MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Zer0 Browser – A Fast, Private Browser with Zero Bloat?
by gokulnair2001 | 2025-05-12 05:12:24+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m building something I’ve always wanted but could never quite find—a browser that just gets out of your way. It’s called Zer0 Browser.

The idea is simple: - No bloat - No tracking - Just the web, fast and clean

Most browsers today feel more like operating systems. They come bundled with shopping deals, crypto wallets, aggressive search suggestions, and background data collection. Zer0 is my pushback—a browser that respects your time, your attention, and your privacy.

# What Zer0 stands for:

* Speed – Instant launch, snappy performance, low memory usage

* Simplicity – Minimal UI, no tabs by default (think iA Writer but for the web), focused reading experience

* Privacy – No telemetry, no trackers, no creepy background services

# What I'm exploring: Optional Local LLM Integration – Imagine summarizing a long article or querying a page using natural language—all on-device, with no data ever leaving your machine.

If this sounds like your kind of browser, I’d love for you to check out the alpha: https://www.zerobrowser.co/

What I’d love your thoughts on: Would you use a browser like this?

What are your deal-breakers or must-haves?

What frustrates you most about current browsers?

Any feedback, ideas, or warnings from the trenches are super appreciated:)

Thanks!
by lwo32k | 2025-05-12 05:13:30+00:00
What culture you cultivate is just one variable. Go to Japan or Iran or Italy and they will fall over each other, telling you how great their culture was and what it cultivated. When things are relatively stable, it's not hard to lean on the Explore side of the Explore-Exploit tradeoff. When things are ever changing, and at faster and unpredictable rates the tradeoff naturally gets much more complex.

You have to ride the waves. No one really controls them.
by robocat | 2025-05-12 05:14:21+00:00
If one altruistically decides to give to society then I'm unsure what outcomes one should expect from society? What's the game-theory here? If one wants something back then who is responsible to get something back?

My canonical example is Linus: if the world was fair he should be worth some pretty big numbers. It is harder to pick what is fair in return for someone's scientific innovation. I would guess Linus has generated as much worth as Microsoft, so in an ideal world he should be worth a Bill Gates. Linus has mostly chosen other non-financial goals to chase (unlike Bill). Linus $50 million, Bill Gates $156 billion.

“While I may not get any money from Linux, I get a huge personal satisfaction from having written something that people really enjoy using.” “The cyberspace earnings I get from Linux come in the format of having a network of people that know me and trust me, and that I can depend on in return.”

Some people that complain about the wealthy making money are selfishly obsessed about money themselves. Perhaps even hypocritically denegrating others as too-money-focused when others choose to win the money making game.

Unfortunately our world tends to be very focused on financial gains; and often completely ignoring non-financial benefits.

What are the non-financial benefits of an iPhone compared to the money paid for it?

How much is job-enjoyment or job-status worth; compared against either the money earned or the time spent?
by ldubost | 2025-05-12 05:15:22+00:00
Hi,

We have started work on this through sponsoring of openDesk: https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/openincryptpad This allows editing of diagrams stores in Nextcloud using cryptpad. However the files are not e2ee in Nextcloud.

The API we build has now been extended to other file types and also support e2ee https://github.com/cryptpad/cryptpad-api-examples

Integration with the new web version of e2ee of Nextcloud could be possible now but we don't have capacity to develop this. Integration with other e2ee tools is also technically feasible.

What type of integration are you looking for ? We would be interested to understand the workflow you would find interesting.

Ludovic, from the CryptPad team
by danielmarkbruce | 2025-05-12 05:15:23+00:00
That's also a silly idea. Companies get sued all the time. There is recourse. If you run a bank that runs an AI model to make decisions on home loans and the effect is no black people get a loan, you are going to find yourself in court the exact same way as if you hire loan officers who are a bunch of racists. There is no difference.

It is available to the entity running inference. Every single token and all the probabilities of every choice. But every decision made at every company isn't subject to a court hearing. So no, that's also a silly idea.
by throwaway422432 | 2025-05-12 05:15:59+00:00
This was quite interesting in how Molycorp naively handed it's near monopoly to China in the 1980s.

We've since seen this playbook repeated across multiple industries.

Lynas Rare Earths noted in it's last quarterly report that it has started it's HRE separation circuit and will begin producing Dysprosium this month (May 2025), followed by Terbium in June at it's Malaysian site.

Doesn't really help the US (which is why Lynas are building the Seadrift plant in Texas with DoD funding) as most of that will go to Japan. Lynas interestingly got into the rare earth business in the wake of China's ban on exporting to Japan, so their major customers are the likes of Sumitumo who put up the initial funds for the Malaysian plant.

Last I heard Lynas were asking for more USG funds due to issues with the planned waste water treatment which will blow out the project costs to get working. The actual draft environmental assessment document is an eye-opener as far as the minutia of requirements, despite this being a national security priority.

https://www.listcorp.com/asx/lyc/lynas-rare-earths-limited/n...

https://www.forbes.com.au/news/billionaires/the-800-million-...

https://www.businessdefense.gov/ibr/mceip/news/docs/Lynas-Se...
by Dig1t | 2025-05-12 05:17:03+00:00
Absolutely not cherry picking, almost every single one of these has to do with race, diversity, equity etc

“Amplifying Diverse Voices in STEM Education”

“Research Initiation: Long-Term Effect of Involvement in Humanitarian Engineering Projects on Student Professional Formation and Views of Diversity and Inclusion”

“Conference: Future Faculty Workshop: Preparing Diverse Leaders for the Future, Summers of 2022-2025”

“RCN: LEAPS: Culture Change for Inclusion of Indigenous Voices in Biology”

“CAREER: When Two Worlds Collide: An Intersectional Analysis of Black Women's Role Strain and Adaptation in Computing Sciences”

“EAGER: Collaborative Research: Promoting Diverse and Inclusive Leadership in the Geosciences (GOLD-EN)”

It goes on and on like that. Millions of dollars in taxpayer money.

>already been paid for and done, and you want to cut funding so you don't even get the final report/publications out of it

Yes, correct. This is tax payer money funding racist politics. It’s garbage pretend science and this stuff is done spreading.
by MrJohz | 2025-05-12 05:17:29+00:00
I mostly use SolidJS. It's super lightweight - in many ways, it's just a wrapper around `document.createElement` and a signals library - so you've got a lot of flexibility to use it how you want. It works well for complex web applications, but the library part of it is small enough that you could probably use it for individual widgets on a page and not have too much overhead. The UX is React-like (hooks and JSX), but honestly feels simpler - JSX gets compiled directly to DOM nodes rather than a VDOM abstraction, and there's no "rules of hooks" to learn.

That said, it's kind of niche, which means you need to be more willing to write stuff yourself, so a good mainstream alternative is Vue. Vue is also signals-based and relatively lightweight, but still has a lot of batteries included and a wider ecosystem that is fairly strong. They're also great at taking the parts of other frameworks that work best and implementing them in Vue, but in a fairly considered way. I understand there's also some fairly battle-tested full-stack frameworks in the Vue ecosystem, although I've not had much personal experience of that.

Both libraries are signals-based, which is a completely different reactivity concept to React, which will take a bit of getting used to. But I suspect Vue will make that transition a bit easier - despite SolidJS's more superficial similarities to React, it behaves quite differently.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-12 05:19:32+00:00
I used to play on a TinyMUSH server where many of the other players were buddies from back in my college days (early 90s). Despite being "all grown up" we still liked to program toys that did silly things, demonstrating to our peers that we had senses of humor, and parodying the silly academic world around us.

One of my friends designed a toy that was called a "Thesis Generator" and whenever it was activated, it selected various words from a list to create a ridiculous word-salad Master's Thesis title. Honestly, most of its output was more or less believable and less absurd than some of the real theses I've seen, written by real students, and probably even passed peer review.

It seems like the pressure is on both ends, for academics to produce something really novel and tightly-scoped, and so they're going out of their way to find the perfect niche to research, and the academic review team wants to read something really Impressive and Scholarly, and those incentives tend to disconnect them from things like reality and sanity.
Show HN: Clean, high-quality AI image generation
by avin_regmi | 2025-05-12 05:21:42+00:00
Hi HN, I recently built a web app that lets users generate AI images using models we trained and fine-tuned on our own custom datasets. One thing that sets it apart is that we run generation with more iterations than most tools. This makes our operational costs a bit higher, but it allows us to produce noticeably better quality images.

The app is paid, just enough to cover infrastructure and GPU costs. You’ll need to sign up to try it out.

I’d love for you to give it a try and let me know what you think. Feedback on image quality, user experience, or anything else is very welcome.

Thanks for checking it out.
by cwillu | 2025-05-12 05:24:28+00:00
This isn't “we haven't tested your browser, if it breaks, that's on you”, this is “we don't specifically Trust™ the environment you're running your browser in, therefore fuck you.”

“Web is supported” in this instance just means “the web, but only when mediated by google, microsoft or apple”, which is not the web as far as I'm concerned.
by Saigonautica | 2025-05-12 05:24:44+00:00
I know someone in this space. The insurance forms are processed first-pass with AI or ML (I forget which). Then the remainder are processed by humans in Viet Nam. This is not for the USA.

I've also vaguely heard of a large company that provides just this as a service -- basically a factory where insurance claims are processed by humans here in VN, in one of the less affluent regions. I recall they had some minor problems with staffing as it's not a particularly pleasant job (it's very boring). On the other hand, the region has few employment opportunities, so perhaps it's good for some people too.

I'm not sure which country this last one is processing forms for. It may, or may not be the USA.

I don't really have an opinion to offer -- I just thought you might find that interesting.
by bound008 | 2025-05-12 05:24:52+00:00
I built a simple SwiftUI/Swift Data app to do the same thing across my Apple Watch, iPhone, iPad and Desktop.

With the heavy lifting of SwiftUI/Swift Data, and iCloud providing automatic and private syncing, this is the cloc output for my project, (including widgets and all of the code and projects needed to target all of these platforms.)

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Language files blank comment code

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

XML 13 0 0 579

Swift 19 131 142 548

JSON 4 0 0 115

YAML 1 7 0 43

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

SUM: 37 138 142 1285

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

If you live in the apple ecosystem and want to make a simple tool for yourself, you really should go ahead and do that.

It started as a desire to have a "focus" on my Apple Watch at all times, and in less than 10 hours, I have widgets, shortcuts (and Siri) integrations, and syncing across every apple platform (although I haven't yet tried it on tvOS).

I've thought about productizing it, and I might one day, but that would add orders of magnitude to the time of making this something that people should be asked to pay for.

And I'm not going to open source it, because it is ~500 loc, with no libraries plus a bunch of Xcode generated stuff.
by intended | 2025-05-12 05:25:16+00:00
I don’t have a problem with DEI. Heck, I’ve seen a research paper that ended up with a different perspective and analysis, simply because it had to make a global south to global north comparison.

I am also sure people here can relate to learning about how skin care research is improving for other skin types, now.

Does this mean I think DEI is a magic bullet? no. It isn’t a bogey man to be afraid of either.

From that list, things like “ George Mason University Quantum Education Research Postdoctoral Fellowship” have been nuked.

Having conference posters removed because they use the word “diversity” when discussing human auditory systems, is a level of anti-intellectualism that has torpedoed America’s credibility.

—-

Girls go from being bright, to losing that spark in their eyes around high school.

Amazingly, things aren’t all rosy for men either. Nihilism is the emotion of the era.

These are just infuriating losses of inspiration, talent and motivation in the populace.

ON HN, we’ve talked about UBI. Giving education grants to increase diversity, and to increase the variance of random career walks US children can visualize, is a huge boon. It’s what we expect people to spend their time on if they had the freedom to do so.

I support the argument that more people should go into the trades. They should!

But you are gutting investment into science, and education. You are killing off your future pipeline of experts, and the pain will be felt in 5-10 years, and constantly compound.

Europe is already rolling out the red carpet for experts. They have better labor laws, which will make it even more attractive to set up shop there and have a great life to lead.

American firms will have to find reasons to attract people back, and with a gutted bureaucracy - the US state wont be an attractive factor, it would be something that has to be worked around.
by bruce511 | 2025-05-12 05:25:40+00:00
Are you bringing anything to the table? Or are you mostly looking for ways to improve yourself.

Both are fine, but its not clear from your post which you are chasing. And clearly it kinda matters to the people you are contacting.

If you have a specific set of challenges and you're looking for advice, then say so. If you have been successful and are looking to advise others then pitch that instead.

Given that my specific industry context is different from yours, given that your experience is likely in a different country (or city) to me, I'm not really sure what you're looking for, other than being away from home and looking for people to socialize with.

Perhaps it would be helpful if you articulate your goals better.
by fuzzfactor | 2025-05-12 05:27:29+00:00
Concepts like this would definitely be in play and misguided UBI could result more in preservation of status quo than allowing abundance to spread.

That's why experiments need to be made.

Now with research pay Bell was right up there with other prestigious institutions, elite but not like the nobility of old.

I would say very much more like a "Gentleman" scientist of antiquity, whether they were patrons or patronized in some way, they could focus daily on the tasks at hand even when they are some of the most unlikely actions to yield miracles.

Simply because the breakthroughs that are needed are the same as it ever was, and almost no focused tasks lead in that direction ever, so you're going to have to do a lot of "seemingly pointless" stuff to even come up with one good thing. You better get started right away and don't lift your nose from the grindstone either ;)
by bradchris | 2025-05-12 05:27:53+00:00
Do we think that Bell Labs, if it were to avoid being broken up, would have existed in any way the same way today ?

Cynically, it likely would have ended up a zombie shell of itself, like IBM

Topically, assuming it avoided such a fate and was held in high regard by the industry and employees, this current administration would likely be meddling with every single grant, contract, or project that did not align with the administrations' priorities (see: colleges and research grants)
by danpalmer | 2025-05-12 05:28:16+00:00
Zed. They've upped their game in the AI integration and so far it's the best one I've seen (external from work). Cursor and VSCode+Copilot always felt slow and janky, Zed is much less janky feels like pretty mature software, and I can just plug in my Gemini API key and use that for free/cheap instead of paying for the editor's own integration.
by bawolff | 2025-05-12 05:29:27+00:00
Usually the best alleged application is using them to do physics simulations that wouldn't be possible on a normal computer. Its a bit unclear precisely what that will open up, but normal computers opened up a lot of applications by being able to simulate classical system, perhaps QC will do the same for quantum physics things.

You're right that most of the other algorithms are pretty useless. Shor and Grover are certainly fascinating intellectually, but i doubt would be particularly useful (shor because everyone will switch to pqc if qc ever becomes relavent and grover is too slow to ever be useful)
by kazinator | 2025-05-12 05:29:31+00:00
Someone working mainly in a terminal could hack this into Basta.

https://www.kylheku.com/cgit/basta/about/

The stock Basta puts a clock (date + time) into a scroll-protected status line, host name and current working dir.

Basta works fine on MacOS, but you need to get a more recent build of Bash from somewhere (Homebrew ...). I should attempt a Zsh port one of these days; the name wouldn't change, though. :)
by SafeDusk | 2025-05-12 05:29:54+00:00
I am betting on myself.

I built a minimal agentic framework (with editing capability) that works for a lot of my tasks with just seven tools: read, write, diff, browse, command, ask and think.

One thing I'm proud of is the ability to have it be more proactive in making changes and taking next action by just disabling the `ask` tool.

I won't say it is better than any of the VSCode forks, but it works for 70% of my tasks in an understandable manner. As for the remaining stuff, I can always use Cursor/Windsurf in a complementary manner.

It is open, have a look at https://github.com/aperoc/toolkami if it interests you.
by ldubost | 2025-05-12 05:30:54+00:00
We never pretended the drive has local syncing. The drive is extremely useful for people to organize their documents inside CryptPad.

It is possible to create folders with any file types in it. Shared folders can be also created.

The workflow you describe with syncthing involves local synching.

We are not saying that syncing locally is not interesting. It's just a lot more work on top of the editor work, the online sharing, the e2ee, etc.. We work with the capacity we have. Also as I said, syncing opens the door to version compatibility issues, risks of mistakenly deleting data of your drive and high volume just for storage. This means for our hosting service (cryptpad.fr) management of much higher volumes. We are not even sure the 1gb free storage policy is sustainable for that use case. But we are working on a path towards this as we have plans for a CryptPad API.

Ludovic, from the CryptPad team
by foxglacier | 2025-05-12 05:31:08+00:00
Huh? Did you see the list? That's number one. I picked out the least DEI looking one I could from a quick glance and it turned out to include "increase the diversity, equity, and inclusivity (DEI) of the Biological Physics Community", and "To increase the participation of women and URM scientists at the meeting, we will ...". It's obvious why these grants were terminated. They were DEI ahead of science and the government is working to clean that out.
by x0x0 | 2025-05-12 05:31:39+00:00
I wasn't disagreeing with you; I idly did the mental math, was surprised at how high it was, then thought through how I'd probably finger-in-the-air that it would take a couple thousand eng years to build a whole car OS. You're building safety critical software, so you're going to start with a very serious test effort, etc. So finger in the air a good chunk of a billion dollars a year for many years.
by lumost | 2025-05-12 05:32:50+00:00
Curiously, medieval societies struggled with “usury”. Effectively being a wage earner was a tough game as you might owe rent, have a bad month, or end up overly indebted. Most wage earners eventually became indentured servants or worse. This contrasts with peasants who had permanent land rights and owned everything they produced, and did not have a fixed rent.

It’s not just that people don’t understand debt, it’s that the vast majority of people live in precarious situations which make debt a temptation. A little debt to grease transactions and buy assets is good, a lot of debt is a burning crises.
by rvz | 2025-05-12 05:34:26+00:00
> The Continuous Thought Machine (CTM) is a neural network architecture that enables a novel approach to thinking about data. It departs from conventional feed-forward models by explicitly incorporating the concept of Neural Dynamics as the central component to its functionality.

Still going through the paper, But this looks very exciting to actually see, the internal visual recurrence in action when confronting a task (such as the 2D Puzzle) - making it easier to interpret neural networks over several tasks involving 'time'.

(This internal recurrence may not be new, but applying neural synchronization as described in this paper is).

> Indeed, we observe the emergence of interpretable and intuitive problem-solving strategies, suggesting that leveraging neural timing can lead to more emergent benefits and potentially more effective AI systems

Exactly. Would like to see more applications of this in existing or new architectures that can also give us additional transparency into the thought process on many tasks.

Another great paper from Sakana.
by aspenmayer | 2025-05-12 05:34:38+00:00
I think that you’re right that Apple is different, but it’s different so that Apple can control it. I wrote about this recently in another comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=43953751

The gist of it is this:

Both Steves worked for Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari and Chuck E. Cheese. I believe that Jobs was likely inspired by Bushnell to create a tech ecosystem to enable easy creation, monetization, and control. But mostly, I think Jobs and Wozniak created Apple to enable them both to create the kinds of technology they needed and wanted, to get the work done they knew folks were using personal computers for. Personal computers have distinct use cases which make them distinct from mainframes or other systems largely outside the control of individuals, and this appeal to the individual is what differentiates Apple from Google or other computer hardware companies. Apple still actually has tech support, retail stores, and yet the goalposts of the market and consumer expectations have moved. Apple hasn’t kept up with what consumers expect in many ways, and the markets they serve have changed, as Apple is now serving multiple sides of markets that they operate as an intermediary, as opposed to the past where Apple was constrained to being a participant in multiple, sometimes overlapping markets.