MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by smithoc | 2025-11-14 16:22:32+00:00
So there is no actual evidence, and you're committing a hate crime if you ask to see evidence or point out that there's no evidence.

If a white person has a drunk uncle or crazy aunt tell a wild conspiracy theory at a family gathering, people dismiss them as a kook. But if an indigenous person does the same thing, it's supposed to be treated as sacred cultural knowledge being passed down?

I have an uncle who swears there are thousands of people who've been killed by Bill and Hillary Clinton. He has lists and websites and links to obituaries about deaths "deemed suicides" or "not investigated" or "unsolved". I don't think that my skepticism about his claims is violence or hate.
by altcognito | 2025-11-14 16:22:39+00:00
Yes, the article is about Mozilla, yes I was sloppy in expanding the scope without saying as much.

Microsoft is definitely the most overt in all of this, but Google is working on built in WebAPIs[1], Opera has integrations (sidebars too), Brace includes Leo, and then of course there are the "AI first" companies like Perplexity, Arc etc...

The problem is often that almost all browser features lurk in the background without you really knowing whether they are active or what their scope really ends up being. Cookies, javascript, and various other aspects of the reality of using the web have been abused for mass tracking (and surveillance)

So what's this got to do with Mozilla? Unless Mozilla is encouraging the use of local models, they are just encouraging the development of the same technology that has gotten us into this trouble in the first place. Maybe they should continue the work that meta started -- support development/use of open models of AI and guarantee the AI feature will be completely sandboxed in useful ways.

[1] https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/built-in
by Aurornis | 2025-11-14 16:23:11+00:00
> they do a fairly decent job as long as you have good data and know what you're doing.

This is the bottleneck in my experience. Going for the expensive per-request LLM gets something shipped now that you can wow the execs with. Setting up a whole process to gather and annotate data, train models, run evals, and iterate takes time. The execs who hired those expensive AI engineers want their results right now, not after a process of hiring more people to collect and annotate the data.
by next_xibalba | 2025-11-14 16:23:28+00:00
Generally "income" refers to net income, which, then invalidates "divide a company's income by its revenue, and you get the operating margin". Perhaps the author means to say "operating income". In any event, operating profit and even net income don't give you a good approximation of cash (unless you're doing cash accounting, which no real company is doing) because they include non-cash charges such as depreciation and amortization.
by rr2841 | 2025-11-14 16:23:33+00:00
Things that I liked:

* The article selection (which is probably the most important part)

Things that I did not liked:

* AI Images. While they are well made and not as cringe as others, I prefer to get stock images even if they are repeated.

* Lack of RSS (or at least I couldn't find it). This is a deal breaker for me

Nice busy!
by colmanhumphrey | 2025-11-14 16:23:33+00:00
I kind of love this, although I feel like I'd need to try it out to understand exactly how it feels. I'd even like to see a video if Zed could make one. It would be good to understand e.g. if the issue of "who wrote that?" actually affects things in practice, or any other weirdness or limitations.

I also kind of get why it's built into an editor! I wonder how it compares to e.g. https://www.coscreen.co.

The default method of remote work, with e.g. Slack and video meetings, I think leaves a lot of potential on the table. I wonder if a flexible collaboration system like this could actually be a lovely default method for many companies.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-11-14 16:23:44+00:00
> I’m also sensitive to the parent commenter’s point that the choice of indicator was kind of narrow.

But you're not. We can separate the parent comment into two claims:

(1) The indicator was accidents;

(2) The indicator is too narrow.

You've supported (2) by pointing out that the parent commenter's idea of what the choice of indicator was was completely incorrect. But everything they said was wrong! They were wrong about the indicator, and they were wrong that the indicator they called excessively narrow was excessively narrow. They weren't saying that the paper judged by a criterion that was too narrow, independently of what that criterion was. (1) and (2) are both claims you can mine out of the parent comment, but they're not claims that were made separately in the parent comment.

"Accidents" covers everything you might want to know about. It's crazy to say that looking at accident rates is "suspiciously specific". It's crazy because it's as nonspecific as you can get.
by submeta | 2025-11-14 16:23:59+00:00
I love AI in the right context, but the current trend of turning every otherwise solid product into an AI tool is diluting their core value at best, and damaging them at worst.

Take Replit, for example. Today I only had my iPad with me and wanted to experiment with some programming languages I have always wanted to learn. I opened Replit and was confused to find the file browser completely hidden. All I saw was a chat window, just another agentic coding interface similar to many others.

Or Zed, a wonderful editor and IDE that now seems determined to become a mix of Cursor and Slack.

And now Firefox.

Please, product managers: build APIs and let me connect my preferred AI agent to your tool, but do not turn the entire product into an AI experience. It risks transforming something genuinely useful into something close to unusable.
by shermantanktop | 2025-11-14 16:24:00+00:00
Very much agree that not making a choice is itself a choice. That said, the intentionality (or lack thereof) is pretty obvious.

I have an impeccably-dressed coworker and I still remember that one time (years ago) he complimented my watch. I doubt I would have thought much about if someone who dresses like me had said the same thing.
by tempest_ | 2025-11-14 16:24:02+00:00
They were losing because MS bundled IE with every device. Eventually they MS lost an anti trust case against it and it opened up the market, which is before that graph begins.

Well 30 years later we are back where we started.

Chrome is where it is because it is preloaded on most phones on the planet (the other ecosystem has a different preloaded browser). The other thing is that it was advertised on the most visited page on the internet for 20 years.

Most internet users don't even use desktop/laptops, they use mobile devices and likely have no idea there is any other option than chrome.
by tomwphillips | 2025-11-14 16:26:11+00:00
Author here. Indeed - it would be just as fantastical to deny there has been no value from deep learning, transformers, etc.

Yesterday I heard Cory Doctorow talk about a bunch of pro bono lawyers using LLMs to mine paperwork and help exonerate innocent people. Also a big win.

There's good stuff - engineering - that can be done with the underlying tech without the hyperscaling.
by dripdry45 | 2025-11-14 16:26:18+00:00
Yeah, but their past history should be taken into account here. Altman and musk are just confidence men. what they’ve touched in the past has turned to crap, and it’s only been the people around them that have made anything work despite those people mucking it up.

trust past history as an indicator of future action. In this case, sure some neat stuff will come out of it. But it won’t be nearly what these people say it is. They are huffing each other’s farts.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-11-14 16:26:41+00:00
Firefox somehow fell into the hole of feature-pack in an effort to save itself.

Firefox instead desperately needs to focus on making it a high performance browser that people enjoy using for.....browsing.

They can start with fixing the spell check, which is hilariously awful for 2008. And we are in 2025.

Signed, a 20 year user.
by Benjamin_Dobell | 2025-11-14 16:26:44+00:00
I've recently become the maintainer of https://github.com/godotjs/GodotJS (TypeScript bindings + JS runtime for Godot). GodotJS supports numerous runtimes, but V8 is the most well supported. Unfortunately, I have been noticing V8's GC a bit more than I would like recently.

Don't get me wrong, I'm aware V8 wasn't designed with games in mind. QuickJS (which is also supported by GodotJS) is probably the safer bet. Or you know, not JavaScript at all. However, I'm building tooling specifically for kids to make games, and TypeScript is leagues ahead in terms of usability:

https://breaka.club/blog/why-were-building-clubs-for-kids

Before I make the swap to QuickJS out of necessity, I was hoping to try my hand at tuning V8's GC for my use case. I wasn't expecting this to be easy, but the article doesn't exactly instill me with confidence:

> Simply tuning the system appears to involve a dose of science, a dose of flailing around and trying things, and a whole cauldron of witchcraft. There appears to be one person whose full-time job it is to implement and monitor metrics on V8 memory performance and implement appropriate tweaks. Good grief!

If anyone reading this has experience with tuning V8's GC to minimize stop-the-world GC duration (at the cost of overall memory use, or runtime performance etc.) I'd greatly appreciate any advice that can be offered.
by Aurornis | 2025-11-14 16:27:05+00:00
Running big LLMs is expensive, but not nearly expensive as hiring people. Employees are very expensive, well beyond their wages that you see. Everything from employment taxes (employer paid) to hiring additional people to manage the people and their HR needs.

Even if it took $10 to run everything to handle each request, that’s far cheaper than even a minimum wage employee when you consider all of the employment overhead.
by benjiro | 2025-11-14 16:27:47+00:00
HDDs have also been under pressure ... There was barely a month ago a article here, from somebody who setup a cluster of like half a million, with several 1000's hdds. Just to store data for AI training.

Not even two days ago there as a article of backlog on HDDs for AI. Because everybody and their grandmother wants to store the entire internet, out of fear that AI scraping will become more difficult. Aka, they are gating data. And yes, you can train AI easily on HDD even with their lower IOPS. The fact that you got a few 1000 in parallel does the trick, and its often bandwidth issues that hit harder.

I just stockpiled a few extra 4TB NVME because i learned my lesson. NVME has not been dropping in prices after the manufacture pushed it up, and AI is going to keep eating NVME storage for a long time. Let alone HDD storage...

Welcome to the new normal ... Crypto miners killing GPU prices, HDD Crypto miners, Crypto miners again back with a vengeance, O pandemic, everybody needs hardware... Short time of benefits because of over production (on NVME especially, manufacture cut back production) AAAAND .. here comes AI.

Its something every fying year.
by tracker1 | 2025-11-14 16:27:56+00:00
Yeah, usually by the time you know a specific model is or isn't "good" the mfg has changed production or how things are laid out in the products themselves. Over time, you can glean that some mfg have been better or worse overall than others though, but that's not a promise of future efforts.

All the same, it's definitely cool and interesting to see. I've had some good and some very bad luck with storage drives over the years. I still think twice about Seagate drives since I had 6 out of 8 of their 3tb enterprise models go bad relatively quickly a decade and a half ago, specifically bought through separate vendors. I also had the first IBM Deskstar drives, the second died before the first could be RMA'd (raid1 isn't backup).
by Capricorn2481 | 2025-11-14 16:28:11+00:00
Okay, but a lot of people are calling environmental and content theft arguments "political" in an attempt to make it sound frivolous.

It's fine if you think every non-technical criticism against AI is overblown. I use LLMs, but it's perfectly fine to start from a place of whether it's ethical, or even a net good, to use these in the first place.

People saying "ignoring all of those arguments, let's just look at the tech" are, generously, either naive or shilling. Why would we only revisit these very important topics, which are the heart of how the tech would alter our society, after it's been fully embraced?
by PanoptesYC | 2025-11-14 16:28:33+00:00
Based on the main demographic that normally jumps to Firefox, it would at least be a good idea for them to make the features opt in rather than opt out. Most of this stuff is on by default.

I'm curious about what you think AI would do for those features? I've never had issues with ads after just installing stock uBlock Origin, and local translation is already available and works great for me across the web. I'm not sure what AI would do for tab grouping. Are you envisioning having 100+ tabs and then telling an AI assistant to sort it all out for you?
by mrlongroots | 2025-11-14 16:28:47+00:00
I think I'm talking about cluster-scale network bisection bandwidth vs attached storage bandwidth. With replication/erasure coding overhead and the economics, the order of magnitude difference still prevails.

I think your point is a good one in that it is more economics than systems physics. We size clusters to have more compute/network than storage because it is the design point that maximizes overall utility.

I think it also raises an interesting question in that let's say we get to a point where the disparity really no longer holds: that would justify a complete rethinking of many Spark-like applications that are designed to exploit this asymmetry.
by georgeecollins | 2025-11-14 16:29:07+00:00
For simple searches it really is better, as long as you don't take the answers as fact. Certain search terms (most?) cause you to be bombarded with ads. Try asking a search engine about details of a particular bond. The answer won't be on the second page.

The AI to give you sources you check if you need the answer to be right. That's still better than a google search in many cases.
by AndrewKemendo | 2025-11-14 16:29:07+00:00
None of which have to do with AI or AGI.

Nestle is and has been 10000x worse for global water security than all other companies and countries combined because nobody in the value chain cares about someone else’s aquifer.

It’s a social-economic problem of externalities being ignored , which transcends any narrow technological use case.

What you describe has been true for all exported manufacturing forever.
by next_xibalba | 2025-11-14 16:29:08+00:00
This is not correct. Your calculation gives gross margin. However, gross margin doesn't account for all the other operating expenses associated with running a business. If you also include those, you get operating profit. Finally, if you then also account for values (negative and positive) associated with financing, investing, and taxes, you get to to net income. Net income is "the bottom line". It is what is generally referred to as "profit" by investors. And, its not the same thing as positive, neutral, or negative cash flows.
by kjs3 | 2025-11-14 16:29:09+00:00
Yeah...and I like how if you hit the 'hide ad' arrow, it veeeery slowly scrolls out of the way. Keep it classy. And don't put a 'donate' button and then pack the page with so many ads I have to use an adblocker[1] to actually view the content in a non-rage-inducing way.

[1] yes, yes...I know...always use an ad blocker.
by snowwrestler | 2025-11-14 16:29:32+00:00
Water and power are local issues. And data center use of water and power is already, currently having local impact on politics. I saw ads about it during the election cycle that just concluded. Candidates had to answer questions about it at debates and in interviews.

People are using these arguments for the simple reason that they demonstrably resonate with average people who live near data centers.

They probably don’t resonate with people who have plenty of income and/or do not compete with data centers locally for resources.
by lproven | 2025-11-14 16:29:36+00:00
Oh nice. I occasionally mention EDE in desktop roundups on El Reg. Glad it is not forgotten.

It's based on FLTK, and although the effort to create FLTK 2.0 faltered and died a few years ago, last year there was a new point release, FLTK 1.4, the first in 13 years.

I wrote about it almost exactly a year ago:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/11/26/fltk_14_released/

(In researching that I discovered that apparently it's not pronounced "eff ell tee kay" but "full tick".)

Since then it's got up to 1.4.4, and they're working on FLTK 1.5. And yes it supports Wayland now.

So maybe it's time for a new release of EDE to go with it. :-)

https://www.fltk.org/
by LargoLasskhyfv | 2025-11-14 16:29:41+00:00
Interesting that you mention that brand :-) I had some of them long ago, and they didn't last long. The true metal enclosure was just that, with the 'board' just held in place by the USB-part, and some pins from the other end. No thermal pads, or putty.

The other one was just metallic painted plastic.

That was the era of 512MB to 4GB. Never bought again from them.
by derektank | 2025-11-14 16:29:44+00:00
The vast majority of water in agriculture goes to satisfy our taste buds, not nourish our bodies. Feed crops like alalfa consume huge amounts of water in the desert southwest but the desert climate makes it a great place to grow and people have an insatiable demand for cattle products.

We could feed the world with far less water consumption if we opted not to eat meat. Instead, we let people make purchasing decisions for themselves. I'm not sure why we should take a different approach when making decisions about compute.
by chipsrafferty | 2025-11-14 16:29:45+00:00
This is true of US dollars too, it's just a matter of scale.

US dollars are certainly worth less if they have a shady transaction history. That's why money laundering exists - I will pay you $100,000 in dirty money if you give me $95,000 in clean money.

Also, US dollars are non-fungible in a collectibles sense because certain id numbers on bills are valuable, older years are valuable (and condition matters). With coins there's a lot more, too - misprints and the like.

So I reject your idea. Either they are both fungible, or neither are.
by bhoyee | 2025-11-14 16:29:55+00:00
I've been building IncidentPulse after getting tired of managing outages across chaotic Slack threads and outdated status pages.

It's a self-hosted incident management tool that focuses on being clean, simple, and actually useful for small teams. The core features:

Centralized incident timeline with responder assignment

Smart webhook automation with deduplication (using fingerprinting)

Support for Slack, Discord, Teams, Telegram, GitHub Actions, UptimeRobot

Easy self-hosting setup

Live demo: https://incident-pulse.vercel.app GitHub: https://github.com/bhoyee/IncidentPulse

I'd love HN's brutally honest feedback on a few things:

Is the webhook setup (HMAC signatures, idempotency keys, fingerprint deduplication) something you'd actually use, or is it over-engineered?

For small teams – would you self-host something like this, or is a cloud version mandatory?

What's the one feature that would make you switch from your current incident process?

The project is fully open-source, and I'm looking for contributors who enjoy building transparent tools for reliability.
by macleginn | 2025-11-14 16:30:18+00:00
I think he got it backwards. Whisper, incredible things chatbots can do with machine translation and controlled text generation, unbelievably useful code-generation capabilities (if enjoyed responsibly), new heights in general and scientific question answering, etc. AI as a set of tools is just great already, and users have access to it at a very low cost because these people passionately believe in weirdly improbable scenarious and their belief is infectious enough for some other people to give them enough money for capex and for yet other people to work 996 if not worse to push their models forward.

To put it another way, there were many talented people and lots of compute already before the AI craze really took off in early 2020s, and tell me, what magical things were they doing instead?
by thewebguyd | 2025-11-14 16:30:23+00:00
> If they take the water from sources which are already scarce, the impact will be harsh.

Surprised I had to scroll down this far to see this mentioned.

The water use argument is highly local and depends on where we are building these data centers. Are you building in the great lakes region with plenty of fresh water and no water scarcity issues (yet)? Ok fine.

But we aren't building there. We're building in Arizona, Nevada, Nebraska, Iowa putting further stress in an area that water scarcity is already an issue, or soon going to become one due to long term drought conditions. Or Texas, which already has problems with their power grid.

We're building in these locations because they're cheap. If we're going do to this, we need to not let the bottom line be the sole driving decision of data center locations. If it's not profitable to build elsewhere, don't build it until you've figured out how to make it efficient enough to where it is profitable.
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by swalabtech | 2025-11-14 16:30:25+00:00
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