MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cestith | 2025-11-14 14:52:28+00:00
I think they are fine definitions. I think a transpiler, a term rewriter, an assembler, a stand-alone optimizer, and even some pretty printers are subclasses of compilers.

I define a compiler as something that takes an input in a language, does transformations, and produces a transformed output in a language. All of them do that, and they are more specific terms for types of compilers.
by pona-a | 2025-11-14 14:52:45+00:00
As someone born in a post‑Soviet country with rather many odd digital laws--including one requiring that any use of encryption be registered with the department of commerce and the secret service (meaning no TLS unless you get a permit)--I can clearly see the endgame of similar proposals.

These laws aren’t meant to be followed. Their text is deliberately vague, and their demands are impossible by design. They aren't foolish, or at least their ignorance isn't needed to explain the system's broader function. They are meant to serve as a Chekhov's gun that may or may not fire over your head, depending solely on whether the people holding it decide like you.

In peaceful times, they fade into the background, surfacing only when it’s convenient to blackmail some company for cash or favors. In times of crisis, they declare a never-ending war on extremism, sin, and treason, fought against an inexhaustible supply of targets to take down in front of their higher‑ups, farming promotions, contracts for DPI software, and jobs updating its filters.

Historically, such controls were limited by the motivation and competence of the arms dealers, usually taking the form of DNS or IP blocks easily bypassed with proxies. With modern DPI, it's entire protocols going dark. Even so, those able to learn easily find a way around them. The people who suffer most are seniors, unable even to call family across the border without a neighbor's help, and their relatives forced into using least trustworthy messengers (such as Botim, from the creators of ToTok, a known UAE intel operation [0]) thinking they're the only way to stay in touch, not knowing how or wanting to use mainstream IM over a VPNs that may or may not live another month.

If wherever you are your votes still matter, please fight this nonsense. Make no mistake, your enemies are still more ridiculous than Voltaire could hope they'd be, but organizing against or simply living through a regime constantly chewing on the internet's wires is going to be a significantly greater inconvenience than taking _real_ action now.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ToTok
by bofadeez | 2025-11-14 14:52:57+00:00
And are there any quant funds that consistently make money? No. It's like professional gambling. Susquehanna actually bets on sports too. Constant losses (hopefully slightly) offset by gains. There's no such as a trader with high accuracy/precision. If you can even edge out 1% (gain-loss) you'll be a billionaire from $0 very quickly. A positive edge is so exceptionally rare, it's like a startup -> unicorn. It would be the equivalent of owning a casino with trillions of dollars being played nonstop. It almost never happens.

If there was any fixed analytic solution to behavior then a simple neural network would approximate it quite easily. It's almost all noise with only spurious correlations and misleading patterns that don't repeat.
by sorcercode | 2025-11-14 14:53:08+00:00
sort of. it was a nuts and bolt implementation. by their own admission it was reintroduced to make it more friendly. from a comment I saw made elsewhere:

> yes about:profiles has existed for a long time. We have heard feedback from many of our users to make it user friendly and accessible. We are introducing many new additional functionalities in this new profile management experience (avatars, colors/themes, shortcuts, desktop icons, default links/apps per profile, copy profile, move tabs between profiles). Stayed tuned for these updates.

so yes, you are right. it did exist.
by immibis | 2025-11-14 14:53:19+00:00
How bad are the effects of an interruption for you? Google has servers running every day, but you with one server can afford to gamble on it, since it probably won't fail for years - no matter the hardware though, keep a backup, because data loss is permanent. Would you lose millions of dollars a minute, or would you just have to send an email to customers saying "oops"?

Risk management is a normal part of business - every business does it. Typically the risk is not brought down all the way to zero, but to an acceptable level. The milk truck may crash and the grocery store will be out of milk that day - they don't send three trucks and use a quorum.

If you want to guarantee above-normal uptime, feel free, but it costs you. Google has servers failing every day just because they have so many, but you are not Google and you most likely won't experience a hardware failure for years. You should have a backup because data loss is permanent, but you might not need redundancy for your online systems. Depending on what your business does.
by greenavocado | 2025-11-14 14:53:31+00:00
As a rule, criticism of the ruling elite will never be tolerated in the long term. The Internet was free and unrestricted until the masses shifted their attention to it, at which point, the ruling elite cracked down on it in order to maintain their hegemony by maintaining the ignorance of the masses, which they see as cattle to be herded and milked and sacrificed ritualistically from time to time for their internal social bonding purposes.
by kj4ips | 2025-11-14 14:53:41+00:00
It's my opinion that nvidia does good engineering at the nanometer scale, but it gets worse the larger it gets. They do a worse job at integrating the same aspeed BMC that (almost) everyone uses than SuperMicro does, and the version of Aptio they tend to ship has almost nothing available in setup. With the price of a DGX, I expect far better. (Insert obligatory bezel grumble here)
by immibis | 2025-11-14 14:53:59+00:00
Indeed, this is something to be aware of.

They are not selling you a magical SaaS solution. They are renting to you a particular physical server on a particular physical shelf. In principle, you could break into the DC and steal your server and lay it on your desk at home and it would operate exactly as it did inside the DC.

Some people accustomed to cloud expect magic from their dedicated servers, which does not exist.
by vidarh | 2025-11-14 14:54:11+00:00
Just half an hour ago I needed to extra some text from a Notion page as JSON, and just popped the URL into Claude code and told it to use Playwright to extract the fields. I'd prefer to have it in Firefox, but the Firefox AI sidebar doesn't provide much meaningful integration (I'm sure there are extensions, and will probably look for that later, but the Playwright MCP server provided what I needed for now)

So, yes, I want AI in "everything".

And it's not a waste of resources if it's not triggered automatically.
by altcognito | 2025-11-14 14:54:41+00:00
People don't want AI passively lurking in the background extracting behavioral data yet this is the model they are aiming for, or at least gravitating towards repeatedly.

I also don't need / don't want it's manipulative presence around.

Not to be paranoid, but it's not just about browsers, that's just the most convenient place we've gotten started with this sort of mass surveillance (and control) architecture.
by kristofferR | 2025-11-14 14:55:34+00:00
Because they mostly are, and even if not, it doesn't usually matter.

For example - you summarize a YouTube link to decide if the content of it is something you're interested in watching. Even if summarizations like that are only 90% correct 90% of the times it is still really helpful, you get the info you need to make a decision to read/watch the long form content or not.
by StefanBatory | 2025-11-14 14:55:42+00:00
True now.

At the same time, as a nonnative speaker of English, this is literally how we were taught to write eye-catching articles and phrases. :P

A lot of formulaic writing is what we were taught to do, especially with more formal things. (This is more of a sidenote to this example)

So in a hunt for LLMs, we also get hit.
by buellerbueller | 2025-11-14 14:56:01+00:00
Fine, fine: get rid of golf courses too.

As for food production; that might be important? IDK, I am not a silicon "intelligence" so what do I know? Also, I have to "eat". Wouldn't it be a wonderful world if we can just replace ourselves, so that agriculture is unnecessary, and we can devote all that water to AGI.

TIL that the true arc of humanity is to replace itself!
by philipwhiuk | 2025-11-14 14:56:32+00:00
> And even though the money used to pay these buyouts mostly comes out of TV deals and sponsorships that athletic departments rake in, it’s not hard to imagine the scholarships that could be awarded or the women’s and Olympic sports programs that could be reinstated with all that cash.

There's a big leap here that the profit from one sport should be invested in another. Why should the profitable football team prop up another sport.

Yes the contracts are crazy, but it's because success drives incredible revenue.
by antonyh | 2025-11-14 14:56:59+00:00
Absolutely is fragmented. Even though I own a Wii I've never played Zelda or any Mario games, and I don't think I know anyone who owns a modern Nintendo. We all live in bubbles. And we change bubbles occasionally; I no longer play Fifa or CoD mostly because of the kernel anti-cheat. I got bored of CSGO. I play less gory games now because of family. We play less Lego games because we grow up.
by andrewflnr | 2025-11-14 14:57:20+00:00
If you define "logic" as requiring words, then it's only a model of casuality, which is real irrespective of life entirely.

You're demanding that language perfectly convey an abstract argument, which is obviously unreasonable, and saying that since it can't do that we can't discuss tricky subjects at all, which if you take this line of reasoning seriously is all of them. So how about you "remain silent".
by rs186 | 2025-11-14 14:57:23+00:00
Unless I am horribly mistaken, using Firefox is an intentional choice by a vanishing group of people. If you are just a little bit less careful or determined, you would likely be using chrome or a chrome variant, definitely not Firefox. These users are choosing a browser that has slightly worse performance, has fewer features (e.g. WebUSB) and is seeing more problems with Cloudflare/Google captcha every day. All of this for better adblocking and full control of the browser.

Why would they want AI?
by CamouflagedKiwi | 2025-11-14 14:57:48+00:00
I see the point, but them following the leader on this does not seem like a recipe for success. They aren't going to be as good at AI as OpenAI's browser, and their users are going to be less bought into it. I would have hoped they'd have learned their lesson from things like FirefoxOS but I guess not...
by sevensor | 2025-11-14 14:58:12+00:00
Yes, this would be P type. Boron is usually the P type dopant of choice. I’m not sure what role they have in mind for this, but probably to replace polysilicon and metals as conductors. What you have to watch out for is that this will make diodes wherever it bumps up against n-type material. This is a problem for metals as well, because you can get accidental schottky junctions, and we usually solve it with degenerate doping under the contract. I’m not sure what a junction with this material would do though.
by nerdjon | 2025-11-14 14:58:22+00:00
I mean, that is kinda exactly what I said..

But we do have to acknowledge that AI is very much turned into an all encompassing term of everything ML. It is getting harder and harder to read an article about something being done with "AI" and to know if it was a custom purpose built model to do a specific task or is it throwing data into an LLM and hoping for the best.

They are purposefully making it harder and harder to just say "No AI" by obfuscating this so we have to be very specific about what we are talking about.
by Etherlord87 | 2025-11-14 14:58:57+00:00
A farmer is a valuable perspective but imagine asking a lumberjack about the ecological effects of deforestation, he might know more about it than an average Joe, but there's probably better people to ask for expertise?

> Honestly, we probably use more water than they do

This kind of proves my point, regardless of the actual truth in this regard, it's a terrible argument to make: availability of water starts to become a huge problem in a growing amount of places, and this statement implies the water usage of something, that in basic principle doesn't need water at all, uses comparable amount of water as farming, which strictly relies on water.
by coldpie | 2025-11-14 14:59:03+00:00
I talk to an acquaintance selling some homemade products on Etsy, he uses & likes the automatically generated product summary Etsy made for him. My neighbor asks me if I have any further suggestions for refinishing her table top beyond the ones ChatGPT suggested. Watching all of my coworkers using Google search, they just read the LLM summary at the top of the page and look no further. I see a friend take a picture, she uses the photo AI tool to remove a traffic sign from the background. Over lunch, a coworker tells me about the thing she learned about from the generated summary of a YouTube video.

We can take principled stands against these things, and I do because I am an obnoxiously principled dork, but the reality is it's everywhere and everyone other than us is using it.
by lapcat | 2025-11-14 14:59:03+00:00
> It's looking just at the moneyed class of entrepreneurs and declaring that "entrepreneurs come from backgrounds that provide a lot of resources".

This is incorrect. For example, here's one of the links in the article:

"We study a sample of individuals who choose either to be employees or to run their own businesses." "we find that the probability of self-employment depends markedly upon whether the individual ever received an inheritance or gift." https://www.andrewoswald.com/docs/entrepre.pdf

Also: “If one does not have money in the form of a family with money, the chances of becoming an entrepreneur drop quite a bit,” Levine tells Quartz.

> I've had the good fortune to get to know and work with quite a lot of successful entrepreneurs

But this is survivorship bias. You also need to consider the people who never became entrepreneurs, or who failed as entrepreneurs due to lack of money.

Note that my quote above says the chances of becoming an entrepreneur drop quite a bit, but it doesn't say the chances drop to zero. So of course the number of non-privileged entrepreneurs will be greater than zero. It's all about the odds.

I'm personally an entrepreneur, not wealthy, but currently doing better than the majority of people. It took me 5 years to establish a sustainable business, and I nearly went broke, burning through my entire life savings (now restored). This never would have been possible if I didn't already have a substantial life savings before I quit my job.
by simonw | 2025-11-14 14:59:07+00:00
See comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45927268

Given the difference in water usage, more data centers does not mean less water for agriculture in any meaningful way.

If you genuinely want to save water you should celebrate any time an acre of farm land is converted into an acre of data center - all the more water for the other farms!
by mcintyre1994 | 2025-11-14 14:59:37+00:00
I've only really used AWS at a startup, but this sounds kinda scary based on that experience just because it's so easy to configure services in AWS to cost you lots more. How does something like Encore figure out what to use for the nitty-gritty AWS config details without exposing the user to those decisions? I can't remember any really specific examples because it's been a while since I used AWS, but a smaller example would be something like configuring logging/time to keep logs.
by hbn | 2025-11-14 15:00:04+00:00
Even before they muddied things with reusing the S and X names for completely different things, "Xbox One" was bad enough

I worked at a pawn shop when that console generation kicked off. One day a guy called in and asked if he could bring in his Xbox One. "Of course," I told him, until I had to turn him away because it was an original Xbox.
by the__alchemist | 2025-11-14 15:01:36+00:00
I will go meta into what you posted here: That people are classifying themselves as "AI skeptics". Many people are treating this in terms of tribal conflict and identity politics. On HN, we can do better! IMO the move is drop the politics, and discuss things on their technical merits. If we do talk about it as a debate, we can do it when with open minds, and intellectual honesty.

I think much of this may be a reaction to the hype promoted by tech CEOs and media outlets. People are seeing through their lies and exaggerations, and taking positions like "AI/LLMs have no values or uses", then using every argument they hear as a reason why it is bad in a broad sense. For example: Energy and water concerns. That's my best guess about the concern you're braced against.
by dmantis | 2025-11-14 15:02:10+00:00
As far as it's an optional separate window, I don't see any issues with that.

E.g. I had a very good experience in reversing a local bank API with LLMs to download my bank statements in a few seconds by local python scripts instead of several minutes of error-prone clicking in the bank's shitty old interface. The thing that I'd have done in one day, the LLM coded in several minutes by taking recorded request-responses. Yes, the code is a bit gibberish, but why do I care for my local single-user usage?

I can imagine a dozen similar stupid but routine API parsing challenges for LLMs that everyone could use.

If it's not enabled during usual browsing and doesn't snoop in everyday data, but only in a dedicated sandboxed window, I say it's a good design from Mozilla's side.
by vidarh | 2025-11-14 15:02:27+00:00
I don't think it exemplifies that at all. Using Playwright absolutely is, but that was my niche fallback to the lack of an integrated AI solution.

The use-case, which generalised is "pull some information from a web page", is far less niche, and I'd argue extremely common.

I know a lot of people - including non-technical people - who spend a lot of time doing that in ways ranging from entirely manual to somewhat more sophisticated, and the more technically knowledgeable of those have started looking for AI tools to help them with that.

To the extent users "don't want" AI available for things like this, it is mostly because they don't know AI could help with this.

E.g. just a few days ago, I had someone show me how they painstakingly copied column by column from the exact same Notion site I mentioned into a Google sheet, without realising it was trivially automatable. Or rather: Trivially automatable to a technical user like me. But it could be trivially automatable to anyone with relatively little integration effort in the browsers.
by j1elo | 2025-11-14 15:02:42+00:00
Tested it last night, here is some feedback:

* Tried the obvious one, removing all Shorts sections and buttons from Youtube.com, it one-shotted it without apparent issues. Great!

* Tried a second one on youtube: increase the information density, shrinking the size of each video entry so more entries can fit in my screen. This one was a fail: it took 180+ seconds (vs. around 60 seconds of previous query), then some thumbnails got smaller (not all), while the physical space and padding for each entry was still there (so no real density was gained from the change)

* I think it'd be useful to be able to check the exact prompt that was used, so I can re-read it. It might even be interesting if it was editable, so I might decide to rephrase something from it. Otherwise, a chat-like interface would be interesting too, so the extension asks me what it interprets from my words before working to produce it. Right now, it feels like a very slow iteration process where I write something, it doesn't get it, and I keep trying to refine it and waiting around 60 to 100 seconds between results.

* I'd also like to see the actual filters that are being generated and applied on each change. This is so I can learn from them and probably edit them manually for refinement, as it can be faster to change a little bit in there, than trying to convey the exact phrasing of what I want to the LLM.

* This brought to mind the obvious (to me at least!) idea of how helpful it would be to have an uBlock Origin rule creator with same kind of LLM help. Filter rules are so esoteric and complicated for me (a C++ backend dev) that I always spend several hours of reading and DOM analysis as soon as I want to do anything that's not as simple as using the extension's element picker.

* A collection of curated changes would be useful. My first instinct was to check if there's a gallery of the most common changes that people request to some popular websites. I guess this can be analyzed and trends can be discovered.

* All in all, this looks amazing. It's a very useful and really gamechanging usage of LLMs! Changing website contents was out of reach for the general public before, so this extension could become their door to that.
Tell HN: Dentist banned from WhatsApp without appeal
by giorgioz | 2025-11-14 15:03:02+00:00
I've been developing https://www.dododentist.com for the past year. DodoDentist is a dental clinic management software. I've spent weeks trying to add the Whatsapp reminders like: "Hi {{recipient_name}}, your dentist appointment is {{appointment_details}}. Thank you"

My ID has been rejected more than 20 times at Business verification. All sorts of dumb errors like "You haven't provided a valid ID" "Your ID name doesn't match" "Your ID must have a dark background". My ID has been accepted literally by dozens of banks and websites before Whatsapp decided to rejected it 20 times in dozens of versions.

After weeks of implementing Meta Cloud API integration, today my whole Whatsapp account has been banned after sending literally 3 message of that template. No reason has been provided except it doesn't comply with Whatsapp Policy (which of course is long pages).

If you know someone from Whatsapp Business verification team or you can help me please write at admin AT dododentist DOT com

If you are also in the same situation please reach out. I'm considering legal action. The Google Play Store and App Store were successfully sued when they did not provide motivation for rejection and I'm considering doing the same.
by dandinu | 2025-11-14 15:03:49+00:00
I just finished testing the Tinker API launched by Mira Murati's Thinking Machines and I can honestly say, even though it feels unfinished, it's pretty great. The setup is really smooth and with some minimal coding (and using their examples in the Tinker Cookbook) I was able to fine tune a Llama 3.1 8B Base on the Romanian language in under 20 min. The result was pretty decent and eventually I got it to write better poetry than the base model, in the target language.

I mostly did it because I got some free credits from them and I was curious what a company valued at 50 billion has to offer. The product overall feels like it's half-baked since there is no real interface, but the API does a lot of the heavy lifting in the backend while maintaining this local development feeling, which I personally find pretty cool.

I put the code up on Github, if anyone is interested, but I am curious what y'all think about their approach top fine tuning.
by Dwedit | 2025-11-14 15:03:55+00:00
The page itself has a more accurate description (Winamp *clone* in swift for OS/X) than the headline here.

Since the actual Winamp had a questionable source code release, it could feasibly have been ported to other platforms, so we need to know that it is in fact a clone, and not a port of the real Winamp.