💰 IBM's $8 Trillion Reality Check (434 points, 508 comments)
CEO Arvind Krishna does the napkin math: fully kitting out 100 gigawatts of AI data centers would cost $8 trillion, with current technology having a 0-1% chance of reaching AGI. Is this sober analysis or sour grapes from a company that "missed the AI boat"? HN debates IBM's track record, the economics of the AI boom, and whether we're watching the most expensive hype cycle in tech history.
https://www.businessinsider.com/ibm-ceo-big-tech-ai-capex-data-center-spending-2025-12
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46124324
🎵 Learning Music with Strudel (458 points, 110 comments)
A delightfully accessible browser-based tool that turns code into music. No DAW, no plugins—just text patterns that become beats. In under a minute you'll be making your own music, whether you're a developer who can't play instruments or a musician curious about live-coding. The course literally explains "what is a bass line" and then hands you a working example.
https://terryds.notion.site/Learning-Music-with-Strudel-2ac98431b24180deb890cc7de667ea92
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46052478
👥 The Proximity Paradox (183 points, 145 comments)
New research on Fortune 500 software engineers shows co-located teammates get 22% more code feedback but ship less. The tradeoff: proximity increases long-run learning at the expense of short-term velocity. Women both mentor more and receive more mentorship when in-person. Post-COVID, that feedback advantage vanished—so if you're junior and remote, you need to manufacture those collisions on purpose.
https://pallais.scholars.harvard.edu/publications/power-proximity-coworkers-training-tomorrow-or-productivity-today
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46121243
🔴 OpenAI's Code Red Moment (601 points, 662 comments)
Full-circle moment: Google declared code red after ChatGPT launched, now OpenAI's feeling the heat from Gemini.
https://www.theverge.com/news/836212/openai-code-red-chatgpt
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46121870
🤖 Anthropic Acquires Bun (1,683 points, 800 comments)
How a zero-revenue JavaScript runtime became critical infrastructure for a billion-dollar AI product. We explore the "talent vs technology" debate, vertical integration in AI, and whether this marks a new phase where AI companies own everything from models to runtimes.
https://bun.com/blog/bun-joins-anthropic
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46124267
📖 Paged Out: The Anti-AI Zine (356 points, 34 comments)
A nostalgic throwback to 90s hacker culture where one article equals one page, AI content is explicitly banned, and magazines can still be shipped as executables. From demoscene zines to a handwritten ML model you can literally print on paper, this free technical magazine is a breath of fresh air that reminds us (ironically) what human-created content feels like.
https://pagedout.institute
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46126217