MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sealeck | 2025-07-13 12:11:02+00:00
The issue with the salary is not that it costs the same as 30 developers – good leadership can make a difference worth >30 developers over the same timespan (especially in an organisation with 1000s of staff). The problem is that the Mozilla leadership hasn't been great, which makes the high salary especially difficult to defend. 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.
by bradfa | 2025-07-13 12:11:49+00:00
I have a Firefox account. I will gladly pay a yearly fee for it! It provides significant value to me.

For example I pay Bitwarden $10/year for both myself and my wife. We will be moving to a Bitwarden family plan soon as our kids are getting old enough to have online accounts. Similar pricing structures for Firefox accounts would be totally reasonable!

Clearly some people would prefer a free way to use Firefox and that’s ok, too. In the same vein Bitwarden have a free plan. This kind of pricing structure already works in the market. Please copy it.

Mozilla, please stop screwing up and just make a great Firefox!
by topspin | 2025-07-13 12:11:57+00:00
> Unless autonomous drones happen

Autonomous drones are an inevitability. Enormous force multiplication is available with autonomy. We're talking about a few people, or perhaps one person, defeating battalions.

The truth is autonomous weapons have been in use for a long time now. Mark 60 CAPTOR anti-submarine mines (circa 1979) autonomously identified enemies and launched a torpedo to destroy submarines.
by ghjhome | 2025-07-13 12:12:16+00:00
I've been playing with the raw ElevenLabs and OpenAI TTS APIs for a while now, and the latency and quality profile here feel familiar. Can you be transparent about what your actual tech stack is? What's the "secret sauce" or the proprietary tech here beyond a nice UI wrapper, and why should I use this instead of just hitting the APIs directly with my own scripts?
by hboon | 2025-07-13 12:12:18+00:00
Not the OP, but I have this fish alias. I just run `claude-docker` in my project root (where I would otherwise run `claude`). There's nothing to it. You can tweak it:

alias claude-docker='docker run --mount type=bind,source=/Users/hboon/.claude,target=/home/node/.claude --mount type=bind,source=/Users/hboon/.claude.json,target=/home/node/.claude.json --mount type=bind,source=.,target=/workspace/project --workdir /workspace/project -it cc /usr/bin/fish'
by therealpygon | 2025-07-13 12:13:03+00:00
What “can” be done and what “will” be done are two entirely different things. I was simply correcting the fact they stated it couldn’t be supported.

There is a reason I stopped using Chrome-based browsers years ago. Killing V2 was never anything but a play to make sure people see ads under the guise of “security”. While there is some security benefit, the main benefit is making sure Google is the only one spying on user’s every move.

This is what you get when people trust their browser development to a monopolist instead of a consortium. You get fast and shiny bells and whistles with support for the latest whatsis, but you also get this.
by jrlee | 2025-07-13 12:13:10+00:00
Great question, and this gets to the heart of what makes us different. While we utilize some external APIs for supplementary functions, our core TTS engine is our own proprietary technology that we run on our own servers. Our team (Humelo) has been focused solely on audio AI and TTS in Korea for the last 8 years. We've built a strong technology base there, but the market for audio content is small. We launched Sohri to bring our tech to creators in the larger US market and would love your support.
by anovikov | 2025-07-13 12:13:27+00:00
Because with air force, critical asset is both people and planes. Just planes is not enough. You can't train pilots not having planes yes, but when you got planes, hard part starts, not ends. It will take many years to have prepared Ukrainian pilots to go into hostile airspace SEAD missions. No one except USAF can do it today. It requires very complex collaboration of many different assets in a manner that is incredibly lengthy and expensive to train for. This is why America leads in it: it has time, space, and cash. There's no way to shortcut it. This is also why Russia concentrates on ground-based SAMs and it's air force is shit: because training SAM operators is cheap and quick. They provide good defence. Ukraine has the same, for same reason. So they are stuck hitting each other with drones because none can do an air offensive.
by reidrac | 2025-07-13 12:13:48+00:00
It can be done; an example is Igalia: https://www.igalia.com/jobs/

> We are a worker-owned, employee-run company with more than 20 years of experience building open source software in a wide range of exciting fields.

If there's enough money to go to the developers actively working on a product to make it sustainable, I think a lot of people would get on board with that and would pay for FF.
by al45tair | 2025-07-13 12:14:02+00:00
And even if OP could show that physics couldn’t be simulated, it still wouldn’t follow that AGI was impossible, or even that it couldn’t be achieved by approximating the simulation that was proved to be impossible to do accurately.

AGI is clearly possible, because our brains are fundamentally machines, and there’s no reason in principle why we couldn’t build something similar. Right now we don’t - as human beings - have the ability to do that, but it clearly isn’t impossible since cellular machinery is able to build it in the first place.
by lesuorac | 2025-07-13 12:14:19+00:00
> I'm afraid without elaborating at least a little bit on the context, this does not tell me anything about the correctness of my (slightly tongue-in-cheek) statement.

Nationwide injunctions are technically still allowed. The birthright citizenship case mostly means that judges _shouldn't_ do them though.

> Is the case you linked the case from this article?

Its for the "click-to-cancel" case. I don't think it's too much to ask to open the link and see that the actual text of the lawsuit starts immediately talking about click-to-cancel.

> This comment mostly reads as "look at me, I know how to quote legalese in a way that only other people who are also on the inside can understand. I am very intelligent."

The comment was more of "our court systems are become partisan hacks". Rules against the party's desires cannot be injected nationwide but rules assisting the party's desires can be.

There's certainly more people in this country with birthright citizenship than companies affected by click-to-cancel.
by sealeck | 2025-07-13 12:15:13+00:00
> But that illusion only works when there is zero oversight.

Certainly when it comes to Wikipedia: there is oversight. I know people don't like the fact that Wikipedia spends money on things other than server racks, but spending money on developing the community is a pretty legitimate thing to do! How else can you maintain such an encylopedia? You need to attract knowledgeable people to write and review articles!
by delusional | 2025-07-13 12:15:18+00:00
It wouldn't necessarily, but innovation would separate the product from the commoditized nature of regular consumer drones, which I postulate is what made them cheap. Suddenly you need a special military drone, and that could end up being a moat Lockheed would charge you 20 billion for.

I suppose my concern is that missiles and bombs probably aren't any more expensive to produce than these drones are. There's just a huge markup for military equipment. We are trying to solve a problem of capitalism (or the military industrial complex i suppose) through technology, and that rarely works. It usually just creates a new layer of incumbents that want another 20 billion.
by danotdead | 2025-07-13 12:15:33+00:00
It’s not about getting overly vitriolic. It’s simply that they said this:

“The Firefox Browser is the only major browser backed by a not-for-profit that doesn’t sell your personal data to advertisers”

And then, they changed it:

https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2025/03/02/mozilla_introduce...

Google also had an unofficial motto: “Don’t be evil” and said:

“Our search results are the best we know how to produce. They are unbiased and objective, and we do not accept payment for them or for inclusion or more frequent updating”

https://time.com/4060575/alphabet-google-dont-be-evil/

And they changed it.

So- sure, sometimes people change their minds.

But, Google never promised it wouldn’t sell your data.

Mozilla did, and users continued to use it, many without knowledge of it; it should be a banner over all the pages: “Hey, we sell your data. Click here to acknowledge.”
by carlosjobim | 2025-07-13 12:16:02+00:00
The Soviet Union had some giant corporations with powerful leaders. The best known of these are the leaders of military industry, such as Pavel Sukhoi or Mikhail Kalashnikov, or Tupolev. Were they not industrialists? They performed the same functions as leaders of Western industry. Soviet military corporations even competed against each other for government contracts. The industrialist could also be a party functionary or minister, but for sure they had industrialists.
by MasanskY01 | 2025-07-13 12:16:03+00:00
The land of the free. Where every moron can get and use a firearm and the rest of the world only knows the country even has educational institutes because of all the school shootings. But let's outlaw trans, drags and writings for the poor religious conservative inbreds in the South. Because that's the real danger in the world now. Yikes
by exDM69 | 2025-07-13 12:16:23+00:00
Long distance communication with submarines is difficult but not impossible, there are four extra low frequency transmitters in the world to send signals in nuclear doomsday scenarios.

For shorter distances, there are acoustic and optical devices, and near surface some low frequency radios can be used.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication_with_submarine...
by lukan | 2025-07-13 12:16:30+00:00
Well, since both sides are using drones heavily, why should one side have already won?

In any case, drones and artillery are responsible for most kills. But to hold the land you still need boots and tanks on the ground. But they can also be soon replaced by drones. Or rather, there will be more and more of them and fewer humans with the main job of controlling and directing them.
by graemep | 2025-07-13 12:17:25+00:00
> The tapestry was made by nuns.

I do not think that is correct. We do not actually know who hade it.

The alleged missed penis was spotted by a historian with the surname Monk though :)

> May be it was more common occurrence so to speak - because men were basically wearing dresses too, and short ones at that

Very likely. They were not that hung up about nudity and accidental exposure.
by pfdietz | 2025-07-13 12:17:32+00:00
This would likely be less damaging if the bomb could be largely based on H-11B fusion rather than DT or DD fusion. The latter inevitably produce large numbers of neutrons.

At gigaton scales, thermonuclear devices become easier to build in a sense, because the assembly has more time to react as it expands. More stages are needed to compress that very large final stage, though.

The argument reminds me of Freeman Dyson's H bomb propelled interstellar concept, which exploited the fact that per unit of energy output, deuterium was (at the time of publication, in 1968) thousands of times cheaper than fossil fuels.
by rpdillon | 2025-07-13 12:17:56+00:00
You can only punish them if you find out about it.

I'm not going to do the legwork for you, but you should be looking around for the way Google is transferring the medical information on 50 million Americans as part of Project Nightingale a few years back, and you should be looking very seriously at medical sites that use Google Analytics in direct violation of HIPAA. The situation here is very much like the situation with the government collecting detailed profiles on every citizen and knowing their location in real time: they're not supposed to be doing it, but the reality is they can and they do.

Snowden's leaks were another great example about how the law doesn't actually matter, if you can't see whether or not it's being enforced.

My point here is if you're counting on the system to protect you, you're going to be disappointed.

Recent example was that I was supposed to give up my ID because I lost my 2FA for a particular site and I refused because I didn't believe they would delete my ID. My friends said that I was paranoid.

https://www.404media.co/id-verification-service-for-tiktok-u...
by ironyman | 2025-07-13 12:18:09+00:00
The Pentagon has recently recognized small drones as 'consumable commodities' like bullets and grenades so there is a role for them to play but U.S. military isn't about to pivot to a strategy of winning wars with swarms of cheap quadcopters. The core of American military power is firmly rooted in long-range kill chains, which is about finding a target to take out (often far in advance of the operation) and then precisely killing it from far away.
by kamaal | 2025-07-13 12:18:12+00:00
>>Unless you believe in magic, the human brain proves that human level general intelligence is possible in our physical universe, running on a system based on the laws of said physical universe.

Using your analogy, what this means is, we have to make humans to make human like intelligence. Not that we can make human like intelligence out side of humans.

>>Given that, there's no particular reason to think that "what the brain does" OR a reasonably close approximation, can't be done on another "system based on the laws of our physical universe."

What exactly does the brain do? Part of the problems with this is language itself might be insufficient to describe intelligence. And Language might be working a level below our thought. There are occasions where even the best of us fail to come up with how we think. We can go close and its not enough. A picture is better than a thousand words - why? Perhaps language is enough to display signs of intelligence but can't entirely contain or describe it.

Similarly, even in the case of LLMs we have seen showing spatial intelligence is whole lot different than predicting text.

Heck intelligence might not even be one monolithic thing. It could be a collection of several intelligences. And this whole idea of one grand AGI monolith could be wrong.
Show HN: Couchtime.click – my YouTube whitelist app
by jwally | 2025-07-13 12:18:50+00:00
I wanted a way to limit what channels on youtube my kids could watch, so I built this over the weekend with Claude. Whats nice is it still works even though we're blocking youtube and youtube-kids through PiHole.

No idea what I'm going to do with it from here, but thought it was worth a share. Thanks!
by homebrewer | 2025-07-13 12:19:29+00:00
Three examples off the top of my head — PostgreSQL, FreeBSD, and Debian — are doing just fine without someone "taking responsibility" (when have Mozilla's CEO ever done that?).

Debian has an elected leader that is not paid and has pretty limited authority overall.

There's also the Linux kernel, with Linus doing both managerial and technical work, running circles around Mozilla's leadership in both. He makes just a few millions per year, less than Baker did even two years ago AFAIK.
by defraudbah | 2025-07-13 12:20:19+00:00
I had no idea what ETH means 2 years ago, I thought it's ethereum club in switzerland or something. Then I kept hearing about it, noticing people wearing ETH stuff.

obviously I don't know if it's university or people there because I haven't been there, but I keep hearing about ETH Zurich in different areas and it means something
by rcxdude | 2025-07-13 12:20:48+00:00
>It appears doubly true for Mozilla in this case because people don’t want to pay executive salaries/bonuses (yet happily consume other goods/services where this is already happening).

I think this is in larger part because people don't like the decisions they have been making. I think an executive team that had stayed focused on firefox or successfully brought in revenue to support it would have much less backlash on this point. People boycott other companies for similar reasons.
by flohofwoe | 2025-07-13 12:21:08+00:00
Still debatable since the C standard doesn't reserve the _t postfix (it does reserve a single leading underscore followed by a capital letter, e.g. _Bool, and IIRC it also reserves two leading underscores).

What POSIX reserves or doesn't reserve doesn't affect code that follows only the C standard but doesn't care about POSIX compatibility, and especially _t is so widely used in C libraries that POSIX's opinion obviously doesn't matter all that much in the real world.
by hackrmn | 2025-07-13 12:21:29+00:00
I've been shouting this from "the rooftops" ever since I eventually independently had come to the same conclusion through sufficient volume of experience and empiry. I consider it a small tragedy, however, that my words tend to fall on deaf ears as I try to explain to e.g. co-workers why they should, in fact, parse their input and use the language's type system to their advantage, vs. all the `validateThis` and `validateThat` they seem to be copying from e.g. Stack Overflow. I see them stumbling and breaking their nose time and again passing URIs around as strings -- even in languages other than C (so this isn't obviously a problem C created and needs to solve alone) -- where it's never enforced that the URI is e.g. "absolute" or "relative" (nevermind the fact these people often don't seem to care for the difference). They do the same error with date and time (how many decades of advice do we need to accumulate and impart on our younger peers for them to irrevocably understand why e.g. date and time should never be passed around as numbers or strings, with very clearly documented and justified exceptions?). But the tragedy is never more evident when the person looks at you like you're suddenly talking Klingon to them and how bored they are with the notion and how it cannot be so important as to disturb their very important "coding project" (we don't write Knuth's "literal" programs any more -- we _code_).
by makeitdouble | 2025-07-13 12:21:37+00:00
> Japan never really did counter-culture as mainstream as the US does.

I would put Akira in that bucket, but I see your point.

The way counter-culture is brought into mainstream is a lot more strategic in Japan, and the reader is expecting to do more deciphering work than in Blade Runner for instance.

E.g. Final Fantasy is overtly about fighting a Zaibatsu like corporate overlord that's depleting the vital resources of an environment. But what's promoted is gun-swords, spiky hairs and cute or sexy fighters.

Same way Reiji Matsumoto's Galaxy Express 999 is a 113 episodes long dissing of the corporate culture but it's all behind psychedelic tropes.

Those are arguably mainstream, given the money,an-hours and corporate weight invested in them and the general reception.

But none of them will put the main message up-front as much as Hunger Games would for instance, there is always a veil of flashiness that needs to be peeled to get to the substance.

(to note, SF live action is a lot harder to fund in Japan. I'd attribute that to the existence of anime which is so much more cost effective. With the budget for a live action Gundam you could make three TV series)
by atombender | 2025-07-13 12:21:38+00:00
> And IIRC Gibson famously doesn't use computers IRL

No, he famously didn't own a computer when he wrote Neuromancer.

“I wrote Neuromancer on a manual portable typewriter and about half of Count Zero on the same machine. Then it broke, in a way that was more or less irreparable. Bruce Sterling called me shortly thereafter and said, ‘This changes everything!’ I said, ‘What?’ He said, ‘My Dad gave me his Apple II. You have to get one of these things!’ I said, ‘Why?’ He said, ‘Automation—it automates the process of writing!’ I’ve never gone back.” [1]

[1] https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6089/the-art-of-fi...
by dotancohen | 2025-07-13 12:22:45+00:00
> "My favorite is always the billion dollar mistake of having null in the language. And since JavaScript has both null and undefined, it's the two billion dollar mistake." > -Anders Hejlsberg

Why can't all-1s be null? E.g. a small int goes from the range 0-255 to the range 0-254, but we get a really useful property with no out-of-band Nullable overhead.

With signed ints it even leads to symmetric ranges in the negative and positive directions.
Ramanujan-Computing: Distributed Computing with Idle Smart Devices: Open-Source
by ps_ramanujan | 2025-07-13 12:23:33+00:00
We're excited to share Ramanujan, a new open-source programming language and distributed computation platform that aims to unlock the vast, untapped processing power of modern smart devices. Imagine all those idle smartphones and smart TVs contributing to scientific research!

The inspiration is simple: an Apollo guidance computer's CPU was as powerful as a modern scientific calculator. Today's smart devices are millions of times more powerful, yet they're mostly idle. Ramanujan helps utilize this power for scientific advancement.

What is Ramanujan? Ramanujan is designed for distributed computation. Unlike platforms like BOINC, which often require project-specific clients, Ramanujan offers a universal interpreter. Project owners submit their code in the Ramanujan language, and participating devices, having installed the Ramanujan client once, can execute any submitted computation.

The interpreter is written in C++ and demonstrates significant performance gains:

~14% faster than CPython for a Gradient Descent algorithm (~350ms vs ~410ms).

Over 20X faster than MATLAB for a Whale Optimization Algorithm (2.5 sec vs 55 sec for optimizing 10 functions).

Key Features & Future Goals Performance: Faster than CPython and MATLAB for scientific computations.

Open-Source: MIT licensed project, code available on GitHub.

Device Compatibility: Binaries available for Android, macOS, and Ubuntu. Windows support is coming soon. Technically, any internet-connected device capable of basic arithmetic can run the interpreter once compiled for its architecture.

Ease of Use: A new portal (portal.ramanujan.dev) makes it easy for anyone to run Ramanujan jobs. An installer is also available for local desktop machines (Ubuntu, MacOS).

Our near-future goals are focused on Python compatibility:

Full Python Adoption: Allow state-of-the-art Python research code to run seamlessly on Ramanujan without modifications, by adopting Python constructs and grammar.

CFFI Integration: Enable associated CFFI code to run alongside Python scripts.

Expanded Device Support: Make clients available for a wider range of smart devices (fridges, washing machines, etc.) to maximize global compute contributions.

This project has the potential to significantly reduce e-waste and carbon emissions by leveraging existing hardware. We believe it can revolutionize computing for scientific research.

Get Involved! Ramanujan is in its nascent stage, and we're actively seeking contributors! Whether you're passionate about programming, compilers, distributed systems, or simply want to contribute to an impactful open-source project, we invite you to join us. Students are especially welcome to learn about compilers, distributed orchestration (our current service orchestrates thousands of computations with just a 2-core CPU!), and large-scale systems.

Checkout the project:

Portal: https://portal.ramanujan.dev

GitHub: https://github.com/Ramanujan-Computing/Ramanujan

Let's collaborate to push Ramanujan forward!