MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by JKCalhoun | 2025-11-27 13:19:49+00:00
Perhaps it made it to the top of HN because there are a lot of Sherlock Holmes fans here who are curious about some of the nuances of the character not often cited. That the article itself may be lacking in specifics may not be a problem if it has at least whetted the curiosity of a number of us. (And we can then seek out more details, or better still, read the whole series of books with a keener eye.)
by ajdude | 2025-11-27 13:20:38+00:00
> Please do not conflate the two

I'm not talking about Firefox focus?

I'm talking about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43213612

Mozilla has hired a lot of execs from Meta and bought an ad company, looking through a lot of their privacy policy at the time, a lot of it involves rewriting it to say that they can serve you sponsored suggestions when you're searching for things in their search bar and stuff and sharing out some of that data with third parties etc.

Firefox was bringing in half a billion a year for the last decade, if they would've just invested that money in low risk money market accounts (instead of paying their csuite executives millions of dollars in salary and putting the rest on non-Firefox related related social causes), the company would be able to easily survive off the interest alone.

I've been using Firefox since like 2006 and have defended it for decades even when they've made questionable decisions that have gotten everybody upset with them. But this time it wasn't just making stupid decisions to try and fund the company, this time they actuality sold out their own customers.

In public announcement in the above link explaining why they removed "we don't sell your data" from the FAQ, the rationality was that some jurisdictions define selling data weirdly, they cited California's definition as an example but California's definition is exactly what I would consider the definition of selling my personal data.

They're justifying this by saying that they need it to stay alive since they're not going to be getting money from Google anymore, but I argue that you shouldn't sell out your customer base on the very specific reason anyone would choose you. I would rather pay a monthly fee to use Firefox to support them, but even if you gave them $500 million today they would just squander it away like they've done since forever so I really don't have any solution I can think of which frustrates me.

It's absolutely Firefox that I'm trying to avoid completely at this point.

> There are other options though. For example a DoH DNS profile pointing at DNS servers that do that for you (for example Mullvad's `adblock.dns.mullvad.net` DNS servers

DNS adblock doesn't automatically skip sponsored segments of videos like sponsorblock does.
by FridayoLeary | 2025-11-27 13:20:44+00:00
Yes, i thought it was silly as well. revisionist analysis such as these are pretty common, though normally better written. You can probably find half a dozen essays with titles like "Sherlock holmes fought against colonial oppression, a deep dive in how Conan doyle covered unpopular and controversial topics in the victorian age". And another 50 essays arguing the opposite point.
by devilbunny | 2025-11-27 13:21:08+00:00
Depends on the surgery and how you want to listen.

Ask to have it played in the room? Sure. Want to listen on your own device? We don’t want to be responsible for loss or damage to that device. Want to use earbuds? Same problem if you’re going to be sedated at all, plus there is also the risk of damage to you if there’s metal anywhere.

One of the most commonly used instruments in surgery is electrocautery. A large pad is placed on (usually) a leg and is one electrode; the other is the instrument tip that does the burning. In theory, any metal in the current path could be a point for arcing. This is why you are asked to remove piercings (see your piercer for silicone plugs to fill the holes during surgeries). We don’t want to torch you.

I’m an anesthesiologist. Some of the risks we are guarding against are more theoretical than practical, but until the 1950’s all useful anesthetic gases were flammable and so protocols were focused on not setting the patients or the operating room on fire, and while we no longer have conductive floors and grounding chains around our waists, we do still worry about setting patients on fire (alcohol is still a common solvent for skin prep solutions). And we don’t want to lose or damage your stuff.
by Fargren | 2025-11-27 13:21:41+00:00
It seems to me that building a recording device that can survive in space, that it's very light, and that can not break apart after receiving the impact from an explosive charge strong enough to decelerate it from the speeds that would take it to Alpha Centauri is... maybe impossible.

We're talking about 0.2 light years. To reach it in 20 years, that's 1/10th of the speed of light. The forces to decelerate that are pretty high.

I did a quick napkin calculation (assuming the device weighs 1kg), that's close to 3000 kiloNewton, if it has 10 seconds to decelerate. The thrust of an F100 jet engine is around 130 kN.

IANan aerounatics engineer, so I could be totally wrong.
by flohofwoe | 2025-11-27 13:21:46+00:00
...so far... but the problems are noticeably increasing in frequency, especially in Github Actions, and most of those don't show up on the status page because they are so random (eg restart the ci pipeline and it works) It feels exacty like Github is slowly rotting from the inside and I guess the reason is that everybody is forced to work on pointless AI features so there's nobody left doing actually important feature and maintenance work.
by KronisLV | 2025-11-27 13:21:54+00:00
I think it's gonna be like with the price spikes around the time of COVID: corpos complained about the global supply chain disruptions and when all of that was over... just left the prices high up.

It's gonna be the same as what you see with food prices nowadays, even fast food - they just increased a whole bunch and nobody can really do anything about it. It's not like there's that many widespread food chains popping up to replace McDonald's, given that most new players in the market are more likely to go bankrupt than anything.

And when it comes to stuff that's actually hard to manufacture, like GPUs and RAM and other components? The corporations will just lie, or in some cases set the MSRP pretty low (e.g. Intel Arc release) and watch the retailers crank up the prices anyways. Even the one case where it did matter a lot was the Intel Core Ultra release where they didn't move units, but only because of AMD CPUs being cheaper, even those prices were known before release. But even so, who's to say that you're not picking the least bad option which still happens to be bad, how close to BOM pricing are those CPUs? And in that BOM, how many middle men are also pushing their own markup?

What are you gonna do about it, since you can't ever look at their books and validate their claims NOR really buy the product elsewhere because like 3 or 4 corps have an oligopoly over the entire planet's supply? Nothing.
by throw0101c | 2025-11-27 13:22:10+00:00
While she is focusing just on humming birds, some are casting a wider net:

> The National Geographic Photo Ark uses the power of photography to inspire people to help protect at-risk species before it’s too late. Explorer, photographer, and founder of the Photo Ark Joel Sartore has taken portraits of 17,000 species — and counting — in his quest to document our world’s astonishing biodiversity! He’s over half way to his goal of documenting all of the approximately 20,000 species living in the world’s zoos, aquariums, and wildlife sanctuaries.

* https://www.nationalgeographic.org/society/our-programs/phot...

* https://abc7.com/post/endangered-species-day-photo-ark-joel-...

Also:

> In late 2023, 70-year-old birder Peter Kaestner was within striking distance of a goal that had never been accomplished: seeing more than 10,000 different species of birds in the wild.

[…]

> Just as Kaestner approached the finish line for his record 10,000 birds, though, a previously unknown competitor by the name Jason Mann flew in out of nowhere to snatch the record out from under him.

* https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/mar/24/birding-...
by menaerus | 2025-11-27 13:22:25+00:00
Too flawed? Did you miss that tiny detail that MR fixes a long time issue for ocaml? This is exactly political because there's no legal or technical issue. Only fluff by scared developers. I have no stakes in this but I'm sincerely surprised by the amount of unreasonable and unsubstantiated claims and explanations given in this thread and MR
by andersonpico | 2025-11-27 13:22:28+00:00
> I think it's sad that performative emotions & vulnerability seem to be a popular thing to have to signal for acceptance.

You only think it's performative because you think people are signaling. They're not and performative anything is not required for acceptance, but people are not accepting of others who deal with their social interaction in these terms and your very language betrays where you stand. These imaginary requirements for affection are not what's sad here.
by zknill | 2025-11-27 13:23:31+00:00
I recently had a brief brainstorming with someone building an AI data enrichment tool. I found myself suggesting the 'entities' in the tool would just be semi-structured json blobs; instead of normalising the data into some relational database schema.

I couldn't find good arguments against just slinging the data into a blob and getting AI Models to make sense of it.
by amypetrik8 | 2025-11-27 13:23:51+00:00
I love hummingbirds. Hummingbirds are awesome. My name is Amy and I can't stop thinking about hummingbirds. These guys are cool; and by cool, I mean totally sweet.

Facts:

1. Hummingbirds are mammals. 2. Hummingbirds humm ALL the time. 3. The purpose of the hummingbird is to flip out and eat flowers.

Hummingbirds are sooooooooooo sweet that I want to crap my pants. I can't believe it sometimes, but I feel it inside my heart. These guys are totally awesome and that's a fact. Hummingbirds are fast, smooth, cool, strong, powerful, and sweet. I can't wait to start yoga next year. I love hummingbirds with all of my body (including my humm humm).
by kristoff_it | 2025-11-27 13:23:54+00:00
We've been directing people to use other means to donate for a few years now, so GH Sponsors is not our main source of income anymore (and hasn't been for a while). It's still a significant chunk, but it's also not going to go away overnight.

> A better parallel would be not posting anymore on Hacker News anything Zig related, in terms of potential outcome.

I've been thinking about this lately and in my experience (having seen the effect of HN posts in the past when Zig was smaller vs now) the community is already big and vibrant enough that an HN post alone doesn't do too much of a difference. To be clear, I don't think that HN is losing relevance (unlike all the other big platforms mentioned earlier in this conversation), but our situation has changed.

People now are more and more learning about Zig though cool Zig projects, not by looking at yet another superficial language comparison blog post, which is the kind of content that tends to get to the top of HN more often than not.

More in general I think that your point about not pulling away from all the markeplaces of ideas is valid, but most of those marketplaces are not as good as they claim to be and we have the luxury to run a project that has a strong community connected to it, meaning that we won't be starved of attention or contributors by moving away from GitHub.

This whole situation has an interesting parallel with what's happening in our community wrt chat platforms, if we happen to be at the same tech event in person I'll be happy to share with you all the details :^)
by mirzap | 2025-11-27 13:26:10+00:00
There are multiple models:

1. Like Sentry - open source all the features, provide the cloud (hosted) version. Most businesses don't want to self-host, but want a bit cheaper alternative

2. Paid tier, buy once - own forever with 1 year update support. Later you can charge lower price to extend the update cycle.

3. Blender model - donations. Very hard to get it right.

4. Laravel/Next.js model - Open source the tooling, monetize the platform
by xyzzy_plugh | 2025-11-27 13:26:17+00:00
I'm doing something very similar but even simpler and Gemini 3 is absolutely crushing it. I tried to do this with other models in the past, but it never really felt productive.

I don't even generate diffs, just full files (though I try and keep them small) and my success rate is probably close to 80% one-shotting very complex coding tasks that would take me days.
by mikkupikku | 2025-11-27 13:26:45+00:00
Emacs and Vi were both born from an era when industry standard UX had not yet been developed, so they were both explorations in relatively uncharted UX space. This kind of thing only happens anymore when you get a project lead by somebody ignorant/indifferent to established conventions who sets out to make something new without caring if anybody else uses it.

So the projects you desire almost certainly do exist, but they're languishing in the obscurity they earned with their indifference to convention.
Show HN: Derusted – An open-source programmable HTTPS MitM proxy engine in Rust
by kumaras | 2025-11-27 13:26:57+00:00
I've released Derusted — a programmable HTTPS MITM proxy engine written in Rust.

This grew out of frustration with existing MITM and proxy tooling being: - unsafe or outdated - coupled to one runtime or protocol - hard to embed into other projects - not flexible for security/compliance use cases

Derusted is a library-first design, meant to be used inside other systems like: - browser automation tooling - secure proxies and gateway stacks - traffic inspection - network research - observability and incident response tooling

Highlights: - Written fully in safe Rust - Supports HTTP/1.1 & HTTP/2 MITM - Pluggable inspection pipeline - Certificate generation + pinned cert detection - Redaction support for sensitive data - No `unsafe` - ~150 tests

Links: Repo: https://github.com/kumarimlab/derusted Crate: https://crates.io/crates/derusted Docs: https://docs.rs/derusted/latest/derusted/

Still early, but I'd love feedback — especially around QUIC/H3, benchmarking, use cases, and potential improvements.

Happy to answer questions.
by OneDeuxTriSeiGo | 2025-11-27 13:27:37+00:00
So the answer is that you are proving two things:

1. That the model/specification makes sense. i.e. that certain properties in the model hold and that it does what you expect.

2. That the SUV/SUT (system under verification/test) corresponds to the model. This encompasses a lot but really what you are doing here is establishing how your system interacts with the world, with what accuracy it does so, etc. And from there you are walking along the internal logic of your system and mapping your representations of the data and the algorithms you are using into some projection from the model with a specified error bound.

So you are inherently dealing with the discrete nature of the system the entire time but you can reason about that discrete value as some distribution of possible values that you carry through the system with each step either

- introducing some additional amount of error/variability or

- tightening the bound of error/variability but trapping outside values into predictable edge cases.

Then it's a matter of reasoning about those edge cases and whether they break the usefulness of the system compared against the idealised model.
by daeken | 2025-11-27 13:28:33+00:00
The vast majority of non-text editing in game development isn't done in modeling or image manipulation apps, it's done via the game engine's editor. That's true whether you're using Unity, Unreal, Godot, or a homebrew engine.

There are the rare engines with no editor to speak of -- where things are either done programmatically or other textual definitions -- but they're very very very few and far between.

The engine itself doesn't have a UI, but working with any major engine without using their editor is functionally impossible.
by throw10920 | 2025-11-27 13:29:01+00:00
Reading my previous comment, anyone with decent reading comprehension can tell that I'm describing a possible interpretation. I'm clearly not assigning it as fact, as echelon is.

I can also explain exactly why echelon's interpretation is unfounded, yet you cannot make any coherent argument and are forced to resort to allusions and baseless accusations stemming from a failure to read what I wrote. Although, that's consistent with a failure to read what ralph84 wrote, too.
Show HN: Alice Architecture: An Attempt at Autonomous AGI Based on ±0 Theory
by Norl-Seria | 2025-11-27 13:29:09+00:00
We are presenting Alice Architecture and the ±0 Theory—an attempt at an Autonomous Thinking AGI model. This model integrates the SDE-driven ±0 Theory (Happiness/Unhappiness Model) and a unique HALM (Hierarchical Abstracted Memory). It aims for a truly internally-driven, autonomous AI that pursues homeostasis through self-negation-driven mechanisms. All mathematical formulas and Python code are publicly available in the GitHub repository. We encourage you to review the work. We particularly welcome constructive discussion and validation on the following points: Validation Proposal: Observing changes in the LLM's behavior when existing LLM APIs are integrated with the ±0 Theory / Alice Theory Python code in the same file. Core Technology: The maximization objective of the Total Wellbeing Scalar V(t) and the mathematical/implementation logic of Affective TDL (Affective Temporal Difference Learning). We are currently developing the Python code that connects existing LLM frameworks with the ±0 Theory and Alice Architecture. We look forward to open discussion from everyone.
by hahajk | 2025-11-27 13:29:57+00:00
The conclusion that you should wait to build anything is an illustration of the danger of economic inflation that the author started with. I'm not sure why he thinks the economic version is toxic but the technological version is a good idea though.

The answer to should we just sit around and wait for better technology is obviously no. We gain a lot of knowledge by building with what we have; builders now inform where technology improves. (The front page has an article about Voyager being a light day away...)

I think the more interesting question is what would happen if we induced some kind of 2% "technological inflation" - every year it gets harder to make anything. Would that push more orgs to build more things? Everyone pours everything they have into making products now because their resources will go less far next year.
by nickserv | 2025-11-27 13:31:19+00:00
There's a few different Skyrim mods that use AI. In particular for adding dialogues using the original voices, basically a more advanced version of line splitting that has been done for a long time.

There are some where the AI is used to add dynamic content, pretty cool actually.

This one in particular is pretty popular: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/98631

I've never heard of anyone complaining about use of AI for mods freely given to the community. Paying mods would likely be different.
Show HN: I made a white noise generator for my newborn
by vicke4 | 2025-11-27 13:31:44+00:00
White noise helps my baby sleep quicker and a little longer. All the available options online look like they were built in the 2000s.

My biggest pain with those apps is setting timer takes more than 2 clicks and they don't remember my last setting.

Now, with this app, one can simply swipe to set timer. Once loaded it works offline, installable as a PWA.

Uses AudioContext web API to generate the noise.

Source code: https://github.com/vicke4/whitenoise
by giancarlostoro | 2025-11-27 13:32:25+00:00
I agree. I usually nope out of projects not on GitHub until someone builds an alternative that seems solid. I am surprised none of the major Linux distros have built one yet. I could see it being better funded if a few major Linux distros decided to host their own. Ubuntu had theirs but it uses a custom source control system so its niche to Ubuntu itself.
by exasperaited | 2025-11-27 13:34:11+00:00
Well, you can certainly FDM print layers below one tenth of a millimetre tall even with a 0.2mm nozzle, and stagger horizontal edges the same. The problem is the time cost of doing so with a large object. Even variable layer height burns through a lot of time. There is some work being done with variable layer heights on outer perimeters only so we may get some significant improvements in the future.

I just wish people would, as you are saying, work with and accept the inherent qualities of the medium rather than doing insane, foolish stuff like using carbon-fibre-filled filaments for surface finish.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-11-27 13:35:18+00:00
No doubt it depends on the company, but I'd say that in many places only 10% of what a developer does is coding, and the percentage is less and less the more senior you become and have other responsibilities.

In many companies, product development is very cyclic - new products and enhancement/modernization cycles come and result in months, maybe years, of intense development (architecture, design, maybe prototyping before coding) but then there may be many months of "downtime" before the next major development cycle, where coding gives way to ongoing support, tuning, bug triaging, etc.

Maybe in some large companies there are highly compartmentalized roles like business analyst, systems architect, developers, perhaps "coders" as a separate or junior category (I have never worked anyplace where "coders" was a thing, although some people seem to insist that it still is). My experience, of a lifetime of software development, mostly at smaller companies, is that "software developers" are expected to do all of the above as well as production support, documentation, mentoring, new technology evaluation, etc, etc. The boss wants to give you a high level assignment, and get back a product. At one company I worked it was literally "build us an EKG machine at this price point", which might be a bit of an extreme example.

The other thing a human software developer does during any "downtime" is self-initiated projects such as creating tools and infrastructure, automation, self-learning, refactoring, etc, and in my experience these self-initiated efforts can be just as, if not more, important to the overall productivity, and output quality, of the team as that of the product development cycles.

LLMs primary use is coding, although they can also be of use for conversational brainstorming about design, tooling, etc. If you are "vibe coding" (just ask the LLM to do it, and cross your fingers) then the LLM is also doing in effect doing architecture, design, tool selection etc.

Notwithstanding agents, which the AI companies proudly state may run for hours before messing up, LLMs are not autonomous entities that can replace developers and be handed high level assignments and will do what it takes (incl. communication with all stake holders, etc) to get the job done. They will not run in the background "taking care of the business" when you are not prompting them.
by the__alchemist | 2025-11-27 13:36:07+00:00
I am getting fatigued by all of these. I am learning about a new one each time. We have

- GitHub - BinCode - GitLab - SourceHut - CodeBerg

They all seem to do roughly the same things, but with a different web UI. Competition is great! Especially in response to a big corp that has market share. But... there was value in the centralization of GH.