venom on this small and valiant effort. We dump on Redis and Elastic while they're being torn to shreds and eaten by trillion dollar giants. This entire conversation has become perverted to the point we're no longer talking about what matters: freedom to operate independently of the giants that control the world. Instead we're complaining about people taking a risk, trying to actually do something impactful that matters.
    - 7mo ago
verdverm 7mo ago
> calling out Ryan directly for some reason Accountability starts and stops at the top. Many CEOs (CxOs) get called out. Personally, I want to write something similar about Bluesky leadership, who have fumbled hard multiple times since peaking, and have now "raised funding" from Bain Capital (private equity).
- phpnode 7mo ago
  These things are easy to say but just because someone has the title CEO doesn't mean they're automatically void of human feelings. I'm sure you understand there's a big gap between a Ryan Dahl and a Satya Nadella, despite them sharing the same job title.
  - verdverm 7mo ago
    > void of human feelings What if we reframe this about how the CEO treats their users and employees? Why does Ryan deserve to be free from criticism?
    - phpnode 7mo ago
      Do you have any special insight here or are you speculating? I'm not saying that he should be free from criticism, but that we should try and have some empathy for people who try things even if they fail, particularly when they've offered their services to the community for free for the last 5+ years (much longer when considering node.js)
      - verdverm 7mo ago
        > Do you have any special insight here or are you speculating? I'm trying to understand why you carve an exception for this one individual. When I worked in restaurants, the owner and I had a very interesting conversation after hours, and with beers, about his thoughts and feelings being responsible for the well being and livelihood of everyone that worked there. It was a positive moment, I thought I had a great boss, I work my ass off for him. A year later I found he was trimming hours off of my paycheck. I quit on the spot. Months later I heard he did the same to the waitstaff tips and it wasn't much longer before it all fell apart. People can appear very different publicly than privately, and they can change over time.
phpnode 7mo ago
Agreed. It is very easy to criticise if you've never been in the hot seat, and if you've never had to make tough decisions like this. As far as I can tell this person has never run a business with actual employees. If Dahl had posted the typical layoff announcement people would be criticising that too.
hardwaregeek 7mo ago
Agreed. I was skeptical of Deno and I think their package management story was a mistake. But the people were still trying to make JavaScript better and doing so out of genuine love for the language. I especially feel for the employees who put in several years of their life, with the resulting opportunity cost.
evbogue 7mo ago
Agreed about the article tone. I'm a Deno lifer over here, and will definitely not try to cover up the mistakes they've made along the way or the trouble their deploy product has had over the past few months. Ryan Dahl is obviously polarizing as a personality for many people, always has been since he decided to "hate almost all software" or even before that when he created Node.js. I don't use Fresh. Serverless is kind of a weird offering that forces developers to do a lot of work to adjust their programs to running all over the place. I even wish Deno had never supported NPM because that ruined their differentiator. I'm going to keep using Deno and I hope they use this opportunity to refocus on their core product offering so that I can move back to using it from this VPS that is hosting all of my Deno servers right now.
- KyleJune 7mo ago
  I'm planning on using Deno long term too and have also made some contributions to their standard library. But I completely disagree with you on NPM support. I think that gap early on contributed to bun's success. I almost quit using it because of how difficult it was to use react with Deno. Now it's pretty easy to use react and other npm packages with Deno. Before that, a lot of the most popular packages were just forks of npm packages adapted for Deno, but not as well maintained since less people were using them. Then deduping dependencies was just harder when they were all urls. If your package had a dependency using a different version url, you'd need an import map just to remap them all to using the same version. I'm pretty happy with the current deno.json with jsr and npm compatibility.
  - evbogue 7mo ago
    As an early Deno purist I must invoke the 10 Mistakes talk that Ryan gave when he launched Deno: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=M3BM9TB-8yA&t=11s&pp=ygUScnlhbiBkYWhsIG1pc3Rha2Vz https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=M3BM9TB-8yA&t=11s&pp=ygUScnlhb...
  - afavour 7mo ago
    As someone who has mostly just tinkered with this stuff (while using Node extensively at work) I see two truths: - Deno initially seemed like something a number of us were clamouring for: a restart of the server JS ecosystem. ES modules from the start, more sensibly thought out and browser compatible APIs, etc etc - that restart is incompatible with the business goals of a VC funded startup. They needed NPM compatibility but that destroyed the chances of a restart happening. I’m just sticking with Node. I know Deno and Bun are faster and have a few good features (though Node has been cribbing from them extensively as time has gone on). I just don’t trust a VC backed runtime to keep velocity in the long term.
dangoodmanUT 7mo ago
Yeah, on top of that bringing in social media politics into it is weird, makes it hard to take this as pure/useful criticism
colesantiago 7mo ago
Some businesses don't need to be VC backed though. That is the problem.
- gkoberger 7mo ago
  Agreed. But building something new takes capital, and it’s really hard to find it for an open source tool. FWIW, it worked for Bun (at least for the VCs and employees), so there is a model there that works.
Aldipower 7mo ago
True! Love to Ryan from my heart. He came around the corner with Node just in the right moment when ActionScript3 started to die and I seamlessly could continue my career and building things. Still to today.. Things with Deno are very ambitious and hard to establish in this space. The blog post is embarrassing.
- pjmlp 7mo ago
  JavaScript on the server goes all the way back to Netscape days with LiveWire.
  - Aldipower 7mo ago
    Yes, I have a SGI Indigo2 with NetScape FastTrack with server-side JavaScript running in my basement! But it is not the same as Node though. ;-) I am selling it btw! Look at the CRT-screenshots. :-) https://www.kleinanzeigen.de/s-anzeige/sgi-indigo-2-mit-netscape-fasttrack-http-server-inkl-nec-fe1250-/3252427509-228-9487 https://www.kleinanzeigen.de/s-anzeige/sgi-indigo-2-mit-nets...
    - pjmlp 7mo ago
      Oh man, it is really cool, hope it gets a nice new owner.
bombcar 7mo ago
I'm just annoyed that decimation would be a 10% layoff; standard if even weak-sauce these days. Too many people use "kill one in ten" to mean "kill them all, let God sort it out."
- ajkjk 7mo ago
  at a practical level that word hasn't meant "one in ten" for like, decades. probably just need to get used to it.
- piva00 7mo ago
  Semantic drift has always happened and will always happen in languages. Decimation has been commonly used as a synonym for absolute destruction for a long time, being annoyed by it is wasted energy, better to let it go and accept the new meaning.
- fuzzy_biscuit 7mo ago
  Etymology is not usage though. I get where you're coming from, but fighting vernacular is all but useless outside of academia.
- Leszek 7mo ago
  Be careful to check whether you're in a glass house before throwing stones - "layoff" used to mean a temporary release from employment for seasonal labour before it meant a permanent one (https://www.etymonline.com/word/layoff https://www.etymonline.com/word/layoff). "Standard" as an adjective also used to mean "being held to a standard of excellence" rather than "normal" or "average". It's ok for words to change meaning over time.
nslsm 7mo ago
[flagged]
- totallymike 7mo ago
  I’m confused. What about the footer are you referring to?
nine_k 7mo ago
Is there a good example of an Open Source project that was born out of VC money? Not a failed attempt of hockey-stick growth that open-sources its code upon shutting down commercial operation, but a genuinely healthy FOSS project that started as a VC-funded company, and still is going strong? In my opinion, FOSS and VC have opposite goals and attitudes: openness, organic growth, staying free vs moat, meteoric growth fueled by marketing, turning a huge profit. I don't see how they could be compatible in the long term, unless the FOSS project is a gateway drug into a proprietary ecosystem.
sieabahlpark 7mo ago
[dead]
the_gipsy 7mo ago
Deno started as a clean slate, no npm. Three years in, they decided to scrap it because they thought they wouldn't get enough users the promised way. So what does Deno offer now, exactly? The free parts just sound like a pretext to pull you into some paid solutions. It can be hard to run a company, even harder to make a buck, but at the same time we can still be allowed to say how much they suck at it.
GTP 7mo ago
> Comparing him to Nero is gross. Just an historic curiosity: Nero setting Rome on fire is just a legend. At the time, there was a fire every other day due to wooden houses and poor to nonexistent safety. I even heard somewhere that Nero actively tried to help some people escaping from the fire by opening his residence's doors. So the comparison with Nero could still be correct, but for another reason: someone being wrongly blamed.

simonw 7mo ago

Yeah, the tone felt off to me too. It felt a bit too much like a celebration of "look how right I was" concerning their earlier posts.

echelon 7mo ago

Fuck this blog post. I'll say it. This author is being an asshole and punching good people when they're down. We live in a land of goddamned hyperscalers and megacorps trying to minimize how much they pay us (or get rid of us). Trillion dollar Zeuses that skirt by antitrust regulations for decades on end, crushing any would-be competition. Pilfering from open source while encrusting it in proprietary systems that cost an arm and a leg. Destroying the open web, turning every channel into an advertising shakedown, monitoring us, spying on us, cozying up to the spy apparatus in every country they do business in... How dare anyone throw rocks at an open source effort? I don't even like JavaScript, but I applaud what these folks are trying to do. At least they're trying. Can't even get a decent round of applause.

gkoberger 7mo ago
Yeah, I was being nice, but this writer upset me. He sees Ryan Dahl as Nero, but he’s a lot closer to Robin Hood.
- wahnfrieden 7mo ago
  If Robin Hood was CEO presiding over a hierarchy of wage workers, with VC backing to shoot for unicorn status
  - gkoberger 7mo ago
    He may have the same title, but he’s way closer to an engineer than Elon/Bezos/etc. My analogy was taking VC money and using it to build an open source tool.
saghm 7mo ago
> We live in a land of goddamned hyperscalers and megacorps trying to minimize how much they pay us (or get rid of us). Trillion dollar Zeuses that skirt by antitrust regulations for decades on end, crushing any would-be competition. Pilfering from open source while encrusting it in proprietary systems that cost an arm and a leg. Destroying the open web, turning every channel into an advertising shakedown, monitoring us, spying on us, cozying up to the spy apparatus in every country they do business in... > How dare anyone throw rocks at an open source effort? According to the article, Deno raised over $25 million from venture capital. Unless you're disputing that, it seems a bit disingenuous to criticize corporations but call this an "open source effort"
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- echelon 7mo ago
  I'm sick of open source "purism" too. It's almost all caused by the OSI. The OSI is owned and operated by the hyperscalers, who benefit from this in-fighting and license purity bullshit. Is the only open source free labor? Some people think so. Are open core and fair source licenses invalid? Yeah - let's make everything BSD/MIT so managed versions can go live inside AWS and GCP and make those companies billions, while the original authors see limited or no upside. The fact is - open source needs salients to attack the hyperscalers. It needs to pay its engineers. It needs to expand and grow. One of the ways to do that is building a business around it. Another way is building an open core plus services that drive revenue to sustain and grow the business. Having VC money doesn't invalidate what's being done. It helps the experiment evolve faster. Nobody's here complaining about Google and Microsoft and Amazon, yet that's where 99.9% of our ire should be directed. And yet we're pouring venom on this small and valiant effort. We dump on Redis and Elastic while they're being torn to shreds and eaten by trillion dollar giants. This entire conversation has become perverted to the point we're no longer talking about what matters: freedom to operate independently of the giants that control the world. Instead we're complaining about people taking a risk, trying to actually do something impactful that matters.
  - 7mo ago

verdverm 7mo ago

> calling out Ryan directly for some reason Accountability starts and stops at the top. Many CEOs (CxOs) get called out. Personally, I want to write something similar about Bluesky leadership, who have fumbled hard multiple times since peaking, and have now "raised funding" from Bain Capital (private equity).

phpnode 7mo ago
These things are easy to say but just because someone has the title CEO doesn't mean they're automatically void of human feelings. I'm sure you understand there's a big gap between a Ryan Dahl and a Satya Nadella, despite them sharing the same job title.
- verdverm 7mo ago
  > void of human feelings What if we reframe this about how the CEO treats their users and employees? Why does Ryan deserve to be free from criticism?
  - phpnode 7mo ago
    Do you have any special insight here or are you speculating? I'm not saying that he should be free from criticism, but that we should try and have some empathy for people who try things even if they fail, particularly when they've offered their services to the community for free for the last 5+ years (much longer when considering node.js)
    - verdverm 7mo ago
      > Do you have any special insight here or are you speculating? I'm trying to understand why you carve an exception for this one individual. When I worked in restaurants, the owner and I had a very interesting conversation after hours, and with beers, about his thoughts and feelings being responsible for the well being and livelihood of everyone that worked there. It was a positive moment, I thought I had a great boss, I work my ass off for him. A year later I found he was trimming hours off of my paycheck. I quit on the spot. Months later I heard he did the same to the waitstaff tips and it wasn't much longer before it all fell apart. People can appear very different publicly than privately, and they can change over time.

phpnode 7mo ago

Agreed. It is very easy to criticise if you've never been in the hot seat, and if you've never had to make tough decisions like this. As far as I can tell this person has never run a business with actual employees. If Dahl had posted the typical layoff announcement people would be criticising that too.

hardwaregeek 7mo ago

Agreed. I was skeptical of Deno and I think their package management story was a mistake. But the people were still trying to make JavaScript better and doing so out of genuine love for the language. I especially feel for the employees who put in several years of their life, with the resulting opportunity cost.

evbogue 7mo ago

Agreed about the article tone. I'm a Deno lifer over here, and will definitely not try to cover up the mistakes they've made along the way or the trouble their deploy product has had over the past few months. Ryan Dahl is obviously polarizing as a personality for many people, always has been since he decided to "hate almost all software" or even before that when he created Node.js. I don't use Fresh. Serverless is kind of a weird offering that forces developers to do a lot of work to adjust their programs to running all over the place. I even wish Deno had never supported NPM because that ruined their differentiator. I'm going to keep using Deno and I hope they use this opportunity to refocus on their core product offering so that I can move back to using it from this VPS that is hosting all of my Deno servers right now.

KyleJune 7mo ago
I'm planning on using Deno long term too and have also made some contributions to their standard library. But I completely disagree with you on NPM support. I think that gap early on contributed to bun's success. I almost quit using it because of how difficult it was to use react with Deno. Now it's pretty easy to use react and other npm packages with Deno. Before that, a lot of the most popular packages were just forks of npm packages adapted for Deno, but not as well maintained since less people were using them. Then deduping dependencies was just harder when they were all urls. If your package had a dependency using a different version url, you'd need an import map just to remap them all to using the same version. I'm pretty happy with the current deno.json with jsr and npm compatibility.
- evbogue 7mo ago
  As an early Deno purist I must invoke the 10 Mistakes talk that Ryan gave when he launched Deno: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=M3BM9TB-8yA&t=11s&pp=ygUScnlhbiBkYWhsIG1pc3Rha2Vz https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=M3BM9TB-8yA&t=11s&pp=ygUScnlhb...
- afavour 7mo ago
  As someone who has mostly just tinkered with this stuff (while using Node extensively at work) I see two truths: - Deno initially seemed like something a number of us were clamouring for: a restart of the server JS ecosystem. ES modules from the start, more sensibly thought out and browser compatible APIs, etc etc - that restart is incompatible with the business goals of a VC funded startup. They needed NPM compatibility but that destroyed the chances of a restart happening. I’m just sticking with Node. I know Deno and Bun are faster and have a few good features (though Node has been cribbing from them extensively as time has gone on). I just don’t trust a VC backed runtime to keep velocity in the long term.

dangoodmanUT 7mo ago

Yeah, on top of that bringing in social media politics into it is weird, makes it hard to take this as pure/useful criticism

colesantiago 7mo ago

Some businesses don't need to be VC backed though. That is the problem.

gkoberger 7mo ago
Agreed. But building something new takes capital, and it’s really hard to find it for an open source tool. FWIW, it worked for Bun (at least for the VCs and employees), so there is a model there that works.

Aldipower 7mo ago

True! Love to Ryan from my heart. He came around the corner with Node just in the right moment when ActionScript3 started to die and I seamlessly could continue my career and building things. Still to today.. Things with Deno are very ambitious and hard to establish in this space. The blog post is embarrassing.

pjmlp 7mo ago
JavaScript on the server goes all the way back to Netscape days with LiveWire.
- Aldipower 7mo ago
  Yes, I have a SGI Indigo2 with NetScape FastTrack with server-side JavaScript running in my basement! But it is not the same as Node though. ;-) I am selling it btw! Look at the CRT-screenshots. :-) https://www.kleinanzeigen.de/s-anzeige/sgi-indigo-2-mit-netscape-fasttrack-http-server-inkl-nec-fe1250-/3252427509-228-9487 https://www.kleinanzeigen.de/s-anzeige/sgi-indigo-2-mit-nets...
  - pjmlp 7mo ago
    Oh man, it is really cool, hope it gets a nice new owner.

bombcar 7mo ago

I'm just annoyed that decimation would be a 10% layoff; standard if even weak-sauce these days. Too many people use "kill one in ten" to mean "kill them all, let God sort it out."

ajkjk 7mo ago
at a practical level that word hasn't meant "one in ten" for like, decades. probably just need to get used to it.
piva00 7mo ago
Semantic drift has always happened and will always happen in languages. Decimation has been commonly used as a synonym for absolute destruction for a long time, being annoyed by it is wasted energy, better to let it go and accept the new meaning.
fuzzy_biscuit 7mo ago
Etymology is not usage though. I get where you're coming from, but fighting vernacular is all but useless outside of academia.
Leszek 7mo ago
Be careful to check whether you're in a glass house before throwing stones - "layoff" used to mean a temporary release from employment for seasonal labour before it meant a permanent one (https://www.etymonline.com/word/layoff https://www.etymonline.com/word/layoff). "Standard" as an adjective also used to mean "being held to a standard of excellence" rather than "normal" or "average". It's ok for words to change meaning over time.

nslsm 7mo ago

[flagged]

totallymike 7mo ago
I’m confused. What about the footer are you referring to?

nine_k 7mo ago

Is there a good example of an Open Source project that was born out of VC money? Not a failed attempt of hockey-stick growth that open-sources its code upon shutting down commercial operation, but a genuinely healthy FOSS project that started as a VC-funded company, and still is going strong? In my opinion, FOSS and VC have opposite goals and attitudes: openness, organic growth, staying free vs moat, meteoric growth fueled by marketing, turning a huge profit. I don't see how they could be compatible in the long term, unless the FOSS project is a gateway drug into a proprietary ecosystem.

sieabahlpark 7mo ago

[dead]

the_gipsy 7mo ago

Deno started as a clean slate, no npm. Three years in, they decided to scrap it because they thought they wouldn't get enough users the promised way. So what does Deno offer now, exactly? The free parts just sound like a pretext to pull you into some paid solutions. It can be hard to run a company, even harder to make a buck, but at the same time we can still be allowed to say how much they suck at it.

GTP 7mo ago

> Comparing him to Nero is gross. Just an historic curiosity: Nero setting Rome on fire is just a legend. At the time, there was a fire every other day due to wooden houses and poor to nonexistent safety. I even heard somewhere that Nero actively tried to help some people escaping from the fire by opening his residence's doors. So the comparison with Nero could still be correct, but for another reason: someone being wrongly blamed.