MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wkat4242 | 2025-07-13 13:44:29+00:00
I don't really agree. By sitting at the big tech table you give up a lot of ethics.

I think it's similar to NGOs like Greenpeace. I respected them when they were using rubber boats to blockade toxic waste dumping. Now they have a millions earning CEO rubbing shoulders with the pollutors and ostensibly "changing the system from within". Which creates watered down measures and too much dependency on the industry. Just like Reagan's "trickle down" fallacy this doesn't work. Money and power corrupts.

Also yes a lot of us use Firefox but not because we still love it so much. But because it's the least worst option. Kinda the only option if you want to run the real Ublock Origin now.
by LeafItAlone | 2025-07-13 13:44:33+00:00
I agree; I don’t understand it.

For the crowd that thinks it is possible:

Why can’t they just have a final non-LLM processing tool that looks for a specific string and never lets it through. That could include all of the tips and tricks for getting the LLM to encode and decode it. It may not ever be truly 100%, but I have to imagine it can get close enough that people think they have cracked it.
by gr4vityWall | 2025-07-13 13:44:49+00:00
> hating Mozilla is becoming a hacker tribal signifier

I respectfully disagree. It's one of the conclusions one can reach upon following Firefox development over the last decade. I'm not going to imply it's the "correct" one. It is a common one in hacker communities.

> It almost feel like each commenter is competing to out-hate the others or to add a layer of “in fact its so bad that we should (consequences)”

Unfortunately, I can't say much besides that this isn't my intention at all, and that I don't sense anything like that from the comments. I can't know for sure the intent behind other poster.
by dailker | 2025-07-13 13:45:09+00:00
everyutil-c is a modern, modular C utility library crafted to provide a wide collection of robust, reusable functions that simplify everyday low-level programming tasks across platforms. It acts as a “standard library extension,” bundling together well-tested logic for common needs such as array manipulation, string processing, number utilities, and more all with performance and portability in mind. The API is intentionally designed to be clean and intuitive, exposing clearly documented headers and consistent function signatures, making it easy to drop into existing projects. Under the hood, the implementation emphasizes speed and reliability, with careful memory handling and minimal external dependencies. The library is thoroughly tested using a dedicated test suite to ensure correctness and stability across use cases. everyutil-c supports multiple build systems Makefiles, Autotools, and CMake and provides an automated build.sh script that can even fetch dependencies and configure environments like MSYS2 on Windows. Recent enhancements include a major refactor of array utilities (e.g., more efficient iteration, memory-safe operations), improved build scripts, and better platform abstraction.

*everyutil-js is JavaScript version of it (identically clone)
by CPLX | 2025-07-13 13:46:09+00:00
Yeah but we didn’t do it, because our political system is built around deference to large corporations and we’ve abandoned antitrust and taking on corporate power.

But here’s the thing. This effort to stop these corporations from delivering unlimited porn to children is a step in the right direction. Which is restraining the activity of these companies to hurt people.

Which is why calls for the old “free” internet are now, like then, bullshit.
by wkat4242 | 2025-07-13 13:47:01+00:00
But they're not. Firefox market share has tumbled and I'm getting more and more captchas because my browser is now so rare it's considered "suspicious". It's not a flaw in the product itself but it does affect its usability. Marketshare of at least 5-10% is crucial to be on the radar of web devs. Especially because the competition besides Safari is basically all one single browser because they share the engine.
by mikojan | 2025-07-13 13:47:09+00:00
I believe async/await means you have a single consumer (caller) and a single producer (callee) and only a single value will be produced (resolved).

With CPS you may send and receive many times over to whomever and from whomever you like.

In JavaScript you may write..

const fetchData = async () => { // snip return data; } const data = await fetchData();

And in Go you might express the same like..

channel := make(chan int); go func() { // snip channel <- data; }() data := <-channel

But you could also, for example, keep sending data and send it to as many consumers as you like..

go func() { for { // Infinite loop: // snip channel1 <- data; channel2 <- data; channel3 <- data; } }()
by ryandv | 2025-07-13 13:47:21+00:00
> Sure they're a bit of a facsimile of a programming challenge, but they're pretty tough problems, especially in the ones that are basically using assembly.

They are indeed "real," bonafide (though perhaps sophomoric) programming problems. There is an Exapunks puzzle that has you implement a form of binary tree search/traversal in assembly.
by BeetleB | 2025-07-13 13:47:48+00:00
> It's unclear to me that you need to pay an extremely high salary to get a good Mozilla CEO - something like 2-3x the average staff engineer would make sense.

It's unclear to me that you need to pay more than $150K total compensation for a good SW engineer.

Yet many over here are getting paid double that.

Salaries are rarely based on value created. They are based on what others pay.
by throwaway6473 | 2025-07-13 13:47:52+00:00
- Advertisers buy user data from Firefox, who can then resell or provide this data to others.

- Others buy that data.

- Big data companies and others aggregate this information.

- Cookie or IP are not necessarily required to identify users; thumbprinting, datetime, and behavioral matching can identify users adequately.

- Advertisers and analytics giants can ingest data that includes PII, if it’s encrypted, and that can be decrypted.

- New methods of tracking have replaced old ones and new methods are even better than old ones.

- This data can be used to group users in many ways, so it can know essentially who you are, when you do things, what you will do, and who you’ll do them with.

- This information is used for targeting ads, but can be used for other purposes.

- Technology to utilize this data has been evolving much more quickly.

- Why just target ads? Why not provide users with a version of reality that optimizes their consumer behavior?

- Why attempt to ensure control through enforcement? Why not control motivation and thought?

- Why have political elections? Why not control decisions?
by nocoiner | 2025-07-13 13:48:22+00:00
“The exact timeline of Neuromancer is never specified.”

This actually isn’t true. I can’t remember how much depends on the rest of the trilogy for nailing down the exact years in which it occurs, but as I recall it’s fairly clear the books in the trilogy each occur seven years apart over the late 2050s-2070s or so.

Neuromancer refers to the “Act of ‘53” that grants personhood to (certain?) AIs, so the events obviously happened after that. The other books make it clear that they occur during the 21st century (the banlieues of Paris dating to the middle of the prior century, a reference to the Wow! signal as having occurred in the preceding century).
by amluto | 2025-07-13 13:48:23+00:00
The best part when a “thinking” model carefully thinks and then says something that is obviously illogical, when the model clearly has both the knowledge and context to know it’s wrong. And then you ask it to double check and you give it a tiny hint about how it’s wrong, and it profusely apologizes, compliments you on your wisdom, and then says something else dumb.

I fully believe that LLMs encode enormous amounts of knowledge (some of which is even correct, and much of which their operator does not personally possess), are capable of working quickly and ingesting large amounts of data and working quickly, and have essentially no judgment or particularly strong intelligence of the non-memorized sort. This can still be very valuable!

Maybe this will change over the next few years, and maybe it won’t. I’m not at all convinced that scraping the bottom of the barrel for more billions and trillions of low-quality training tokens will help much.
by hnthrow90348765 | 2025-07-13 13:48:24+00:00
This is a design/requirements problem to me, not a language one. You can handle no internet connection in just about every language, but you probably won't if you don't say something about needing to do that, and plan how to store/access the data in that failed state.

If the stakes were higher (say, brain surgery to get some study results), you'd want even more planning around storage/access so that your disk doesn't die and the server is unreachable at the same time and lose the only copy. Letting a developer come up with this on their own is a footgun with an incredibly sensitive trigger.

The other reason it's design/requirements is so everyone knows and it's not just Tim the developer coming up with his own idea and not really detailing it to anyone, and then Tim gets hit by a bus and someone has to go figure out what he did (or more likely, fired because they thought AI could do all of this for them).
by monkeyelite | 2025-07-13 13:48:35+00:00
> then I would mark it very low.

What would you do differently?

I would also assert if any overlapping intervals were inserted - it’s an invariant.

If it was static I would just sort and binary search, but with inserts this seems like a fine way to reuse the std::map.

Std templates are designed for this kind of thing - make a custom comparator, document why it works, wrap it in a typedef.
by cropcirclbureau | 2025-07-13 13:49:53+00:00
I'm curious, how capital intensive/wasteful were these aimless projects? Compared to their operating expenses? What better way could they have spent this money? (Development isn't exactly a good answer, if it's not a lot of money, it won't exactly buy a lot of R&D and even if it did, R&D doesn't necessarily translate to more income).
by jhanschoo | 2025-07-13 13:50:05+00:00
> This is cognition at its weirdest: solving problems somewhat by accident, finding answers in the wrong place, connecting dots that aren’t even in the same picture.

If you solve a problem "by accident", there are very many other people who make foolish decisions daily because they do not think. Some of those pan out too and lead to understanding. A resource-bounded agent can also maintain a notion of fuel and give a random answer when it has exhausted its fuel.

The structural incompleteness mentioned isn't really meaningful. Humans have not demonstrated the capacity to make epsilon-optimal decisions on an infinite number of tasks, since we do not do an infinite number of tasks anyway.

K-complexity, and resource-bounded K-complexity are indeed extremely useful tools to talk about generalization, I'd agree, but I think the author has misunderstood the limits that K-complexity places on generalization.
by wkat4242 | 2025-07-13 13:50:11+00:00
Everyone's acting like a competent CEO is some kind of rocket scientist unicorn.

In reality they don't do all that much. And most of the decisions are driven by data and advice from Gartner that just recommend the highest bidder, not some magical insights.

After all the CEO works for the board which is made up of shareholder representatives. They have very little industry knowledge and they just want the company to jump on the latest hype and "industry practices". They're usually very risk-averse.

So the CEO is kinda tied by what's happening in the industry anyway. The only CEOs that are capable of breaking that are the ultra confident ones like Jobs or Musk.
by moron4hire | 2025-07-13 13:50:14+00:00
Somewhat recently, a couple of Chinese companies have been making some very cheap telephoto lenses. Brand marks like JINTU are offering 800mm and 1600mm lenses for around US$75-100. They are usually around F8.3, though, and lack any electronics for auto focus or stabilization (hence why so cheap). The mounting rings are also somewhat fiddly. So, you're definitely getting what you pay for. But good telephoto lenses are 10-20x more expensive, so it could be a good way to get started on the cheap.
Show HN: Brandiseer – From Idea to Full Brand Identity in Minutes
by srkdaniel | 2025-07-13 13:50:36+00:00
Hey HN

I kept seeing early-stage products with a killer idea but… the logo, slide deck, hero image, Twitter banner were all random. As a dev, I’ve felt that pain myself—hiring a designer for a cohesive brand system costs $3–10 k and weeks of back-and-forth. Cheap logo generators solve 5 % of the problem and leave you with mismatched colors + fonts.

So I built Brandiseer: paste your project name + business description → get a 16-asset brand kit in about ten minutes:

- multi-variant logo set (dark / light / mono)

- color palette + HEX/RGB sheet

- headline/body font pairing (Google Fonts)

- PDF style-guide (spacing rules, do’s / don’ts)

- website hero header, social launch graphic, app icon

- business card front/back, basic merch/mock-ups

- PNGs today; SVG/Figma export on the roadmap

Why it’s different

- Generates a system, not a single graphic—the palette / typography feed every asset.

- Ships a style-guide PDF so whoever designs your next slide deck has guard-rails.

- A “brand DNA” layer means we can add editing & re-generation without breaking consistency.

What’s next

- Re-edit flow (credit based)

- Brand “memory” so you can chat “make a holiday version of our hero image” and stay on-brand

Ask HN

- Does the kit cover what you would need for a launch? Anything missing?

- Thoughts on a pay-once vs SaaS tier? (I’m leaning pay-once for V1, then optional Pro tools.)

- Anyone interested in contributing template packs / prompt flows?

Live demo + sample kits: https://brandiseer.com

Appreciate any feedback, roasting, or “this already exists, here’s why” comments—thanks!
by hnbad | 2025-07-13 13:51:12+00:00
`Date` is based on the original Java `Date` class and its API was mostly copied verbatim, explaining a lot of the quirks and silliness. While JS can't remove things easily because that would break the web, a lot of work has gone into a set of time primitives that will effectively replace it. `Date`'s parsing logic is so bad even Java has deprecated it.

This is one of those cases where the problem isn't language design but boardroom politics - Sun wanted JS not to compete with Java so they had to try to make JS more like Java to present JS as a kind of "Java for amateurs".
by smohare | 2025-07-13 13:52:25+00:00
What’s the dev experience actually like for serious Lua? I’ve only used it for some basic neovim configuration. The dynamicism and lack of type hinting in Python that was the norm when I started having to review professional code, after transitioning from pure mathematics, was a major cognitive blocker for me. With a math paper I could typically skim the first few pages to map the author’s particular symbology (if non-standard) and know exactly what was being expressed. I could never do that with untyped code.
by delduca | 2025-07-13 13:52:33+00:00
When I decided to create a game engine where the game could be entirely scripted in a scripting language, I was choosing between JavaScript (QuickJS), Python (Boost.Python), and Lua (Sol2).

The ease of embedding Lua, even with a C++ wrapper, is incredible. With little effort, I now have something I consider “ready”.

Not to mention, it’s a very lightweight VM.

https://github.com/willtobyte/carimbo
by layer8 | 2025-07-13 13:52:54+00:00
throw new RuntimeException(e);

Linters like SpotBugs tend to complain about that. But it’s also a matter of naming. If RuntimeException was instead called something like ProgramBug, people might be more reluctant.

In the end, it’s an issue of education. People need to be aware of the possible consequences, and have to be taught how to properly handle such cases. There is no way to automate error handling without the developer having to think about it, because the right thing to do is context-dependent. Checked exceptions at least make the developer aware of failure modes to consider.
by treetalker | 2025-07-13 13:53:13+00:00
I believe it difficult to conceive of an activity more at odds with psychedelics, their therapeutic use, and the human healing, growth, and improvement that may result from their proper use, than the attempt to make money off of them — particularly through the sale and use of synthetic computer programs as trip-sitters or otherwise. Using a synthetic LLM as a trip-sitter or guide also feels antithetical to me: something about it doesn't pass a gut-check.

And as for this statement —

> “Psychedelic therapy is incredibly effective but it’s hard to do alone,” says Dylan Beynon, founder and CEO of Mindbloom, which has mailed ketamine lozenges, and now the drug in injectable form, to almost 60,000 people across the US since 2020, according to the company.

While (trustworthy, responsible, experienced, and human) trip-sitters are important and advisable for physical health and safety, I strongly disagree with the second half of the internal quotation because I think the therapeutic aspect can really only happen on one's own. Meet and greet whoever and whatever one encounters; respect, trust, and embrace the experience; decipher, study, and internalize the lessons; and then bring them back down the mountain to help others.

This should not be construed as a suggestion to do drugs.
by kevindamm | 2025-07-13 13:53:49+00:00
It's a very big "if" because other fields are comparatively underspecified. There's no equivalent to a compiler or interpreter in most cases (with spreadsheets being the lingua franca that comes even close for most industries).

It would "work" but I think it will need even more scrutiny by experts to confirm what's correct and what needs to be re-generated. Please please no vibe accounting.
Show HN: c0admin – A terminal-based AI assistant for Linux sysadmins
by ufuayk | 2025-07-13 13:54:11+00:00
I made a small CLI tool called `c0admin`. Runs locally using your own Gemini API key. No signup, no server, no tracking.

You just run `c0admin` in your terminal, and it gives you suggestions interactively.
by wkat4242 | 2025-07-13 13:54:22+00:00
It's not 100s of millions. The previous CEO made between 2.4 to 7 million (she was really good at giving herself raises) and wasn't there long enough for that to add up to even one hundred million. Still she was very overpaid with the marketshare ever declining and the new one gets even more.

Nobody else got that kind of raise at Mozilla and they probably were much better at their jobs.

But hundreds of millions it was not.
by fluidcruft | 2025-07-13 13:54:28+00:00
The article starts as

> Just in time for the Fourth of July, last week the Supreme Court effectively nullified the First Amendment for any writers, like me, who include sex scenes in their writing, *intended for other adults*

There you have it. The author already is self-aware of the appropriateness of their creation for minors.

All that's needed is an easy way for the author to click "intended for adults" on whatever material they are creating and the entire article becomes nothing more than yapping into the wind.

Substack can easily build that as a feature for example. Reddit already has that with its "NSFW" flags (but does not currently verify accounts are actually 18yo+ adult humans).

Generally, it seems like silicon valley has become so entitled to taking the mile that the threat of taking back an inch brings out the hysterical Chicken Little fursona.
by audunw | 2025-07-13 13:54:40+00:00
It’s hard to judge before stackless coroutines are reintroduced. But I think you’re entirely wrong that the next version of it will have colored functions, even according to your definition.

It has been mentioned that it’s possible that the default for debug builds is that every single function is compiled as an async function. I.e. there is canonically only one function color. Changing function color could become an optimisation for release builds. This is really not much different from inlining functions or other tricks the compiler can do with the calling convention if it has perfect knowledge of all callers.

> it appears to me that the Zig team decided to have every concurrency technique in the hope that it would appear innovative.

That’s a really bad take. It’s not much different from what they did to make allocators explicit. It’s an excellent approach for what Zig is supposed to be. Different concurrency models have different performance tradeoffs, just like with allocators. If the can support different IO models without making the language complicated, that’s a huge win, and they seem to be achieving that.

I find this approach the opposite of “appear innovative”. They’ve moved away from designing in a bunch of fancy syntax that locks users into one particular concurrency model, and gone for a more explicit and boring design which puts power in the hands of the user. It may not be right for everyone, but for what Zig is setting out to do it’s perfect. A disciplined decision in my opinion.

Getting stackless coroutines right for a low level language like Zig would be somewhat innovative. But not in a way that’s flashy or super interesting.
by kristoff_it | 2025-07-13 13:54:56+00:00
> If this doesn't make the argument that Zig has certainly not defeated function coloring, I don't know what would.

if you're opting into stackless coroutines then yeah you're opting into their viral nature, but the point is that you don't have to. as the application author your dependencies won't opt you forcefully in using stackless coroutines (or any singular execution model), which is currently the case with other languages.

this is what it means to defeat function coloring.
by jauco | 2025-07-13 13:55:54+00:00
And penne gets that meaning because en penne used to mean ‘be stuck, not able to move on’

This phrase existed because the penne was a wood affixed to the mast of sailboat that allowed you to move the sail such that the boat slowed down and stopped.

That thing was called the penne because it looked like a pen (the writing instrument)
by vessenes | 2025-07-13 13:56:01+00:00
I’d like to courteously disagree. I think existing models and existing tools are good enough to bootstrap this at least.

I’d propose the following architecture:

Step 1: Microsoft phi style - read code and write specifications using a frontier model. You could use an ensemble here to nitpick the spec; it’s only going to get written once. We also have of course many many rfcs and codebases that conform to them or where they do not we have an existing repository of bug reports, patches, forum complaints, etc.

Step 2-4: implement multilayer evaluation: does it compile? Does an existing model think the code complies with the spec on inspection? When it’s run on qemu are the key evals the same as the original software?

I propose most of steps 2-4 are automatable and rely on existing tooling and provide a framework that is, if not cheap, achievable. I’m also sure someone could improve this plan with a few more minutes of thought.

To me the interesting question is - will this add capabilities at current model sizes? My prior is yes in that the current behemoth size models feel like they are only incrementally better than 1/10 size distills. I interpret that to mean we haven’t gotten the most out of these larger scales. I will note Dario disagrees on this - he’s publicly said we need at least 10x more scale than we have now.
by alganet | 2025-07-13 13:57:28+00:00
I left a job just before the first day because they shoved in a stupid image rights clause in the contract.

I left a promising interview in the middle because they pretended the process was more bureaucratic than it was.

I left a job that was good because my manager was starting his own company and making us do his work.

It's more about honesty, really. I'd rather be unemployed than take bullshit.