MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Uehreka | 2025-07-13 12:58:31+00:00
To quote myself:

> I get why people are pissed at Mozilla

My issue is that when you try to have discourse but everyone’s on the same side, it can easily devolve into a circlejerk where everyone is trying to see who can most dramatically burn the strawman. These kinds of feedback loops are just bad—it doesn’t really matter who the target is or how malicious they are—because they cause the participants to drift further and further from the reality of the conflict.

In the best case, if the target really is bad, the participants may just look foolish when they later deploy their anti-strawman ballistic missile against someone who actually has a slightly good pro-target argument they hadn’t thought of. In the worst case, this is how mobs work themselves up to eventually justify violence against a target that’s totally harmless.

One thing’s for sure though, once a circlejerk like this starts, rational thought ends.
by gcanyon | 2025-07-13 12:58:46+00:00
This jumped out at me as well. I think it's fair to say that if you aggregate all predictions, there will be those who vastly over- and under-estimate progress on any given time frame, so depending on who the authors were paying attention to, both could be correct. The interesting question is whether there is, in aggregate, a tendency to over- or under-estimate on a given time frame. My money is on Amara's Law for that.
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by Pooge | 2025-07-13 12:59:50+00:00
A few years ago I wanted to buy some Mozilla merch in order to support them. I'm glad they removed it because I would have regretted it.

Forget about Mozilla, donate to Ladybird—or another open-source non-browser project you like. If a competitor eats away the remaining market share of Mozilla's only "working" product, maybe they'll wake up.
by wrasee | 2025-07-13 13:00:07+00:00
Perhaps a better way to phrase it is to simply say that politicians are elected, and are nothing without votes.

A politician isn’t even a practicing politician without votes. Democracy is ultimately driven by citizens. Of course politicians will do their best to influence public opinion (it’s their job) but are ultimately in service to it though elections.

It’s why what people think (and vote) matters in a democracy.

And back to the point, why voting with your feet (switching to Firefox) actually means something.
by mustache_kimono | 2025-07-13 13:00:22+00:00
> .. [I]t is not at all about performance, but performance is the canary in the coalmine: it is a direct translation of the essential vs accidental complexity problem.

This is all nice color on my commentary, but it fails to address the point of my two parent comments: programming is an economic activity. Sometimes a putatively more complex solution is the "right" solution for someone else, because it is easier to understand and implement, or fits within an existing workflow (it is more coherent and consistent).

Yes, if the performance delta is an order of magnitude, then yes, perhaps that is a problems for such software, but then again, maybe it isn't, because economics matter. Lots of people use 10+x slower languages because for loads of technical reasons, but also economic ones.

> In other words: performance is an easy objective metric for the complexity that lies behind (an otherwise opaque) piece of software.

Then presumably so is performance per dollar? Your argument can make sense, where the cost of a redesign is low (in cost of programmer education and experience and ultimately work), and performance benefits are high (10ms faster nets us 10x more dollars). That is -- Blow, et al/you, need to show us where these, "easy", if you will, 10x gains are.

Again -- I agree performance problems are real problems, and data oriented design is one way to reason about those problems, but Blow's marketing exercise/catastrophizing (see "Preventing the Collapse of Civilization") hasn't solved any problems, and is barely an argument without an analysis of what such incremental improvements cost.
by zajio1am | 2025-07-13 13:01:02+00:00
Yes, but in the first chapter, Mill is clear that even public speech falls into sphere of liberty, the part of person's life "that affect only himself":

"But there is a sphere of action in which society, as distinguished from the individual, has, if any, only an indirect interest; comprehending all that portion of a person’s life and conduct which affects only himself, or if it also affects others, only with their free, voluntary, and undeceived consent and participation. When I say only himself, I mean directly, and in the first instance: for whatever affects himself, may affect others through himself; and the objection which may be grounded on this contingency, will receive consideration in the sequel. This, then, is the appropriate region of human liberty."

"It comprises, first, the inward domain of consciousness; demanding liberty of conscience, in the most comprehensive sense; liberty of thought and feeling; absolute freedom of opinion and sentiment on all subjects, practical or speculative, scientific, moral, or theological."

"The liberty of expressing and publishing opinions may seem to fall under a different principle, since it belongs to that part of the conduct of an individual which concerns other people; but, being almost of as much importance as the liberty of thought itself, and resting in great part on the same reasons, is practically inseparable from it."

(Also note that your original citation was also related to judgements based on actions that concern only the judged person: "Though doing no wrong to anyone, a person may so act as to compel us to judge him, and feel to him, as a fool, or as a being of an inferior order")
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-07-13 13:01:08+00:00
This is basically an optional way to pay for the features that a decent fork like librewolf provides.

This is really just a long way to donate really in some sense directly to firefox somehow just because everybody feels like mozilla takes the donated money and tries on some "zanky" product

See The Ville_Lindholm comment really, those were my first thoughts too but I wouldn't really donate to mozilla like ever.

Ladybird's cool though. Maybe donating to them makes more sense but I understand they are not mature but that's exactly the point, they need way more funding (IMO) to get to a genuinely stable browser and need all the help that they can get as compared to the past.

Sure, we all like to stick the big firefox guy to beat the monopoly of google, but firefox/mozilla survives on a single deal by google, and if google ever stops the deal of paying for search engine, it can really shut down mozilla or maybe hinder it extremely.

I do hope that ladybird grows in a way where I can use it in compared to firefox in like hopefully 5 years since browsers are a mess.
by anovikov | 2025-07-13 13:02:38+00:00
Good strategy is to just wear down till they run out of people able to fight. Ukraine is at about 10% of the way there. It won't take all that long - in any case, if Ukraine is to be defeated it will happen for demographic reasons (lack of births due to female emigration and men ageing out of service), not through combat attrition. ~20 years down the road when it happens, Russia will be so demographically weakened through it's losses it won't be of much threat to anyone.
by Sayrus | 2025-07-13 13:02:54+00:00
> I have a hard time understanding robot detection as an issue of "user freedom" or "browser competition".

In the name of robot detection, you can lock down device, require device attestation, prevent users from running non-standard devices/OS/software, prevent them from accessing websites (CloudFlare dislikes non-chrome browser and hates non-standard browsers, ReCaptcha blocks you out if you're not on Chrome-like/Safari/Firefox). Web Environment Integrity[1] is also a good example of where robot detection ends up affecting the end user.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Environment_Integrity
by diggan | 2025-07-13 13:02:56+00:00
> If the US government calls it one thing and everyone else calls it another, that's a dispute

I guess that's the fundamental disagreement, I wouldn't call that a "dispute" more than I would call the name "America" a dispute, it's just that different people understand it different. For some, it means a group of continents (that's how most people around me would take that for example), for others it means a country in North America (which I'm guessing is the common meaning if you live in North America already). Just because different people has different meanings doesn't make it into a dispute.
by yoav | 2025-07-13 13:03:28+00:00
I have been giving it about the same amount of context as a large github/jira/whatever issue.

But i’m giving it a goal with a fairly distant milestone where it needs to hit 5-10 smaller milestones and even for advanced ai mixing the system languages I’m mixing in this large project there are build errors it powers through on its own (fixing the building, linking, or syntax, or using the apis for the versions of all the things i’m using) and there are some combinations of tech (windowing, webviews, etc.) and some architectures of things that require it to try multiple approaches to succeed.

Sometimes it will ask like “how am i doing so far should i continue”, or can you run this visual thing and report back. But there can be 30-60 mins between it doing that.

It also has to scan a lot of files and find the things it needs to find to fill its own context. Like “let me examine how you implemented that on mac and windows and come up with a solution for linux”

Other times while it’s reasoning if i notice it’s going down a rabbit hole I’ll point it out and set it in the right direction without interrupting it and when it moves onto the next thought it’ll incorporate my suggestion but it didn’t really stop or need another big prompt or goal.

There are plenty of times where I do need to step in and baby it with small goals through something tricky or obscure. But even in those cases I don’t have to write any code directly i just ask it to do xyz small change and hand it back for me to test
by gcanyon | 2025-07-13 13:03:34+00:00
It's a funny coincidence, I've never read Neuromancer, and talking with a friend of mine three days ago he said, "I thought we read Neuromancer at the same time and discussed it? You should really read it now!"

I have to say, that quoted paragraph in the article is not enticing me. I'm tempted to just read the wikipedia article and maybe clarify a few things with ChatGPT and call it a day. If I'm going to work that hard to read something, it should be because the topic itself is complex, not because the writer purposefully (or unskillfully?) obfuscated the material.
by ecocentrik | 2025-07-13 13:03:47+00:00
I think what you're trying to say was that "cyberpunk" appealed to a subculture of computer enthusiasts emersed in Asian cultural artifacts like manga, empowered by the 80's mantra that sex and violence sells and driven by the idea that all technology is socially transformative, just not in the ways we hope it will be.

Subcultures are far from dead and GenZ seem to be a subculture factory. Counterculture is also far from dead as it usually expands in the US every time there's a conservative president in power or a recession. Subcultures != Counterculture. The subculture of amateur horticulturalists that are also cat lovers and like photographing their cats in their gardens is only a thing because it's been empowered by technology.
by Galanwe | 2025-07-13 13:03:53+00:00
So you have to do:

io.async(saveFile, .{io, data, "saveA.txt"}).await(io);

That is 3 references to `io` in a single call.

Considering there is very little use case for mix and matching different Ios, any chance of having some kind of default / context IO to avoid all these ?
by messe | 2025-07-13 13:05:30+00:00
If you're going to immediately await it, you can just do

saveFile(io, data, "saveA.txt");

EDIT: following up on that, I'm actually not sure that

io.async(saveFile, .{io, data, "saveA.txt"}).await(io);

will even be valid code. Futures in this article are declared as var, meaning mutable. This appears to be because Future.await is going to take a pointer as its initial argument. However, because it's a temporary and therefore treated as const, the return value of io.async will not be passable to a .await function expecting a *Future as its initial argument without first being stored in a mutable var.

So this would be valid:

var save_future = io.async(saveFile, .{io, data, "saveA.txt"}); save_future.await(io);

But the original presented in the parent comment would be equivalent to the following, and therefore invalid:

const save_future = io.async(saveFile, .{io, data, "saveA.txt"}); save_future.await(io); // compile error
by camgunz | 2025-07-13 13:07:26+00:00
I'm so exhausted by these threads. Hacker News is, if it's anything, a site built by tech entrepreneurs for tech entrepreneurs. If you really think you can do better, fork Firefox, hire some engineers, and have at it. Brendan Eich did exactly that! Go work there! Or skip some steps and look at the other browser startups to see if they already had all the ideas you do.

Do you have every right to whinge here, roughly ever few months? Absolutely! Do I have a right to call you a bunch of wingers? Also absolutely!
by weare138 | 2025-07-13 13:08:12+00:00
We already paid for Firefox through decades of donations in addition to the hundreds of millions of dollars MoCo has received over the years from Google that was definitely not a bribe in exchange for sandbagging Firefox by firing most of the Firefox devs. That's what the community got in return for our decades of support because again, we've already paid for Firefox.

At this point we should just fork Firefox or focus on IceCat instead.
by TXTOS | 2025-07-13 13:08:47+00:00
Sure — it’s not about activating AI like magic, it’s about steering its reasoning process.

Each formula plays a role in making the LLM more stable, coherent, and logically self-aware:

• = I - G + mc² defines semantic residue — how far the current output strays from meaning. • BigBig(G) recombines context & error to steer output back toward intent. • BBCR detects collapse and triggers reset → rebirth (like fail-safe logic). • BBAM models attention decay — restoring continuity over multiple steps.

Together, this makes the LLM act less like autocomplete… and more like a self-guided reasoner.
by wpietri | 2025-07-13 13:08:48+00:00
> 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)”.

On a site that gives people attention and points for saying strident things that emotionally resonate with people? How surprising!

That aside, Firefox's origin is in a hacker rebellion against corporatist awfulness. It was the browser of choice for a lot of people here for a long time. Watching its continuing flailing and ongoing failure has been excruciating. I still use it, but more out of stubbornness than anything. So whether or not it's fashionable to hate on Firefox, I think there's a lot of legitimate energy there.
by PaulHoule | 2025-07-13 13:08:53+00:00
I’m more of a full-stack but I develop “Firefox first” on my projects if I can and leave it to my tester to see that it works on Chrome. X-browser issues turn up rarely, I wind up having more trouble with Safari than anything.

I know Mozilla does worse on benchmarks, but I never complain about performance. Recently I tried some sites from one of the spammiest sectors on the web and found I couldn’t move the mouse without my Chrome lighting up like a Christmas tree and navigating me to crap sites, but the Firefox experience was that I had to click on something for all hell break loose.

We have an internal app that has screen with a JavaScript table thingie with 40,000 rows loaded locally. Crazy? Yeah. It performs great on Chrome and lags pretty bad on the fox. That’s the only bad screen, and we have a lot of screens.

Personally I don’t like it that they have an office in San Francisco. Emotionally I think, “the only thing anybody should be building in San Francisco is a homeless shelter.” Practically though, I think a browser company can’t “think different” if is steeped in the Bay Area culture, not least if they can get in a car and go visit people at Google and Facebook. If they were someplace else they might have a little more empathy for users.
by abxyz | 2025-07-13 13:09:53+00:00
The supposed problem is being peddled by a company called Socure, who, coincidentally, offer the solution to this problem. There are absolutely "fake" remote workers floating around but to suppose this is some grand security-focused North Korean government conspiracy rather than people from poorer nations trying to get paid is without evidence. "North Korean" job applicants has become a meme, any suspicious looking applicant is being labelled "North Korean" by people who've read articles planted by Socure. If this were a grand North Korean government orchestrated conspiracy we would not see hundreds of job applicants engaging in exactly the same strategy for the same job.

https://www.socure.com/blog/hiring-the-enemy-employment-frau...

https://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
by Xmd5a | 2025-07-13 13:10:01+00:00
I asked it to give me its opinion on a mail I'm writing. 95% of its content is quotes from famous authors, and the 5% I wrote is actually minimal glue in-between.

All the models I tested, which includes Sonnet 4, DeepSeekR1, 4o and Gemini 2.5 understand this isn't your normal email and what I ask is literary/philosophical criticism, not remarks about conventions, formatting or how to convey my message in a more impactful way.

Quick fix: - Replace half the commas with periods. - Let one metaphor bloom and then stop. - Read it aloud; wherever you inhale, insert a line break. Before: >And if the collective imagination is so seized by it, it's because we are already—not in some other world—but in this very life, in a state of socio-, photo-, and videosynthesis. After: >The collective imagination is seized. >We are not in another world. >We are in this life, in a state of videosynthesis.

Yes, this quote is by Baudrillard. None of the other models fixated on the fact that it’s an email (I only used the word once in the prompt). My gut feeling is that this reflects not so much a lack of intelligence as a difference in model personality. Here's what it replied when I shared Gemini's analysis. The point was to have it understand that:

Gemini, second sentence: It is less a simple email than an intellectual and personal exploration still in the making.

Point deflected as soon as understood:

**Gemini is polite and pedagogical; I’m going to be blunt.** 1. **This isn’t an email, it’s a trip.** ... 2. **The content is good, the format is not.** ... 3. **Gemini is right about one thing:** ... * cut 80% of the material, * ask **one clear question** * put the rest in a separate Google Doc or PDF for posterity. 4. **Brutal summary:** Keep your draft for yourself — it’s valuable. But for the email, write a new one in **three sentences**: * thank them, * recall the context in one line, * ask the question. You’ve already got Gemini’s answer to stroke your ego — now give me the short version you’re actually going to send.

The solution to sycophancy is not disparagement (misplaced criticism). The classical true/false positive/negative dilemma is at play here. I guess the bot got caught in the crossfire of 1°) its no-bullshit attitude (it can only be an attitude) 2°) preference for delivering blunt criticism over insincere flattery 3°) being a helpful assistant. Remove point 3°), and it could have replied: "I'm not engaging in this nonsense". Preserve it and it will politely suggest that you condense your bullshit text, because shorter explanations are better than long winding rants (it's probably in the prompt).
by effed3 | 2025-07-13 13:10:31+00:00
Probably every intelligence has its limits, as every systems (eg. mathematics, remembering goedel) has his own. This kind of AGI seems like a deity, hard to belive it's possible, but in pratice many kind of "smaller" intelligences exist (from ants to primates) less "general" but enough to solve enough problems to live and evolve, and maybe can be even created by others intelligences. IMHO It's reasonable to think a real intelligence as a property of complex evolving systems interacting with a complex environment, so to live in a complex world a not-so-general intelligence can be enough, even given some limits and errors.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-07-13 13:11:04+00:00
Yeah, my thought reading Neuromancer too. I'm fine with Clockwork-Orange-esque jargon in prose, but even removing that, Gibson's text still didn't flow in a story-telling (conversational?) way for me. It was too stilted or something.

I suspect talking to Gibson in person probably requires a good deal of studied attention as well. That can be exhausting for an entire novel.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-07-13 13:11:53+00:00
One of the core problems of the internet is that the "everything-is-free-if-watch-ads-but-you-can-also-easily-block-them" paradigm of the last 25 years has created a generation of people with an innate entitlement to free services.

Asking these people to directly cover the cost of the services they use incurs a level of incredulity and anger on par with charging to breath.
by dep_b | 2025-07-13 13:12:28+00:00
Apple would be in big trouble if their hardware mobile and desktop wasn't so much better, Windows wasn't a train wreck and Android was offering something more than a slightly less sucky version of Siri.

In the mean while most of its competitors are burning towers of money on AI products that they charge their consumers about 1/10th of the real cost for. While Apple goes for on-device agents that are essentially free to run.
by ecocentrik | 2025-07-13 13:12:40+00:00
Eh, that is a take but hetero normative sex still sells lots of porn subscriptions today and depictions of queer sex in media only feel novel because it was so heavily disallowed in the past. Whereas hetero normative sex hardly appears in movies or tv anymore because it's boring to watch actors pretending to have sex when you can see the real thing effortlessly.
by sokoloff | 2025-07-13 13:13:00+00:00
I disagree (not a CEO). What’s the median worker at a company like Walmart or Amazon paid? To think that a CEO of those couldn’t improve (or degrade) the company’s performance by many thousand times more than a Walmart or Amazon worker seems strange to me. They’re paying them to not make those companies into Sears or J.C.Penney.

Investors (and the boards they hire) pay CEOs for results. That range of results is very wide for large companies.
by amy214 | 2025-07-13 13:15:10+00:00
>The local reporting just said the patient died the same day they sought care, without saying anything about when the illness may have started.

Such velocity is possible but rare. I've seen people die from necrotizing fasciitis, for example, that died at such a velocity (1-2 days). Granted it's an extremely rare infection like amoeba of the brain.