MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Why don't browsers load websites directly in WASM?
by FerkiHN | 2025-07-08 09:31:14+00:00
I've been wondering — modern browsers are optimized to parse and run HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. But what if a browser was built to load and run websites written directly in WebAssembly?

Wouldn’t this improve performance, startup speed, and reduce overhead from parsing multiple formats? Why hasn't anyone created a browser where the default language for sites is WASM?

Is it a technical limitation, security concern, or just lack of interest from the ecosystem?

I’d love to hear what the HN community thinks.
by seanhunter | 2025-07-08 09:32:12+00:00
Thanks for that. That’s the trigonometric Fourier series. A complex Fourier series (which is what I mentioned) is equivalent and works similarly except that the terms are all uniform, so

f(x) = sum n=-infty to +infty C_n e^{i n x}

You can derive one from the other by using the identities

sin x = (e^(ix) - e^(-ix))/2i cos x = (e^(ix) + e^(-ix))/2

I specifically mentioned the complex series because I didn’t like the fact that the alternating terms use a different trig function and it seemed weird to me to have every second dimension in a space be different in that way but they are equivalent.

The convergence criteria for Fourier series vary depending on how strongly you need convergence but I think basically if a function is differentiable on the interval you care about then the Fourier series provably converges on that interval and otherwise if it has jump discontinuities and that sort of thing, then depending on whether it is square-integrable or a bunch of other properties) you can prove weaker forms of convergence (absolute, pointwise etc).

To address your comment I don’t see why an infinite sum prevents something being a basis. In fact I would specifically say that can’t be true because then there would never be a basis for any infinite-dimensional space- any time you want to take an inner product in such a space you need an infinite sum, and you need such an inner product to construct the basis. A sibling comment pointed me in the direction of a Hilbert basis, which seems to be what I was thinking of.
by wkat4242 | 2025-07-08 09:32:47+00:00
I don't know where you live but here those kinds of people tend to pretend to be normal and use such innocent topics to strike up a conversation. At which point they unleash the rabidly insane side of them.

I've had religious nuts, people who thought I should give them money after making light conversation, hookers, even people following me when I declined to give them money. I've even taken to carrying pepper spray at night (more forceful items are not allowed where I live). Never had to use it but I have been pretty close to it. I don't think it's allowed to use it on people here but when it comes to self-defense I'm the kind of "better a year in jail than a week in hospital" person.

If something happens worth talking about I'd strike up a conversation with a stranger in the metro or something, but on the street I'm a lot more careful.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-07-08 09:32:51+00:00
>We have just gone back to normal that most people can't make money being a musician just like being an actor is not really a viable middle class career option.

And we want to normalize that? We can also go back to the times were 8 YO's worked in teh mines and humans worked 7 days a week for 12+ hours.

>The way everyone wanted to be a rock star when i was a teenager.

Everyone wanted to be an astronaut growing up at one point too. That trend faded... but it turns out astronauts can get a living wage. Or at least, I sure hope so.
by convery | 2025-07-08 09:33:39+00:00
It certainly is fast, but I'm curious if LLMs ever will figure out how bitshifts work..

e.g. from the playground: `static const uint64_t MERSENNE_PRIME = (1ULL << 127) - 1;` which it insists is the correct way to store a 128-bit integer in followup questions.
by b112 | 2025-07-08 09:34:20+00:00
Partially.

There's probably a way to optimize in this sphere. What's important is the perception of a relationship with the professional, but on the professional's side, the application of their knowledge in the most effective way.

The masses may not be able to afford in person, one on one sessions.

But if they can be provided a means to speak their mind, discuss their problems, and have a meaningful response? That's still exceptionally helpful, especially with that response being crafted by a professional in a medical capacity.

The validity of my method can be highlighted by how many are using LLMs for "therapy". Often they're just talking, looking for a sounding board.

The problem is, LLMs are by no means therapists. Their responses are not really targeting this specific category, nor are they really helpful in sussing out a more significant medical problem.

Yet a therapist with such a setup could provide an in-between solution. Actual real skill and training, without the costs of a full one-on-one.
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2025-07-08 09:34:31+00:00
To be explicit my P(#) is meant to be the Bayesian probability an observer gives to # being conscious, not the proposition P that # is conscious. It's meant to model Descartes's receptor, as well as disagreement of the kind, "My friend things week 28 fetuses are probably (~% 80%) conscious, and I think they're probably (~20%) not". P(week 28 fetuses) itself is not true or false.

I don't think it's incoherent to make probabilistic claims like this. It might be incoherent to make deeper claims about what laws given the distribution itself. Either way, what I think is interesting is that, if we also think there is such a thing as an amount of consciousness a thing can have, as in the panpsychic view, these two things create an inverse-square law of moral consideration that matches the shape of most people's intuitions oddly well.

For example: Let's say rock is probably not conscious, P(rock) < 1%. Even if it is, it doesn't seem like it would be very conscious. A low percentage of a low amount multiplies to a very low expected value, and that matches our intuitions about how much value to give rocks.
by FerkiHN | 2025-07-08 09:35:02+00:00
I'm still exploring this idea and I know it's far from perfect, but I posted it here because HN is a great place for constructive feedback.

If this concept sounds interesting to you — even if you think it's flawed — I’d love to hear how you would improve or reshape it. Maybe there’s a better way to approach it, or a different angle I haven’t considered.

Feel free to break it down, challenge it, or build on it. That's exactly what I'm here for
by 9dev | 2025-07-08 09:35:18+00:00
It grants them a two-year headspace in which licensees are prohibited to create a competing offering based on the open sourced code—so e.g. Amazon can't just take the source code and create a paid offering within AWS without contributing to upstream—at least for two years after officially licensing the software.

You can read the FSL license text here: https://github.com/getsentry/fsl.software/blob/main/FSL-1.1-...

Sounds like a reasonable tradeoff to ensure companies don't have immediate disadvantages from open sourcing their code.
by Ukv | 2025-07-08 09:35:42+00:00
Probably depends a lot of the type of questions you're asking. I think LLMs are inherently better at language-based tasks (translate this, reword this, alternate terms for this, etc.) than technical fact-based tasks, and within technical tasks someone using it as their first port of call will be giving it a much larger proportion of easy questions than someone using it only once stumped having exhausted other sources (or, as here, challenging it with questions where they expect failure).

There's a difference in question difficulty distribution between me asking "how do I do X in FFmpeg" because I'm too lazy to check the docs and don't use FFmpeg frequently enough to memorize, compared to someone asking because they have already checked the docs and/or use FFmpeg frequently but couldn't figure out how to do specifically X (say cropping videos to an odd width/height, which many formats just don't support), for instance. Former probably makes up majority of my LLM usage, but have still occasionally been suprirsed on the latter where I've come up empty checking docs/traditional search but an LLM pulls out something correct.
by aaomidi | 2025-07-08 09:36:07+00:00
Political aims that come to mind:

- settlement and expulsion of Palestinians (think the bulldozer tactics)

- a testing ground for weapons: Israel routinely uses footage and draws evidence about how they’ve battle tested their weapons and tech they’re selling in the West Bank. There’s a book about this: https://www.versobooks.com/products/2684-the-palestine-labor...

Anyway I think there’s probably more goals I can think of but these might be enough for now. Makes me too sad otherwise.
by raxxorraxor | 2025-07-08 09:36:20+00:00
"Brave Truth Tellers"? There were protests on the 8th october after Israel was attacked and didn't even retaliate yet. Nothing happened to the people that shared their thoughts. I personally think they should improve their education on the topic, but that is my opinion.

This is a thorough victim complex if you really apply a neutral perspective.

"Counterfactual" my arse...
by bob1029 | 2025-07-08 09:36:23+00:00
I think co-evolution should be investigated for encoder-decoder architecture training.

The idea being that you pair multiple decoders with each encoder, and multiple encoders with each decoder (randomly sample if large populations). The selective pressure is a feedback loop between the encoder and decoder populations that requires the members to produce and interpret the latent vector as well as possible. In theory, this creates a form of generalization pressure wherein the encoders and decoders must perform well with a wide range of possible up/down stream states. I think with large enough populations, this could be robust to premature convergence and overfitting.
by elpocko | 2025-07-08 09:37:06+00:00
>I've had many a comment here unironically wanting to end copyright as a concept

I mean, the site's name is Hacker News after all, even though so many of the "hackers" here are confessing their love for Intellectual Property and Copyright law, and everybody chanting the well-known slogan "Information wants to be proprietary!".
by znpy | 2025-07-08 09:38:34+00:00
I think that the issue here is the following:

- you can charge money for things - anything that's not built with the "official compiler" is not "supported"

I've interviewed for a junior embedded software engineer when i was in university and when i started mentioning i had experience building cross-compilers i was immediately stopped by the guy interviewing me (he literally didn't even let me finish the sentence) and told me "Absolutely no. We don't want to maintain our own toolchain and we want everything to be coming from the BSP [Board support package] and integrated nicely with the vendor's IDE.

They used ARM chips, so not even anything strange...

The real issue would come if they did not provide the source code for the gcc build they sell you, though.
by kleiba | 2025-07-08 09:38:38+00:00
> But last week, in a Manhattan courtroom, a federal judge ruled that OpenAI must preserve nearly every exchange its users have ever had with ChatGPT — even conversations the users had deleted.

Interesting. Does this imply that OpenAI needs to distinguish between users in the EU who absolutely have a right to have personal information deleted (like, really, actually deleted) and users in the US?
by billfruit | 2025-07-08 09:39:00+00:00
On some YouTube video related to Jurassic Park, I read a youtube comment, from a teacher, they said they shown the film to their class of 10 year olds and they were in such an awe of the secene where all the sea the Brontosaurus in the open meadow, the teacher said they had a hard time convincing the students that there isn't really an Island off Costa Rica with dinosaurs in it.
by gslin | 2025-07-08 09:39:38+00:00
Let's Encrypt issues 9M certs per day (https://letsencrypt.org/stats/), and its market share is 50%+ (https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/ssl_certificate), so I assume there are <20M certs issued per day.

If all certs are sent to just one CT log server, and each cert generates ~10KBytes outbound traffic, it's ~200GB/day, or ~20Mbps (full & even traffic), not in the same ballpark (2-3Gbps).

So I guess there are something I don't understnad?
by nkoren | 2025-07-08 09:40:31+00:00
This is all absolutely correct. To amplify this point for people unfamiliar with it, the two creation stories are:

1. God separates the light from the darkness, the earth from the water, and creates all the plants and animals and peoples of the world.

2. The LORD God creates the garden of Eden, makes Adam from mud and Eve from his rib, plants a tree of knowledge and tree of life, etc.

Already there's a divergence: Adam is supposedly the first man in the second story, but in the first story, all the peoples of the world have already been created. But the more interesting divergence is in the name of the responsible God. This often flies over the head of readers in English, but notice that the first story isn't the "LORD God", just "God". This is because in Hebrew, the name of God in the first story is "Elohim", while in the second, it's "YHVH" -- a name too holy for Jews to pronounce, so they just say "Hashem" ("the name"), although if you're naughty you can say "Yahweh" or "Jehovah" or whatever. Why the difference?

A clue is that "Elohim" is a pluralised word in Hebrew. Once Judaism became fully monotheistic, this became interpreted as something like "The Wings of God" -- a sort of abstract all-encompassing Godly aura, rather than the pointed and personified manifestation of the divine, which is YHVH. But this is a bit of a tortured post-rationalisation, and isn't explicitly supported by the text. It's much more straightforward to read "Elohim" as simply "the gods", which is probably how it was read when the text was first assembled, with a henotheistic YHVH text being appended to an earlier polytheistic text.

Even the first commandment -- "I am YHVH, your God, and you shall have no other Gods before me" -- reads better as a henotheistic rather than a monotheistic text. It doesn't say there are no other gods. It pretty strongly implies the opposite. It just says that the other gods aren't for you.
by 9dev | 2025-07-08 09:41:39+00:00
Yes, you do indeed need to be technical to understand that. The tech industry, and that includes most of us here (especially all the FAANG people that curiously always stay silent in threads like this one), has worked very hard to make everyone believe that online privacy is a thing, while working even harder to undermine that at every possible step.

Ordinary people expect stuff that they don't actively share with others to stay private. Rightly so! It's the ad industry that got it wrong, not the People.
by xdennis | 2025-07-08 09:42:00+00:00
The opinion contribution is obviously taking the side of Open AI by spreading FUD. The whole piece is basically "do you really trust the evil New York Times with the data you entrusted to us, the honorable techbros of Open AI?".

I don't think people trust OpenAI nor NYT. But if you did trust OpenAI with your sensitive data, NYT isn't going to be more nefarious with it that OpenAI already is.
by shakna | 2025-07-08 09:42:17+00:00
Article 6 does not differentiate between civil and criminal.

> Processing shall be lawful only if and to the extent that at least one of the following applies:

> ...

> processing is necessary for the performance of a task carried out in the public interest or in the exercise of official authority vested in the controller;

https://gdpr-info.eu/art-6-gdpr/
by mschuster91 | 2025-07-08 09:43:53+00:00
> I've had many a comment here unironically wanting to end copyright as a concept

Given how blatantly "copyright" has been (and still is) abused by multibillion dollar corporations (with Disney being the most notorious) it's no surprise that there will be a counter-movement forming.

Complete abolishment is of course a pretty radical proposal but I think pretty much everyone here agrees that both the patent and copyright situation warrants a complete overhaul.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-07-08 09:44:45+00:00
>Sure _rich_ people will be able to do all the arts they want. Everyone else won't

I miss when rich people spent their time appealing to other rich people with art instead of screwing over all of society.

Well, they always did the latter. But they had their circuses as well. Now it's just cold, hard corporatism.
by hombre_fatal | 2025-07-08 09:45:19+00:00
I started playing Balzhur 5 years ago to practice Spanish.

Ended up befriending a blind guy from Venezuela and wondering if most people still playing MUDs might be blind.

I logged on a few weeks ago and noticed he still plays, but I forgot the commands to do anything so I never left him a message.

There's also:

- rlmud.org 23 https://www.reinosdeleyenda.es/ -- Still relatively popular for a MUD in Spanish

- mud.simauria.org 23 http://www.simauria.org/ -- This game was cute and quaint 5 years ago but now you can't get past the email verification anymore. I've messaged the admin email for this site a few times over the years asking if I can archive the server code but I don't think anyone ever receives it

- cyberlife.es 7777 https://www.cyberlife.es/ -- Logged into this just a few weeks ago to test charset support on my hobby mud client. It's a real life Madrid-like world mostly geared towards roleplaying I think (no combat). When I logged in as Sindulfo, someone said my name sounded like a butler and if there also existed a Condulfo. Was kinda funny to chat with them.

Sucks to know the source code for these servers will all get lost forever.
by nkoren | 2025-07-08 09:46:12+00:00
See my later reply to the parent comment, but basically, first there's the creation of the whole world and all the peoples in it, then there's the creation of the Garden of Eden and Adam and Even and so forth. The first is ascribed to "God", or "Elohim" in Hebrew -- a plural word which has recently been awkwardly recontextualized through a monotheistic lens, but probably originally meant "the gods" -- while the second is ascribed to the "LORD God", or "YHVH" in Hebrew -- a definitely specific God.
by Separo | 2025-07-08 09:46:51+00:00
As a once full-time designer turned full-time engineer, I totally agree with the author.

There are plenty of other more creative design tools - but Figma's success and ubiquity have locked many organisations into more limited, sometimes formulaic and un-creative design expressions.

Also, I unfortunately don't feel that this is the ideal forum for this idea to get much support.
by sfn42 | 2025-07-08 09:46:56+00:00
That's hilarious. Reminds me of another person in my life who just burns everything. I keep telling her to calm down with the heat and she keeps putting her induction top on boost then just going to do something else while things burn. She goes through teflon(or whatever they replaced it with) frying pans on a monthly basis, she has like 4 of them right now and they're all flaking off because she overheats them. Like properly destroyed. All her plastic utensils are messed up, molten and broken because she just leaves them on these 1000 degree frying pans.

I tried buying a carbon steel pan for her thinking it can take the heat but after a month it was rusty and caked with carbonized food that she never took the time to scrub off. In hindsight a stainless steel pan would probably have been better but I'm sure she would have found a way to destroy that too.
by motorest | 2025-07-08 09:49:07+00:00
> Did you even search for anything before making that idiotic comment?

You acknowledged the fact that "there are those who self-diagnose without really suffering from a condition".

I, in turn, added to the fact that you pointed out that not only are there "those who self-diagnose without really suffering from a condition" but there is also a complex mental disorder where individuals play the role of a sick patient to receive some form of psychological validation.

This somehow triggered in you an emotional reaction. Why was that?
by cal_dent | 2025-07-08 09:49:40+00:00
Feels strange watching an organisation of this size and scale (monetarily speaking) that seems to have no real clear idea on what product they want to deliver/or think would be a useful output essentially vibeproduce based on incomplete assumptions of how their users currently engage with their widget.

Is this actually the best use of their skilled team’s time? I have little knowledge in this space but the answer seems like no to me. Maybe low hanging fruit?

Fascinating and wild
by Rockytu1 | 2025-07-08 09:50:05+00:00
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by mnky9800n | 2025-07-08 09:50:48+00:00
I thought the first act was clever. In fact, I kind of wish the entire movie was just neo sitting in a therapist office trying to unpack what happened to him and you never know if he is just a crazy person or real. Then you get action sequences from flashbacks or whatever. After the first act matrix 4 stops being a movie and just becomes a collection of unrelated scenes.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-07-08 09:52:05+00:00
I mean, I thought "we" did understand why they happen. It's a design decision to always provide an answer because an LLM never wants to say "I do not know". It might sometimes say "I cannot answer that" for compliance reasons, but never "I don't know".

This design decision is inherent to American culture and waht they consider as a "trustworthy person". Always having an answer is better than admitting a lack of knowledge.

I don't know the technical details behind incomplete information, but I feel I know the meta reasoning behind it.
by lucumo | 2025-07-08 09:53:33+00:00
> But, I don't know anyone (outside of very vocal online posters) who would be offended if we were standing in line and I casually brought up the weather.

I agree, BTW. It's the kind of thing I meant with "short remarks".

But while I'm not annoyed at such conversations, I won't miss them. They're a cheap sacrifice to make for not having to deal with proselytising and the like.

> Reddit/HN/"Chronically Online" asocial attitude

While remarks about the weather don't offend me, it does offend me when I'm being called "asocial" for refusing to be religiously converted. Please don't.

Interestingly, the 'Reddit/HN/"Chronically Online"' monickers are also anachronystic. I've not just been referring to books as a way to deflect the knee-jerk response smartphones usually get, though there was some of that. But for the most part, that is the implement people used "in my time" to avoid cumbersome people on trains. It works less well than headphones though, so I'm not surprised those gained in popularity.