MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pseudalopex | 2025-07-09 06:11:25+00:00
> The obvious choice would have been to put all your effort into making a good mobile browser on other mobile OSes[0], but instead Mozilla decided to make a whole OS.

Firefox was losing market share to Chrome on desktop platforms which Google did not own and which did not bundle Chrome. It was not and is not obvious a better Android Firefox would have halted the decline. And any Windows Phone effort would have been wasted.

Some people think Mozilla gave up Firefox OS too soon.

In another history all iOS browsers are Safari, all Windows Phone browsers are Internet Explorer, and all Android browsers distributed through Google Play are Chrome. HN comments say Mozilla were foolish to bet this would not happen.

> Now, let's look at Rust and Servo. Those are critical developer tools. Firefox is built with them. But Mozilla jettisoned them, unceremoniously, even though they were delivering tangible improvements to the browser.

Firefox includes components prototyped in Servo. It is not used as a developer tool as far as I know. Many tangible improvements to the browser were delivered without Servo.

Many companies rely on Rust without funding it. Mozilla passing Rust to an independent foundation was painful for Rust. It is unclear it harmed Mozilla.

> Zawinski's plan seems too radical now because Mozilla larded themselves up on side projects like Boot2Gecko and acquisitions like Pocket and Anonym, while tossing things like Rust and Servo out the window. To be clear, if Mozilla had used Pocket to make themselves Google-independent, I wouldn't be complaining about it, but instead they shut it down.

Why do you call Firefox OS its development name? Boot2Gecko may have been a side project. Firefox OS was the main project according to people who worked for Mozilla then.

Mozilla shut down Pocket to refocus on Firefox because Pocket was unprofitable or insufficiently profitable apparently.

Mozilla acquired Anonym last year. I think Mozilla owning an advertising company will enshittify Firefox. But how did you determine so soon it was dead weight?

> Zawinski's plan

Does Zawinski's plan mean Building THE reference implementation web browser, and Being a jugular-snapping attack dog on standards committees? The 1st part is a vague objective. Not a plan. And the 2nd part depends on the 1st part.
by kragen | 2025-07-09 06:11:47+00:00
One of the most famous essays in the history of art criticism concerns precisely this question; this is probably the single intellectual work of the Frankfurt school for which it is remembered today, if we don't count inspiring right-wing conspiracy theories.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Work_of_Art_in_the_Age_of_...

https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/... (Zohn translation)

https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/benjamin.pdf (Zohn translation)

https://web.archive.org/web/20220128111229/http://raumgegenz... (French, blocked)

https://web.archive.org/web/20180730163618/https://www.artec... (German)

This is probably a good time to reread it, since AI art is forcing us to revisit many of the same questions from a new perspective.
by vasco | 2025-07-09 06:12:14+00:00
Payment terminals can offer whatever currency exchanges they want, but usually it's just a way to fleece you on the spread, nobody is doing you any favors, it's just that whoever in the chain gets to perform the exchange gets to set the fees and the spread and most people get confused by currency exchange so it's in every middle man of the chain's interest to be the one to perform it and get the spread themselves.
by Roark66 | 2025-07-09 06:12:22+00:00
Polish here, very much against adopting the euro until our standard of living and growth rate matches Germany (no at least not for next 10 years). Why? Because the disadvantages far out weight the benefits for developing countries. The biggest issue is giving up one of the biggest instrument of control over the economy to a supra-national non-democratic organisation. Surely the monetary policy will follow what is best for the biggest economies (or at best the average) while local policy is way better tweaked towards local needs. The best example of this is money supply. The money supply ideally should match the economy growth rate +X so there is tiny inflation (and definitely no deflation). This growth rate is very different in "old EU" and "new EU" countries. So what happens? In time things get more expensive much faster in countries that grow faster while incomes stay the same. This is a huge negative and this is on top of price increases happening on "day 1" due to rounding up during conversion.

Historically the biggest benefit that was sold as something to outweigh this was a claim that "inflation will be low" and big inflation spikes are impossible. This came about from the short sighted view that all inflation stems from printing money and by giving up our control over it to somebody else we somehow "protect ourselves". This was proven wrong during covid when inflation was vastly different in let's say Latvia and Germany despite sharing a currency.

So what is the bottom line? Is euro all bad? No, it is very useful so we have a common currency in the euro zone that is not controlled from across the ocean. This is a huge benefit, but the same benefit is achieved by having it be a second currency like it is now in Poland rather than the only currency. (you can pay in euros in almost everywhere if you prefer as well as get it from cash machines etc)
by venkat223 | 2025-07-09 06:12:58+00:00
This type of activity is happening with Amazon Netflix and other medias also with various E-Commerce sites Apple particularly is asking for all particulars train to debit after the expiry of the period but is not allowing cancellation properly as the bandwth work remains down in many many areas sporadically we are not able to cancel at will.This is a user unfriendly activity which is monopolistic or coercive.People will lose faith in digitization slowly
by Springtime | 2025-07-09 06:13:45+00:00
I'm glad there are an abundance of visual overviews in the readme. Too many readmes about GUI programs lack them (or they'll point to a site which still lacks a clear indication of how it behaves).

That said, they're all GIFs and each ~10-22MB. Making loading the readme larger than the program size itself. Embedding some video would be snappier.
by anovikov | 2025-07-09 06:13:57+00:00
Thing is, those companies can't do much if whole lines of business will become obsolete. Behind every company, there is a core competence that forms the value and the rest of the business is just a wrapper. When core competence is worthless, the company is just out. Even if they know it's coming there's little they can do. In fact, best thing they can actually do is turning the company into a milk cow to extract all value they can here and now, stopping all investments into future - will probably generate enormous profits for a few years. Extract them and invest into the wider stock market.
by renatovico | 2025-07-09 06:14:40+00:00
> There is no separation of code and data on the wire - everything is a stream of bytes. There isn't one in electronics either - everything is signals going down the wires.

It has the packet header, exactly the code part that directs the traffic. In reality, everything has a "code" part and a separation for understanding. In language, we have spaces and question marks in text. This is why it’s so important to see the person when communicating, Sound alone might not be enough to fully understand the other side.
by klodolph | 2025-07-09 06:15:28+00:00
Agreed, and rehashing Strunk & White sucks because Strunk & White wasn’t a great guide in the first place. Strunk & White boiled down the advice to aphorisms and you have to kind of understand what good writing is before you read it. The aphorisms don’t make sense if you don’t already understand them.

Meanwhile, Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace gives concrete advice, examples, and exercises.
by vasco | 2025-07-09 06:16:50+00:00
Ok that is adding an interesting variable of perceived interest and then it's not about # of people anymore, but rather time plus # of _interested_ people. I guess that has to be the reasoning because it does make sense if that's the optimization goal.

Though I'd imagine mostly its going to be a random sample of people that happen to be there that day. I imagine there's likely under 1% of museum visitors actually chasing single works and planning trips like that. So most people that would see it are still just random "museum people" (which under the "interest" metric is still better than purely random people).
by gtsop | 2025-07-09 06:17:53+00:00
I admit i half-read this second link, but the essential nuance it adds is that the ruling process didn't allow the violators (see: companies making it extremely hard to come out of a subscription) to do their homework in order to drill holes into this regulation that would have stopped their immoral buisness practices.

I understand there is a "by the book" process that should be respected, but this seems very fishy to me. I am certain the regulation would have passed had the tables been turned (meaning the companies would benefit from that said regulation)
by frabcus | 2025-07-09 06:17:56+00:00
I think it's a flaw in end-user MCP combined with agentic, where the end-user chooses the combination of tools. Even if the end-user is in an IDE.

The trouble is you can want an MCP server for one reason, flip it on, and a combination of the MCP servers you enabled and that you hadn't thought of suddenly breaks everything.

We need a much more robust deterministic non-LLM layer for joining together LLM capabilities across multiple systems. Or else we're expecting everyone who clicks a button in an MCP store to do extremely complex security reasoning.

Is giving an LLM running in an agentic loop every combination of even these vetted Microsoft MCP servers safe? https://code.visualstudio.com/mcp It seems unlikely.
by wahern | 2025-07-09 06:18:10+00:00
The problem with Landlock, AFAIU, is that it's inherited across exec. OpenBSD's pledge and unveil were deliberately designed to reset across exec by default precisely because the "more secure" behavior makes it difficult or impossible to add to alot of existing code that needs to invoke other programs. It could be done in theory--e.g. by forking a helper process prior to locking down--but that requires a significant refactor all its own, so what ends up happening is that people just abstain from using seccomp or Landlock. Whereas all OpenBSD core utils were quickly modified to make use of pledge and unveil to some extent, and then over time improved to tighten things further; they were designed to permit and promote this sort of easy, incremental deployment.

I don't know the extent to which Landlock or even unveil would have helped here; maybe they would have only prevented the hook from running during the clone, but not subsequently when it's expected trusted hooks to run. But I'd bet adding unveil support to Git would be an easier task, notwithstanding (or even because of) the way Git invokes subprocesses.
by mikewarot | 2025-07-09 06:19:01+00:00
Computer Security - I'm firmly convinced that it has already been solved, but the solution[1] isn't widely known about or understood properly. Because we don't have computers we can trust, we can't have communications that we can trust, and thus we can't have true Democracy.

Computing efficiency - The fact is that most of the transistors in a computer sit idle, waiting for their 15 nanoseconds of fame. A first principles review of what is actually possible leads me to suspect we can run LLMs and other large compute loads for 1% (or less) of the current energy requirements without new process nodes, using current fabs.

The Supply Chain - We need to have a publicly documented and tested second supply chain for everything in our society. Less efficient, and more robust ways to make every essential tool and material required for a modern society should be developed. Even if it's 1000x more expensive, it's still better to have that backup rather that being completely without options.

Radio Mesh networking - I'd set up a system in which everyone, everywhere, could stay in touch with everyone else. Governments and other organizations would handle the fiber backbone for big stuff, but a low bandwidth system that could work slowly, and globally, without it should be the thing we can all own.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability-based_security
by specproc | 2025-07-09 06:20:04+00:00
My last employer was truly global, I was interacting with people from Japan to the west coast of Canada, with the bulk of people in EU timezones.

Worked great for me, I'm a little bit to the east of CET. My mornings, my most productive hours, were typically unmolested. Then chill out into meetings in the afternoon.

My boss was in Toronto, had to work a bit late to do calls with him, but usually had a long lunch or big dog walk on those days.

His day was typically meetings in the morning, work in the afternoon. The opposite of mine.

I pitied the Australians. They seemed to be attending calls at brutally antisocial hours.
Co-founder exiting after pivot – what's a fair exit package?
by throwaway-xx | 2025-07-09 06:20:29+00:00
Throwaway for obvious reasons. I’m a co-founder of a venture-backed startup currently valued at ~$20M. We raised a strong pre-seed, built a team, shipped v1, generated revenue, and recently pivoted into a related idea that I think could work—but I’m no longer the right person to lead it. My co-founder is passionate about the new direction and wants to take it forward. I want to step away cleanly and with integrity.

I have ~10% vested. I led our early fundraise, worked unpaid for months, and contributed personal capital. I’m not trying to maximize my return—but I also don’t want to walk away empty-handed after 1.5 years of building.

My question: 1. What’s a fair exit package in this situation? A formula/rule I can use?

2. Should I just keep the vested equity? Future investors may see this as dead equity.

3. Is a cash buyout common or appropriate?

How would you approach this with the board/co-founder in a way that’s constructive and protects long-term relationships?

Would love to hear from anyone who's seen this play out—on the founder, investor, or legal side.
by petre | 2025-07-09 06:20:51+00:00
You can't possibly compare Poland to Bulgaria with 1/8 Poland's GDP and 17% its population. For Bulgaria the Euro is completely fine, as the Lev has been pegged to the Deutche Mark and later the Euro for ages. It's exports are basically raw materials and grain. Most of the other stuff they produce is sold domestically. I think I've only seen Bulgarian sunflower oil, mineral water, ketchup and pasta in stores outside the country. For a state with so feeble exports and a pegged currency it really doesn't matter, only adds up currency conversion fees. They might want to attract more tourism and investments.
by globnomulous | 2025-07-09 06:21:31+00:00
> I think the processing effort is likely a side effect of English mainly using sentence constructions that go subject->verb->object. Not all languages do that, so I suspect that your brain has an easier time processing whatever's most common in the language.

This isn't true at all. Passive voice is extremely common in everyday speech, and sentences constructed with linking verbs are almost certainly more common than either active or passive voice.

And that accounting of the language considers only utterances consistinf od grammatically correct, complete main clauses, which constitute by far the minority of the sentential constructions a native speaker of English will produce in a day.

If everything you said in a normal day were a complete sentence, let alone uniformly or predominantly active voice, you'd sound completely deranged and unhinged.

If whatever's most common in the language really were easiest for readers or listeners to understand, then active-voice constructions should be the most cognitively challenging. They aren't.
by frabcus | 2025-07-09 06:21:33+00:00
Reflecting on this whole situation, I suspect MCP is fundamentally insecure, in which case Supabase should refuse to implement it.

MCP's goal is to make it easy for end user developers to impulsively wire agentically running LLM chats to multiple tools. That very capability fundamentally causes the problem.

Supabase's response (in the top comment in this post) of making it read-only or trying to wrap with an LLM to detect attacks... Neither of those help the fundamental problem at all. Some other tool probably has write capabilities, and the wrapping isn't reliable.
by hnlmorg | 2025-07-09 06:22:06+00:00
Since we are nitpicking, git is considerably older than TOML, and nearly as old as YAML and JSON. In fact JSON wasn’t even standardised until after git’s first stable release.

Back then there wasn’t a whole lot of options besides rolling their own.

And when you also consider that git had to be somewhat rushed (due to Linux kernel developers having their licenses revoked for BitKeeper) and the fact that git was originally written and maintained by Linus himself, it’s a little more understandable that he wrote his own config file parser.

Under the same circumstances, I definitely would have done that too. In fact back then, I literally did write my own config file parsers.
by jbs789 | 2025-07-09 06:24:13+00:00
Stepping back from the specifics these are stories of human nature.

We tag “complacency” as bad, but I think it’s just a byproduct of our reliance on heuristics and patterns which is evolutionarily useful overall.

On the other hand we worry (sometimes excessively) about how the future might unfold and really much of that is unknown.

Much more practical (and rewarding) to keep improving oneself or organisation to meet the needs of the world today withe an eye on how the world is evolving, rather than try to be some oracle or predict too far out (in which case you need to both get the prediction and the execution right!).

As an aside, it seems a recent fashion to love these big bets these days (AI, remember Metaverse), and to make big high conviction statements about the future, but that’s more to do with their individual specific circumstances and motivations.
by teiferer | 2025-07-09 06:24:22+00:00
> It's so, so , so hard to walk the line between persistence (which leads to glory) and stubbornness (which leads to more time following already wasted time.)

> Congratulations for walking this line correctly.

As much as I like to agree with this message ... isn't there a big portion of luck involved here that makes the difference between the two sides of this line? In other words, aren't we seeing huge survivorship bias at play here?

That's what makes the line so hard to walk. Surely skill helps, but more than most like to admit it's the unpredictability of outside forces that makes the line really hard to walk.
Ask HN: Do you think a new alternative to MCP would be useful?
by empire23 | 2025-07-09 06:24:25+00:00
Hi everyone,

I've been wrestling with MCP, and keep finding the same weaknesses: - the middleware server feels completely unncessary and overly complex - it has too many security flaws due to what feels like a rushed out standard - it's just so poorly undocumented and confusing

I've been thinking of doing a new protocol, but am too aware of that ol' comic (https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/standards_2x.png)

Yet was curious to ask you guys - is there value in trying to build a new scalable, secure version of MCP?

Or should I just stick to the protocol that's currently popular?
by gbraad | 2025-07-09 06:25:17+00:00
This could be what I am looking for...

But in general use it feels slow and very unstable. I tried on Windows, as that was 'recommended'

I tried this with some of my own OctaMED files, and the experience has been ... well ... not pleasant. None of them load.

Note: I used MED, OctaMED 4, OctaMED SoundStudio, Protracker, before moving to Renoise, Reaper and Bitwig. Also used Samplitude and Sonar for a long time. Amiga user with a large collection of modules and samples I created over the decades. I like trackers and hate pianorolls. I like the Korg Gadget interface, but want a tracker for MIDI.
by philipallstar | 2025-07-09 06:25:45+00:00
> Unless this applies to European Jews then? They were not all killed.

I didn't say anything about "not all killed". Please - all these silly distractions and fallacies permeate any attempts to discuss this. You're not talking to an avatar representing all the worst, easiest to counter arguments from the "other side". You're talking to a real person who is articulating a view.
by hnlmorg | 2025-07-09 06:26:27+00:00
I’ve written a fair few lexers in my time. My general approach for CR is to simply ignore the character entirely.

If CR is used correctly in windows, then its behaviour is already covered by the LF case (as required for POSIX systems) and if CR is used incorrectly then you end up with all kinds of weird edge cases. So you’re much better off just jumping over that character entirely.
by desertrider12 | 2025-07-09 06:26:46+00:00
The Cyc project basically achieved what you're talking about, even without approaching AGI. They manually programmed concepts and relationships between things into a huge knowledge graph. Then they had heuristics for choosing the appropriate version of facts for a given context (e.g. level of rigor). It was arguably able to use a library of abstractions similarly to what Chollet is talking about, but couldn't learn new ones automatically through exploration or play.
by LeoPanthera | 2025-07-09 06:27:01+00:00
It is long past the time that every good person should have stopped using X.

That platform's recent descent into racism, hatred, and bigotry, as amplified by Grok, is shocking.

If you still use X, you should be ashamed. Leave now. And don't tolerate anyone else continuing to use it. By doing so, they're sending you a message. Believe them.
by yamatokaneko | 2025-07-09 06:27:07+00:00
Tech seems to have reduced foot traffic but not car traffic. Kind of ironic...

> i cant name one young rising startup that was hot like snapchat. so that was disappointing when i was job hunting.

I’ve had the same thought. Maybe Tinder or Oculus (pre-acquisition), but those feel like they were a while ago now.
by harrisi | 2025-07-09 06:27:22+00:00
I would love if Vercel paid all the people in the teams I mentioned earlier, told them to do whatever they want, and checked in only to make sure they had enough snacks. But that's probably not the case. Vercel employs these people. To some degree, simplistically, the employees are there to further the goals of the company.

I don't claim to know their plans. I've never been in charge of a multibillion dollar company. I just think I have a vague idea of what their general strategy is, and I don't love it.

I'll also say that I definitely want open source projects to succeed. I don't know how they can in a great way in a capitalist system. So maybe this is, from my standpoint, the best of a bad situation. I still think it's worth pointing out and paying attention to from a free software and business position.

Also just want to say thanks for what seems to be a genuine discussion in good faith.
by astatine | 2025-07-09 06:27:23+00:00
You can absolutely do this in India. Every card based subscription requires an explicit authorization to set up. And every such authorized subscription can be seen in the bank app/site. You can choose to cancel those subscriptions at the bank end and the subscribed services will fail their next renewal. This is not just a service specific thing and is required by regulation for all recurring payments, incl utility bills, insurance premia, entertainment service, cloud services.