MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jmadeano | 2025-11-14 17:40:54+00:00
Totally hear you on the permissions/access. I'd love to request fewer permissions, but the chrome store doesn't support that kind of permissions granting.

In order for us to be able to execute your scripts that do powerful things (send notifications, save to local storage, download things, etc.), our extension needs to have those permissions itself. Google doesn't have any way for us to say our extension itself only requires permissions x, y, z but give this user script permissions j, k, l.

Your browsing/page data is yours. That data is only accessed when you explicitly request to generate a script (i.e. can't generate a script to modify a page without seeing that page).
by Merinov | 2025-11-14 17:41:19+00:00
Thanks for the feedback. Really appreciate that the article selection resonates as that's the core value prop.

RSS: You're the second to mention this already, makes it even more priority.

AI Images: Noted. The pattern was to avoid generic stock "businessman shaking hands" photos, but clearly it's not working for everyone. Options i consider now are: 1. Hide images in RSS/reader mode 2. Stock images as fallback 3. User preference toggle

Would a "reader mode" without images help?
by aduwah | 2025-11-14 17:41:57+00:00
I can give you an example. Single divorced mother with two kids. Working in social care for minimal wage, often earning lower amounts than the people she cares for. There are no savings, no relatives to help. Job change is an uncertainty that could introduce homelessness for the whole family if it doesn't work out. Not many options there. Now if you move this scenario out of rich countries it will get even worse
by refulgentis | 2025-11-14 17:41:59+00:00
It's not subsidized, lol.

Generally, I worry HN is in a dark place with this stuff - look how this thread goes, ex. descendant of yours is at "Why would I ever pay for this when it hallucinates." I don't understand how you can be a software engineer and afford to have opinions like that. I'm worried for those who do, genuinely, I hope transitions out there are slow enough, due to obstinance, that they're not cast out suddenly without the skills to get something else.
by foruhar | 2025-11-14 17:42:11+00:00
This video shows the systems being built and shipped with cooling, cabling, etc.

It’s pretty mind blowing what this crisis shows from the manipulation of atoms and electrons all the way up to these clusters. Particularly mind blowing for me who has cable management issues with a ten port router.

https://youtu.be/1la6fMl7xNA?si=eWTVHeGThNgFKMVG
by lubujackson | 2025-11-14 17:42:19+00:00
"Poor" is why razor blades are behind a glass case at Walgreens. Because people steal razor blades, not (just) to use, but to sell at a discount to other poor people.

There is also the interesting situation of "newly poor" people getting crushed much faster than people who have been poor a long time. There are community safety nets that bubble up from everyone being cornered all the time. You don't go to the mechanic, but ask that guy who charges $100 and can hack something together so you can get to work this week. You know an old lady around the corner who will take your kids in for the night if you don't make it home for some reason. These aren't solutions, they are patches and stopgaps. But this is also the strength of community that to be more common in the U.S. before suburbs made every family an island.
by JohnMakin | 2025-11-14 17:42:22+00:00
The nagging is a feature, not a bug - to the shareholders. If you can show X number of users have adopted $AI_FEATURE or a % growth, whether it's by brute force, nagging, or (maybe just making a good product?), then that sells the AI growth story, and number goes up. That's really all it is.
by cluckindan | 2025-11-14 17:42:44+00:00
”It would appear from the about page and the article that he has the requisite skills to earn an income that should move him out of the "poor" category: - auto mechanic - digital tech - landscaping”

cf.

”The other mindset is poor people are lazy. Quit complaining and do it yourself! Just get a better job! Get a second job! There’s money out there, you just have to go get it.”
by umvi | 2025-11-14 17:43:03+00:00
It's way more nuanced than this. Ultimately poverty comes down to an individual's ability to be self-sustaining.

Take a software engineer, take away their house, job, and all of their money so they are homeless and have literally nothing ("broke"): how quickly can they reach a stable self-sustaining state again?

Probably pretty quickly:

- Ask family for help (they are anchored in a higher place to help bootstrap you up again - borrow some money, temporarily move back in with parents, etc)

- Get a new programming job

- Build a small nest egg

- Done, back to a self-sustaining state in a short time frame

Now take a kid from Baltimore who dropped out of high school and who has no skills. Repeat the scenario

- Ask family for help (they probably aren't in much of a position to help - they can't pull you up when they aren't anchored in a higher place)

- Get a new job (good luck when you have few marketable skills. The high(er) paying jobs for people with no marketable skills usually involve selling drugs/sex)

- Can't build a nest egg easily

Poverty (in the USA at least) is mainly a product of your family situation and your knowledge/marketable skills. If you have an unstable family and no marketable skills, escaping poverty is extremely difficult without an external actor helping to pull people up.
by refulgentis | 2025-11-14 17:43:06+00:00
It's not actually subsidized and the economics of smaller/self-hosted models are a much, much, worse nightmare (source: guy who spent last 2 years maintaining llama.cpp && any provider you can think of) (why is it bad? same reason why 20 cars vs. 1 bus is bad. same reason why only being able to use transportation if you own a car would be bad)
by fullshark | 2025-11-14 17:43:38+00:00
It's interesting how many comments here are knee jerk annoyance at this blogpost, which in my mind does a good job outlining two different financial situations and how flippant suggested solutions for escaping poverty don't make sense.

The fact that many of us here have so much compared to others in our community however you define it is disturbing and not helpful information for our day to day lives so we do what we can to ignore it.
by ActorNightly | 2025-11-14 17:44:08+00:00
> because you won't have to design this extra acceptance system or deal with keeping an entire organization disciplined by it.

This is just a matter of tooling. (On that note, here is a free business idea, prompt engineer an LLM agent that sets this up for you)

While the compiler does do a lot of things for you, you still end up with things that you should check because compiler doesn't understand your program logic. If Rust was a absolutely strict typed language, where basically everything had a type that defined what data it could hold, then it would be a different story. For example, when parsing a json into an object, instead of strings/numbers/bools, every single field has a finite set of values that it can hold. Then the compiler can figure out a lot of things. For example, if you try to convert a string to int, if the string field type doesn't have a defined regex expression it must match, then the compiler can catch this.

Anything less then that, you are better of writing the validation system once and reusing it for all your code bases now and in the future.
by reaperducer | 2025-11-14 17:44:28+00:00
There are some places in the US, that have that kind of poverty, but I have not seen them, with my own eyes.

Americans are very often blind to the poverty in their own backyards.

There are hundreds of thousands (millions?) of people in America who do not have electricity or even running water in their homes.

I'm always reminded of a photograph from a few years ago in the Navajo Times showing a handful of children sitting in a little clearing bordered by rocks at the top of a hill, surrounded by endless desert. That was their classroom.

No desks or chairs. Not even walls, a roof, or a floor. Just out in the open, sitting in the dirt. According to the photo caption, they had to have their classes there because it was the only place where they could get a cellular signal to do their lessons.

Edit: I can't believe I found it - October, 2020. (I took a picture of it, and it was still in iPhoto.)

Caption: Milton T. Carroll, left, and Wylean Burbank, center, help their daughter Eziellia H. Carroll, a kindergartener at Cottonwood Day School, with her school work on Monday in Fish Point, Ariz. Carroll said he built the circular rock wall to protect his children from the elements.

I was wrong about no desk. The three of them share something that looks like it was nailed together from a discarded wooden palette. There's also a plastic milk crate nearby.

These are American citizens. In America. It's hard not to go off about the gilded ballrooms and trillion-dollar bonus packages.
by mr_toad | 2025-11-14 17:44:44+00:00
> Why did nobody use it before the Raptor?

It’s not the best choice for an high-budget high-performance expendable multi-stage rocket. Using kerolox/SRBs in the first stage and hydrolox in the second stage gives better overall performance.

Metholox is better for re-use, using the same engine in multiple stages lowers costs and complexity, and you can produce the fuel on Mars.
by TheRealPomax | 2025-11-14 17:44:44+00:00
Statistics disagrees with you to such a degree that this statement ignores reality. If you poll 52 people, and you get 52 identical results, even with population bias, you're done. If there was a mix of "yes" and "no", less so, but 100% "no" after 50+ samples is statistically damning. Because remember: the bias is towards people who care about Firefox enough to post in an official forum, so that's the core audience, representing the existing user base that you're going to piss off if their poll result is a unanimous "no".

So unless Mozilla thinks losing part of their existing user base over this is fine because they can attracting enough new users with AI to compensate then this result should be all the evidence they need that this is the wrong direction.

Firefox hasn't been relevant in the larger browser space for years now, it's a "nice that it exists" for a niche audience. It used to be the poweruser's browser, but that got axed. It used to be the privacy browser but insanely Safari now fills that roll. So what's left? Either you play to what strengths Firefox still has, or you have a management layer composed entirely of ex-Facebookers that are coming up with nonsense ideas that are just going to make Firefox fall off the map completely.
by lossolo | 2025-11-14 17:45:33+00:00
We have already found limitations of the current LLM paradigm, even if we don't have a theorem saying transformers can never be AGI. Scaling laws show that performance keeps improving with more params, data + compute but only following a smooth power law with sharply diminishing returns. Each extra order of magnitude of compute buys a smaller gain than the last, and recent work suggests we're running into economic and physical constraints on continuing this trend indefinitely.

OOD is still unsolved problem, they basically struggle under domain shifts and long tail cases or when you try systematically new combinations of concepts (especially on reasoning heavy tasks). This is now a well documented limitation of LLMs/multimodal LLMs.

Work on COT faithfulness shows that the step by step reasoning they print doesn't match their actual internal computation, they frequently generate plausible but misleading explanations of their own answers (lookup anthropic paper). That means they lack self knowledge about how/why they got a result. I doubt you can get AGI without that.

None of this proves that no LLM based architecture could ever reach AGI. But it directly contradicts the idea that we haven't found any limits. We've already found multiple major limitations of the current LLMs, and there's no evidence that blindly scaling this recipe is enough to cross from very capable assistant to AGI.
by refulgentis | 2025-11-14 17:45:44+00:00
Apologies that you're taking on the chin here. Generally, I'll just skip fantastical HN threads with a critical mass of BS like this, with pity, rather than an attempt to share (for more on that c.f. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45929335)

Been on HN 16 years and never seen anything like the pack of people who will come out to tell you it doesn't work and they'll never pay for it and it's wrong 50% of the time, etc.

Was at dinner with an MD a few nights back and we were riffing on this, came to the conclusion is was really fun for CS people when the idea was AI would replace radiologists, but when the first to be mowed down are the keyboard monkeys, well, it's personal and you get people who are years into a cognitive dissonance thing now.
by AlotOfReading | 2025-11-14 17:46:07+00:00
There's a line in the standards that basically says a conforming program is anything acceptable by a conforming implementation. In theory you could have an implementation that gives semantics to UB like Fil-C or CCured do. No mainstream implementation does that for memory unsafety due to the performance overhead, and conforming implementations are required to document those extensions. I don't think there's a sane argument for an implementation to intentionally choose the behavior in the example I provided and Clang certainly doesn't, so it's non-conformant regardless.
by HPsquared | 2025-11-14 17:46:08+00:00
Just from a physics standpoint.

If you discharge water into a river, there are environmental limits to the outlet temperature (this is a good thing btw). The water can't be very hot. That means you need to pump a large volume of water through because you can only put a small amount of energy into each kg of water.

If you evaporate the water on the other hand, not only is there no temperature limit but it also absorbs the latent heat of vaporisation. The downside is it's a lot more complex and also the water is truly consumed rather than just warming it up.
by beepbooptheory | 2025-11-14 17:46:11+00:00
I don't know if that is what gp and above is talking about. "Agents" are the kind of thing/word that helps to paper over the very fact that these things only work because of huge amount of humans in-the-loop in the outset (that is, you know, labor). Agents help us believe that LLM's can do everything for us, even bootstrap themselves, but, what the above thread is about is that, really, what you get out correlates only to what you put in in the first place.
by asdfman123 | 2025-11-14 17:46:20+00:00
> It’s as if we’ve made technology so complex, that the only way forward is to double down and try harder with these LLMs and the associated AGI fantasy.

This is the real AI risk we should be worried about IMO, at least short term. Information technology has made things vastly more complicated. AI will make it even more incomprehensible. Tax code, engineering, car design, whatever.

It's already happening at my work. I work at big tech and we already have a vast array of overly complicated tools/technical debt no one wants to clean up. There's several initiatives to use AI to prompt an agent, which in turn will find the right tool to use and run the commands.

It's not inconceivable that 10 or 20 years down the road no human will bother trying to understand what's actually going on. Our brains will become weaker and the logic will become vastly more complicated.
by creatonez | 2025-11-14 17:46:25+00:00
Problem is, a chatbot sidebar isn't something new to try, it's a tired dead-end idea that never delivered any value to the multiple competitors that tried the exact same thing.

Firefox's implementation of a chatbot sidebar is especially cookie-cutter because it just plugs into existing LLM APIs, it doesn't make use of local AI the way the alt text generator and local machine translation features do. What were they thinking?
by rsyring | 2025-11-14 17:46:29+00:00
What was fallacious about my OP?

He asserts that being poor is different from being broke. The former being tied to a permanent state.

But, if you have the skills and opportunity to make better-than-poor money, then in most cases, I presume, you aren't really poor. It's only a matter of time until you can make additional money. And if you need to charge the $300 of parts to your credit card, on the presumption that if you have a running vehicle you can go to an interview of do the next landscaping job, you have a reasonable expectation of being able to pay it off. It's an investment in that case.

There are all kinds of reasons why you might find yourself poor anyway for reasons outside your control. Health issues, weird economic situations, whatever. I'm not discounting them. And maybe they apply here.

I just feel like there is a disconnect between the earning potential of the skills he has and being truly "permanently" poor. I'm not arguing there isn't a legitimate reason, just that it wasn't clear to me what that reason would be.

You may not like the reasoning or think I'm being too critical, but it's hardly fallacious.
by moralestapia | 2025-11-14 17:47:19+00:00
This argument is baseless.

All those things add up to a couple hundred a month, let's be extreme and say it's $1,000 USD/month. That amount will never move you up in the socioeconomic ladder. You're two-three orders of magnitude away(!).

"But it adds up" could argue the midwit, "why don't you just get a job that pays you more", "just invest", "why didn't you buy bitcoin in 2010", "why don't you just buy the winning lottery ticket". I wrote all those in order of increasing stupidity. Not aimed at you @merth, it's just stuff that I've actually heard.

Nobody who is wealthy these days got there by skipping Starbucks and instead throwing that dollar in a jar. Nobody.

You need to cross a threshold of (income/purchasing power) to be able to start building things that matter. It's extremely difficult these days because the denominator there is almost zero.

As TFA states, people who have not experienced poverty have ZERO idea of what it is like.
by krick | 2025-11-14 17:47:28+00:00
> what used to be just called ML

FWIW, 10+ years ago I was arguing that your old pocket calculator is as much of an AI as anything ever could be. I only kinda stopped doing that because it's tiring to argue with silly buzzwords, not because anything has changed since. When "these things were called ML" ML was just a buzzword, same as AI and AGI are now. I'm kinda glad "ML" was relieved of that burden, because ultimately it means a very real thing (which is just "parametrizing your algorithm by non-hardcoded values"), and (unlike with basic autocorrect, which no end user even perceives as "AI" or "ML") when you use ChatGPT, you don't use "ML", you use a rigid algorithm not meaningfully different from what was running on your old pocket calculator, except a billion times bigger and no one actually knows what it does.

So, yes, AI is just a stupid marketing buzzword right now, but so was ML, so was blockchain, so was NoSQL and many more. Ultimately this one is more annoying only because of scale, of how detrimental to society the actions of the culpable people (mostly OpenAI, Altman, Musk) were this time.
by magicalist | 2025-11-14 17:47:34+00:00
> But what I'm curious about is the causal difference between the two

A majority of personal bankruptcies in the US being caused by medical expenses might be a good place to start looking. You can be "broke" living paycheck to paycheck and "making it", but you're on even more of a razors edge than most. One medical emergency, one car accident, one removal of work hours etc and you start to fall behind, and that's when late fees and compounding interest work to make sure you never get out of the hole.
by fer | 2025-11-14 17:47:41+00:00
Just moved to Niri, it's incredible how snappy it is. The animation makes what you did with the window much clearer vs. other wms where it just teleports, the scrolling just compounds to that effect. The scrolling is great because it tends to work at getting things out of the way when they're not relevant and bringing them back when they are, while not ending up with tiny windows like dwm/AwesomeWM/Sway (what I've been using for the last ~15 years).
by crazygringo | 2025-11-14 17:48:09+00:00
> Does anyone want AI in anything?

I most definitely do.

I want to be able to type into Finder on my Mac to rename all the files a certain way, without spending 10 minutes figuring out the right regex for it.

I want to be able to type into Firefox to go through 50 different versions of the current URL, using a different US state parameter for each, and download the table it shows into a single combined CSV with an added column for "state".

Every day there's 20 things like this. I absolutely want everything in my OS and browser to be exposed to an LLM that can do everything so much faster. Without the intermediate stage of having it write a script to do it. It would save so much time.

Unfortunately we're not quite there yet because the GUI programs we use haven't exposed all the views and actions. But hopefully soon!
by PaulHoule | 2025-11-14 17:48:31+00:00
Operating systems and the software that comes with them are a fat target for security problems. There's "new hardware" in turns of new phones, laptops and the core components of desktops but also peripherals from things you plug into USB and things like watches and AirPods that you might want to use with your existing phone. Both Linux and Windows run on generic hardware so they need to handle whatever AMD, Intel, Dell, etc. throw at them -- look at how Ubuntu is always coming out with new releases and occasionally makes one that is LTS.
by srmatto | 2025-11-14 17:48:32+00:00
I can't comment on this idea but I will say that I would have expected press fittings to have brought down the cost of plumbing because they don't require soldering up to certain diameter. But they don't seem to have had any impact on the cost of plumbing despite not requiring as much skill.

https://www.ferguson.com/content/ideas-and-learning-center/t...
by runlevel1 | 2025-11-14 17:48:33+00:00
I've wanted a music player like the early versions of iTunes for a while, and this looks like it might fit the bill.

Those who've only known Music.app and later iTunes versions might be surprised to learn that there was a time when iTunes actually had a clean, intuitive UI: https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/itunes-app
by philipwhiuk | 2025-11-14 17:48:58+00:00
> It's not subsidized, lol.

It's subsidised by VC funding. At some point the gravy train stops and they have to pivot to profit so that the VCs deliver return-on-investment. Look at Facebook shoving in adverts, Uber jacking up the price, etc.

> I don't understand how you can be a software engineer and afford to have opinions like that

I don't know how you can afford not to realise that there's a fixed value prop here for the current behaviour and that it's potentially not as high as it needs to be for OpenAI to turn a profit.

OpenAI's ridiculous investment ability is based on a future potential it probably will never hit. Assuming it does not, the whole stack of cards falls down real quick.

(You can Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V OpenAI for all the big AI providers)