MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jillesvangurp | 2025-11-14 14:33:48+00:00
Well, there are all these alternative browsers like Comet, Atlas, and a few others that are doing similar things. And I'd be very surprised if Google isn't going to push more features via Chrome and their search engine.

I think this is more a case of there being limited appetite for what Mozilla is doing here. At least so far. I keep that stuff turned off in Mozilla and just don't see the appeal. And I'm saying that as someone who does agentic coding for some things, uses and pays for ChatGPT, uses perplexity regularly, etc. And I did install Atlas the other day. I didn't switch to it and wasn't too impressed with what it does.

I think browser makers (including the big ones) are still a bit struggling to identify use cases beyond doing search via a llm, adding side bars, and trying to find a balance between site security and giving all this full access to what's on the page.

Mozilla using their own limited models seems to have very little to add to this mix. At least my impression. But it's too early to state that user's don't want this.

Some users don't want this, clearly. And some other users really don't like any form of change. But there are other users that might want some of these things if they are well executed.

Anyway, Mozilla's attempts here strike me as yet another weak effort to do "something" that follows in a long line of half assed products and services they've developed, launched (sometimes), and killed over the last decades. I don't think they have what it takes; or at least, they have a lot to prove. And the vague hand wavy announcements for this aren't a great sign that they have this figured out beyond "doing something with AI".
by simonw | 2025-11-14 14:34:01+00:00
That BBC story is a great example of what I'm talking about here:

> A small data centre using this type of cooling can use around 25.5 million litres of water per year. [...]

> For the fiscal year 2025, [Microsoft's] Querétaro sites used 40 million litres of water, it added.

> That's still a lot of water. And if you look at overall consumption at the biggest data centre owners then the numbers are huge.

That's not credible reporting because it makes no effort at all to help the reader understand the magnitude of those figures.

"40 million litres of water" is NOT "a lot of water". As far as I can tell that's about the same annual water usage as a 24 acre soybean field.
by andout_ | 2025-11-14 14:34:02+00:00
We provide client abstractions for infrastructure primitives (databases, pub/sub, object storage, etc.). Your application code uses these abstractions, and the actual infrastructure configuration is injected at runtime based on the environment.

For example, your code references "a Postgres database" and Encore provisions Cloud SQL on GCP or RDS on AWS, handling the provider-specific config automatically. The cloud-specific details stay out of your application code.

And if you prefer Kubernetes, we can provision and configure GKE or EKS instead of serverless compute. The point is your application code stays the same regardless.
by gbear605 | 2025-11-14 14:34:43+00:00
If I talk to the people I know who don’t spend all their time online, they’re just not using AI. Quite a few of my close friends haven’t used AI even once in any way, and most of the rest tried it out once and didn’t really care for it. They’re busy doing things in the real world, like spending time with their kids, or riding horses, or reading books.
by bestouff | 2025-11-14 14:35:35+00:00
> This paper examines the impact of the UK's decision to leave the European Union (Brexit) in 2016. Using almost a decade of data since the referendum, we combine simulations based on macro data with estimates derived from micro data collected through our Decision Maker Panel survey. These estimates suggest that by 2025, Brexit had reduced UK GDP by 6% to 8%, with the impact accumulating gradually over time. We estimate that investment was reduced by between 12% and 18%, employment by 3% to 4% and productivity by 3% to 4%. These large negative impacts reflect a combination of elevated uncertainty, reduced demand, diverted management time, and increased misallocation of resources from a protracted Brexit process. Comparing these with contemporary forecasts – providing a rare macro example to complement the burgeoning micro-literature of social science predictions – shows that these forecasts were accurate over a 5-year horizon, but they underestimated the impact over a decade.
by dimitrios1 | 2025-11-14 14:35:54+00:00
> sound scary when presented without context

It's not about it being scary, its about it being a gigantic, stupid waste of water, and for what? So that lazy executives and managers can generate their shitty emails they used to have their comms person write for them, so that students can cheat on their homework, or so degens can generate a video of MLK dancing to rap? Because thats the majority of the common usage at this point and creating the demand for all these datacenters. If it was just for us devs and researchers, you wouldn't need this many.
by bell-cot | 2025-11-14 14:36:18+00:00
> ...the US did militarily invade...

You can make a literalist argument that way - but between Germany declaring war on the US first (and doing extremely well, early war, at taking the war to US shores), the preponderance of British strength (and British overall ground forces commanders) in both the Sicily and Normandy invasions, and the US's eagerness to slash its forces in Europe (post-war) any time that the Communist Menace looked weak - I think that's a poor big-picture characterization of America's entry into Europe.

I did not make any "for their own good" argument. And the US involvement in Europe has borne very little resemblance to European colonial behavior.

No, until roughly the Marshall Plan, I don't think the US had much of a long-term strategy in Europe. But human nature abhors a power vacuum, and water doesn't need any strategy to run downhill.
by jojogh | 2025-11-14 14:37:01+00:00
I am working on building neospark - AI native canva

And we are now recruiting our first group of seed users. If you're excited to shape the future of design and be among the first to try neospark, please visit our homepage and join the wishlist through https://useneospark.com/

We'll send you an exclusive invitation the moment our MVP is live.
by bzzzt | 2025-11-14 14:37:04+00:00
Nintendo is also becoming worse. Some Switch 2 games are so big you need to juggle with the internal storage and expansion SD express cards above 256Gb are simply unobtainable or priced outrageously. While you can obviously delete and redownload titles that takes a while and it's a shame the console storage can be completely filled with 4 AAA titles. That in combination with 'key carts' that are just a download key and still require internal storage has put a big brake on my game collection ambitions for the time being.
by qcnguy | 2025-11-14 14:37:17+00:00
Your faith in the British establishment is touching but misplaced. Being given a long series of fake (sorry, "visiting") academic roles and board seats is exactly how you'd expect them to protect a former government official.

He wasn't savvy with tech. I just demonstrated that. He claimed it was "patently obvious" you couldn't deliver data over copper just a few years before the tech to do it was invented.

He wasn't savvy with economics either. BT was a basket case when he was running it, which is why they had to lay off over 100,000 employees the moment they were privatized. And again, he claimed you could make FTTH cheap by scaling up cable manufacturing, which is not only economically nonsensical but is obviously nonsense to anyone who thinks about it for a moment.

The moment BT had to actually deliver value matching the prices they charged, they could no longer justify FTTH nor could anyone else, because it was irrational. That's why the project got cancelled. Stop trying to force a left wing narrative where none fits: if FTTH was such a great idea in the 1980s other companies would have done it. None did, because it was the wrong call.
by basilgohar | 2025-11-14 14:37:21+00:00
What Backblaze is doing here is so underrated. This a large scale, practical, in-datacenter real data on essential hardware infrastructure that is available almost nowhere else, and they provide it, and their excellent analysis, completely for free.

I miss this culture and I admire leadership that allows it to not only exist, but thrive. I fear the day a stockholder meeting occurs and someone wringing their hands see the decommissioned pennies they can save by limiting or stopping these reports.
by constantcrying | 2025-11-14 14:37:42+00:00
But I am full time employed, active in multiple sport groups, have social hobbies and do volunteer activities. I am anything but a recluse.

If you would ask any person around me, none of them would describe me as "frustrated" or "full of anger".

That you can not imagine people like me, shows to me that you are contained inside a social circle, with where homogeneous opinions.

Just FYI, comments like yours are likely against HN guidelines.
by matthewdgreen | 2025-11-14 14:38:05+00:00
Of course there are conspiracies in the world. The problem with “conspiracy theorists” is not that they’re wrong about the existence of organized conspiracies, it’s that they’re so routinely, 180 degrees wrong about the specifics, and so easily mislead into being useful idiots.

For example, the loudest Epstein conspiracy theorists have spent the past ten years screaming about a conspiracy of pedophiles in their specific outgroup, while ignoring every hint of evidence that indicated their preferred leader was somehow tied to the mess (remember when Trump appointed Epstein’s sweetheart-deal prosecutor to his cabinet during his first term. Wtf!) They were led by the nose to a conclusion that anyone could have seen was highly questionable, because their reasoning and judgement absolutely sucks.
by kace91 | 2025-11-14 14:38:10+00:00
I’m currently moving from macOS to Linux, so I’m using Firefox as a daily driver for the first time in a decade.

While I really appreciate its existence, I was surprised by the amount of corporate stuff I had to remove setting it up: Frontpage ads from their supporters, search offering completions and extras that border on ads as well, the AI bar being pushed through a popup tutorial…

It definitely felt different from other free software, distinctly similar to a for-profit app in a bad way. All the crap was removable in settings, but still.
by panick21_ | 2025-11-14 14:38:46+00:00
Britain is also uniquely bad at government contracting. As we can see in detailed studies about cost of transport engineering.

As with everything things can be done well and can be done badly. And it really depends on this exact situation and the exact contract.

And both well done likely not that different in cost and other factors need to be included.

In terms of transparency having an isolated outside of government structure, you can potentially be more transparent as you can get detailed contracts down to item levels and have all those things be public. This is done in other nations when it comes to transport projects. But it of course depends on the government writing the contract to demand the level of transparency.
by dralley | 2025-11-14 14:39:43+00:00
I don't even like AI (certainly don't like hearing about it), but I don't really have an issue with AI features. There, I said it.

HN spent a year discussing the threat that AI posed to Google Search. Well, if it threatens search, then it threatens the browser. They're hedging. How frequently does Mozilla get criticized for failing to do X Y or Z to change with the times (or for doing it late? for having too much ambition, or not enough, sometimes at the same time?).

The fact of the matter is that they're already struggling to remain relevant as it is, and their competitors have been dabbling in this space for a while. They're already going to have the infrastructure, because local LLMs works really well for translation (and being able to do content translation without sending all the content off to Google is obviously a sensible feature for Firefox to have). There's no reason to not at least try to match their competitors. Especially if they could potentially hit on some "killer app", which is really the only way at this point to make up any significant ground in marketshare in a market that is otherwise entirely commodified.
by heymijo | 2025-11-14 14:39:45+00:00
You're not wrong.

My perspective from someone who wants to understand this new AI landscape in good faith. The water issue isn't the show stopper it's presented as. It's an externality like you discuss.

And in comparison to other water usage, data centers don't match the doomsday narrative presented. I know when I see it now, I mentally discount or stop reading.

Electricity though seems to be real, at least for the area I'm in. I spent some time with ChatGPT last weekend working to model an apples:apples comparison and my area has seen a +48% increase in electric prices from 2023-2025. I modeled a typical 1,000kWh/month usage to see what that looked like in dollar terms and it's an extra $30-40/month.

Is it data centers? Partly yes, straight from the utility co's mouth: "sharply higher demand projections—driven largely by anticipated data center growth"

With FAANG money, that's immaterial. But for those who aren't, that's just one more thing that costs more today than it did yesterday.

Coming full circle, for me being concerned with AI's actual impact on the world, engaging with the facts and understanding them within competing narratives is helpful.
by tmtvl | 2025-11-14 14:39:55+00:00
Well, as long as:

- It runs locally without consuming too much energy or phoning home,

- it can be completely disabled without being re-enabled after an update,

- its training set is ethically sourced and the manifest of training sources is publicly accessible (I'm fine with the training data not being accessible as long as it's properly marked in the manifest),

- and the weights and training code are open,

I would be fine having some sort of AI model available as assistant in FF. I probably wouldn't use it, but I wouldn't have any problems with it being there.
by jve | 2025-11-14 14:39:59+00:00
> Does anyone want AI in anything?

I want in Text to speech (TTS) engines, transliteration/translation and... routing tickets to correct teams/persons would also be awesome :) (Classification where mistakes can easily be corrected)

Anyways, we used TTS engine before openai - it was AI based. It HAD to be AI based as even for a niche language some people couldn't tell it was a computer. Well from some phrases you can tell it, but it is very high quality and correctly knows on which parts of the word to put emphasis on.

https://play.ht/ if anyone is wondering.
by billy99k | 2025-11-14 14:40:33+00:00
"Why not push to increase their low wages and get some job protection, things that could “make it a sustainable job for everybody?”"

It's obvious they don't know anything about the coffee business. Smaller shops have razor thin margins. Ignoring economics and strong arming the business isn't going to create a sustainable job with better benefits.

In our current economy, most people aren't willing to pay more money for the same cup of coffee.

The result will be what I saw with the dozen or so coffee shop workers that tried to unionize in my area: The businesses all closed and the workers were out of jobs.
by vidarh | 2025-11-14 14:41:16+00:00
Window positioning is one that on its own is sufficient to make me ignore Wayland, as it means that without my own compositor with my own extension, I can't get a file manager that will behave how I want it.

Most people won't care, but for a number of us Wayland is stubbornly refusing to support functionality we see as dealbreakers.
by chironjit | 2025-11-14 14:41:20+00:00
I connected Claude to Firefox's ai pane and honestly I feel that this a good middle ground. I don't want an AI browser but I appreciate being able to have ai access specific pages when I have questions.

My only beef is they've basically put Claude's webpage on a side pane, with all the issues of a squished webpage.

I also think having a separate mode is really the best middle ground between an all spying ai-browser and one that has none (which makes doing some things with ai more manual)
by vivzkestrel | 2025-11-14 14:41:29+00:00
since you love reverse engineering a lot from your blog posts it seems, if it isn't too much to ask, can you look into this .unr file which is basically an unreal map that was made with an internal tool at Ubi HQ for a 15 yr old game (splinter cell conviction) . It won't load inside UEExplorer or any of the openly available UE tools. Perhaps it could be a topic of your next post in addition to being tremendous help for the gaming community as only basic mods can be made for this game currently unless someone can figure out how to load its maps somehow
by kristintynski | 2025-11-14 14:41:29+00:00
Claims to have built a theory of everything (Standard Model + General Relativity) from a single, simple principle.

But here's the kicker: the theory has zero free parameters?

Instead of just accepting constants like the speed of light or the mass of an electron as "just-so" numbers we have to measure, this theory derives them. And it does it all using the golden ratio, $\phi$.

The core claim is that the universe is "self-consistent" and that this mathematical consistency forces the value $\phi$ to appear as the fundamental scaling ratio for everything.

The results are kind of insane:

It predicts the fine structure constant ($\alpha$) with 0.017% accuracy.

It predicts the Weinberg angle (which relates fundamental forces) with 0.03% accuracy.

It predicts all the mass ratios between particles (like the muon-to-electron mass) with sub-percent accuracy.

It claims to solve the Hierarchy Problem (why is gravity so weak?).It claims to solve the Strong CP Problem (why does one force obey a key symmetry?).

It claims to solve the Cosmological Constant Problem (it predicts the value of dark energy, $\rho_\Lambda = \phi^{-250}$).

How it works (in a nutshell):The theory uses a holographic E8 symmetry (a massive, 248-dimensional mathematical object) on a 2+1D boundary that "projects" our 3+1D universe.

This isn't just hand-wavy math. The paper provides specific, testable protocols for quantum computers and topological quantum computing platforms.

The theory makes hard predictions that can be falsified today.

I'm not a physicist, so I can't tell if the E8 math is sound, but the sheer number of bulls-eyes it claims to hit is staggering.

What do you all think? Is this genius, or just really good numerology?
by csomar | 2025-11-14 14:41:39+00:00
What is funny is that when asked, the current LLMs/AIs, do not believe in an AGI. Here are the some of readings you can do about the AGI fantasy:

- Gödel-style incompleteness and the “stability paradox”

- Wolfram's principle - Principle of Computational Equivalence (PCE)

One of the red flags is human intelligence/brain itself. We have way more neurons than we are currently using. The limit to intelligence might very possibly be mathematical and adding neurons/transistors will not result in incremental intelligence.

The current LLMs will prove useful but since the models are out there, if this is a maxima, the ROI will be exactly 0.
by allan_s | 2025-11-14 14:41:54+00:00
3 month I was annoyed by the "let me translate the page for you" and last week in vacation I was browsing some local website, and I was more than happy to have firefox being able to translate the website dynamically, the result was okay-ish , but okay enough that I was able to proceed. And I'm more than happy that it didn't left my mobile device.
by llarsson | 2025-11-14 14:42:08+00:00
There are already APIs being developed that assume a browser has an LLM either inside it or otherwise available, see for instance https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Summarizer_...

So they pretty much have to ship one, to stay relevant. And they are privacy-focused, so I'm happy they are not just using ChatGPT or whatever under the hood to implement support.
by antonyh | 2025-11-14 14:42:27+00:00
The problem for me was more a software issue than hardware or cost. It (Quest 2) just felt awkward, the software selection was meh, IPD bad for me, resolution only so-so, but most of all it felt isolated from the rest of my gear. I've been planning to give it another go recently but don't have much enthusiasm for it, but a Steam headset with my collection is something I'm very keen to try.
by AndrewKemendo | 2025-11-14 14:42:38+00:00
Go read Kurzweil or Bostrom or Shannon or von neumman or minsky or etc… and you’ll realize how little you have thought of any of these problems/issues and there are literally millions of words spilled already decades before your “new concerns.” The alignment problem book predates GPT2 so give me a break.

People have been shitting on AGI since the term was invented by Ben Goertzel.

Anyone (like me) who has been around AGI longer than a few years is going to continue to keep our heads down and keep working. The fact that it’s in the zeitgeist tells me it’s finally working, and these arguments have all been argued to death in other places.

Yet we’re making regular progress towards it no matter what you want to think or believe

The measurable reality of machine dominance in actuation of physical labor is accelerating unabated.
by rtkwe | 2025-11-14 14:42:46+00:00
It's just numbers in a database if they're doing automated scanning, it's basically free to keep an alert around, and if the bills show up new out of nowhere it means there's a decent chance you're relatively close to their original source.

The FBI gets out of bed for more inane things than maybe figuring out what happened to DB Cooper (he probably died during the jump or after landing) after all this time.
by jjgreen | 2025-11-14 14:43:10+00:00
Riemann, twin-primes and a united theory of physics in one year; busy couple. Amusing comment on the latter:

Comments: 335 Pages. (Note by viXra Admin: File size reduced by viXra Admin; please submit article written with AI assistance to ai.viXra.org)

https://figshare.com/articles/dataset/Structured_Determinism...
by kkukshtel | 2025-11-14 14:43:20+00:00
You've needed to have a project file in the past to compile .cs files, and this gets rid of that need. There are things that are part of more esoteric corners of Roslyn like .csx files that have allowed similar behavior in the past, but this fronts .cs directly as a scripting solution.

Scraping main() has been a thing for a while in dotnet — so called "Top-level programs" have be in since C# 9/.NET 5, aka about 5 years ago.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/fundamentals...
by jstanley | 2025-11-14 14:43:24+00:00
For comparison it's about 10 olympic-sized swimming pools worth of water, doesn't seem very significant to me. Unless you're going to tell people they're not allowed swimming pools any more because swimming doesn't produce enough utility?

And at any rate, water doesn't get used up! It evaporates and returns to the sky to rain down again somewhere else, it's the most renewable resource in the entire world.
by lazide | 2025-11-14 14:43:32+00:00
It doesn’t require most people to be stupid. It just requires people to have other things they need to do, and pay attention to, and limited ability to give a shit.

If everyone has to be paying attention all the time (and it would be 150% of the time with modern society), everyone is susceptible to being drowned in bullshit and either checking out or being manipulated.

Even with what we have now, that is exactly what is going on. Direct democracy would be even worse.