MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by DebtDeflation | 2025-11-14 15:04:08+00:00
More like financial engineering. When Wall Street demands ever increasing EPS growth, but revenues are flat or declining and you don't have cash to buy back shares, cost cutting is the only option. Unfortunately, labor costs are the bulk of most companies' costs, so that means layoffs. It would be nice if companies had a financial horizon that extended beyond the current quarter but that seems more and more like a pipe dream.
by berkes | 2025-11-14 15:04:25+00:00
> And in fact, it should have no network access whatsoever (and network should be a user controllable permission, as it used to be — the only reason that was removed is that people would block network access to block ads)

Sure, a QR code scanner can work fine without network. E.g. it could use the network to check a scanned URL against the "safe browsing API" or to pre-fetch the URL and show me a nice OG preview. You are correct to say you may not need nor want this. But I and others may like such features.

Point is not to discuss wether a QR scanner should have network-access, but to say that once a permission is there for obvious or correct reasons, it can in future easily get abused for other reasons. Without changing the permissions.

My mail-app needs network. Nothing prohibits it from abusing this after an update to pull in ads, or send telemetry to third parties. My sound record app needs microphone permissions. Nothing prohibits it from "secretly" recording my conversations after an update (detectable since a LED and icon will light up).

If you want to solve "app becoming malicious after an update", permissions aren't the tool. They are a tiny piece of that puzzle, but "better permissions" aren't the solution either. Nor is "better awareness of permissions by users".
by shevy-java | 2025-11-14 15:04:45+00:00
I also wondered about this. Mozilla pushed out some AI buttons.

I don't need this. I don't want this. I did not ask for this.

I think what we here see is that commercial interests ruin a browser.

The AI things are pushed by an idea to make firefox more marketable to companies. So Mozilla gets more money, at the expense of users. This is the sad reality that explains why Mozilla behaves that way. Google too by the way.
by LexiMax | 2025-11-14 15:04:45+00:00
In my experience, the loudest critics of Rust I have heard are actually seasoned C and C++ developers who are incredibly good at one or both languages, but know almost nothing outside it.

On one hand, C++ is an incredibly complicated language that one can invest considerable amounts of time into. It also used to occupy a unique niche where you get tons of abstraction features yet as much blazing speed as you care to spend time optimising. Rust is encroaching on that niche.

On the other hand, C is an incredibly simple language, which does not allow for convenient expressions of particular abstractions. If they hated C++ because it was too hard to follow. What the code is doing, they probably hate rust for the similar levels of abstraction affordances.

When I hear the bad faith arguments from people who really should know better, what I hear is a group of scared developers who have been able to coast on their knowledge base for years or even decades, and are now feeling like their skill set is at risk of being unnecessary.

It always seemed like an unproductive attitude to have in a knowledge-based industry like software development. I am also a C++ developer, but you bet I am learning Rust on the side, because I think it's a good idea to skate where the puck is headed. I also learned enough of Zig to be dangerous a few months ago because it was fun.

Either way, I would suggest those developers reflect on the reason why they have this reflexive need to throw a wrench into any conversation mentioning rust. If their intention is to slow down adoption through hostile community sentiment, it's not working.
by andix | 2025-11-14 15:04:50+00:00
Configuring of the proxy is done by the k8s Gateway controller. Exactly like for the ingress controller. You just use standardized k8s CRDs to configure it.

The gateway/ingress controller takes the k8s resources and configures the proxy server accordingly. In some cases additional config snippets specific to the proxy (nginx, envoy, etc) are required, but it's usually just a few lines.

Which http server is used is not that important (the most common ones are all fine), it's more about how well the integration to k8s works.
by a96 | 2025-11-14 15:04:52+00:00
> EDE (Equinox Desktop Environment) is a simple and fast desktop environment for *nix-like systems. It uses the FLTK GUI toolkit and offers a familiar look and feel. EDE is designed according to the UNIX philosophy, which means it offers seperate executables for each component to “do one job and do it good”. This makes EDE very modular and also easy to alter for any user's special needs and requirements.

TIHI, but I can definitely see places where this would be useful. Based on the name, I thought it was just Enlightenment/E rebrand or something.
by notepad0x90 | 2025-11-14 15:05:42+00:00
I think "nobody i know" and nobody are different things. Mozilla wants more firefox users. there are "AI browsers" and ai integrated browsing is becoming more and more the norm. Mozilla is doing the right thing here, the features are there but unobtrusive. But down the road, I fully expect Mozilla to do whatever they have to do to remain in the game. Their small market share is hurting the entire internet, they can't afford to become a browser for retro-techo-luddites or something.
by machekb | 2025-11-14 15:05:46+00:00
With SST v3 you're still specifying specific resources in code though, so at implementation time you have to decide which underlying infra you want to use. E.g. will you use Lambda or Fargate, this means using different SST components. How Encore is different is that you only declare the semantics in code, and then at deploy you decide which infra to use depending on your needs for each environment. Similarly, you can choose at deploy time if you want to colocate services or deploy as separate processes, with no refactoring needed.
by abdullahkhalids | 2025-11-14 15:06:02+00:00
There is no possible way to compete against a competent trillion dollar organization that knows how to build a good browser, and exploits its global monopoly position in search to advertise their browser.

It doesn't matter if Firefox became better. There is simply not enough differentiation potential in the core browser product to win by being better. Its all marketing.

I just wish Mozilla sold some stickers/themes as proxy donations and became largely independent.
by Etherlord87 | 2025-11-14 15:06:26+00:00
The problem is that you take the water from the ground, and you let it evaporate, and then it returns to... Well to various places, including the ground, but the deeper you take the water from (drinking water can't be taken from the surface, and for technological reasons drinking water is used too) the more time it takes to replenish the aquifer - up to thousands of years!

Of course surface water availability can also be a serious problem.
by rollcat | 2025-11-14 15:06:26+00:00
Oh that's interesting! I've never played Rust (or any PvP shooter outside of Quake 3...), so forgive me my ignorance. Questions, out of curiosity:

- Why no matchmaking, why no win/loss condition? What's the incentive structure / stakes for the participants? Is that a differentiator in the genre?

- Other than raw mechanics (aiming), what other kinds of skillsets affect gameplay / success?

- What are you allowed to share about the mitigations?

I don't wanna try any further backseating, just curious.
by austy69 | 2025-11-14 15:06:26+00:00
> As a technologist I want to solve problems effectively (by bringing about the desired, correct result), efficiently (with minimal waste) and without harm (to people or the environment).

I agree with the first two points, but as others have commented the environmental claim here is just not compelling. Starting up your computer is technically creating environmental waste. By his metrics solving technical problems ethically is impossible.
by boplicity | 2025-11-14 15:07:05+00:00
Automatic captions has been transformative, in terms of accessibility, and seems to be something people universally want. Most people don't think of it as AI though, even when it is LLM software creating the captions. There are many more ways that AI tools could be embedded "invisibly" into our day-to-day lives, and I expect they will be.
Show HN: Distil-localdoc.py – SLM assistant for writing Python documentation
by party-horse123 | 2025-11-14 15:07:05+00:00
We built an SLM assistant for automatic Python documentation - a Qwen3 0.6B parameter model that generates complete, properly formatted docstrings for your code in Google style. Run it locally, keeping your proprietary code secure!

```bash python localdoc.py --file your_script.py ```
by Hizonner | 2025-11-14 15:07:17+00:00
Copyright needs to be pared back legislatively (and via treaty renegotiations). More like "aggressively pruned with a chainsaw".

Courts and captured international processes have made an absolute mockery of the original intent, and they're not going to turn around and fix it.

Not holding my breath, mind you... market religion is strong out there, and so is the more self-serving "there need to be big concentrations of money that are easily plundered".
by nashashmi | 2025-11-14 15:07:22+00:00
Allow me to be a devil's advocate here. I don't natively like AI in Firefox. But let's allow ourselves to imagine that Firefox has a help menu that can respond to AI. Now let's imagine a help agent (helper?) that can agentically make changes to Firefox Settings using AI.

Second set of features could be language rewriter and translator in web pages and web forums.

Third set of features: extract text notes from a web page. save it to the browser history. Allow AI chatting with this AI text enhanced browser history.

Fourth feature: Bookmark surfing. AI will individually look in each bookmark for resources and information that can be outputted based on chat requests.

The first and only useful scenario in a local setting that actually would be applauded and appreciated. I don't know how it is on some systems, and how much resource it would expend in energy. It wont slow down Firefox off the shelf, because Firefox won't scour the AI index, unprompted.

Edit: rearranged paragraphs.
by andout_ | 2025-11-14 15:07:31+00:00
Encore uses sensible defaults optimized for cost and performance (eg. reasonable instance sizes, log retention periods, backup schedules), but you have full control to modify anything. You can adjust configs per environment through the Encore Cloud dashboard or directly in your AWS console - it's all standard AWS resources (RDS, Fargate, etc.) in your account.

The goal is to start with good defaults so you don't have to think about every config detail upfront, but nothing is locked down. You can also set up approval workflows for any infrastructure changes that have cost implications before they're applied.
by IAmGraydon | 2025-11-14 15:08:37+00:00
People always create god, even if they claim not to believe in it. The rise of belief in conspiracy theories is a form of this (imagining an all powerful entity behind every random event), as is the belief in AGI. It's not a totalizing solution to all woes. It's just a way to convince oneself that the world is not random, and is therefore predictable, which makes us feel safer. That, after all, is what we are - prediction machines.
by thih9 | 2025-11-14 15:08:51+00:00
> I can’t use a google product without being harassed (...)

You can disable AI in Google products.

E.g. in Gmail: go to Settings (the gear icon), click See all settings, navigate to the General tab, scroll down to find Smart features and personalization and uncheck the checkbox.

Source: https://support.google.com/drive/answer/15604322
by glenstein | 2025-11-14 15:09:06+00:00
I believe there are good targeted tasks. One Chrome plug-in called 'Tweeks' is a reimplementation of Grease monkey user scripting where you can make changes by posing natural language to an LLM that changes the page for you. It was posted here in hn the other day. [0]

Also I believe some agentic tasking can make sense: scroll through all the Kindle unlimited books for critically acclaimed contemporary hard sci-fi.

But stapling on a chat sidebar or start page or something seems lacking in imagination.

0. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45916525
by shevy-java | 2025-11-14 15:09:16+00:00
That's fine. My gripe here is that Firefox, Google etc.. try to force this onto everyone. If I could I would just disable the crap AI as I don't need or use or want it. But we are not given an easy option here; the Google "opt-out" is garbage. I actually had to install browser extensions to eliminate that Google AI spam. That extension works better than those "Google options" given to us. I actually rarely use Firefox so I can not even want to be bothered to install an installation, but I know that I don't need any AI crap from Firefox/Mozilla either. People are no longer given a choice. The big companies and organisations abuse people. I have said since years that we, the people, need back control over the world wide web. That includes the UI.
by jimnotgym | 2025-11-14 15:09:42+00:00
I really hate the terminology of the first sentence

> Divide a company's income by its revenue

How about dividing a companies operating profit by its revenue? Income is a vague term and is just as often equated with revenue... which makes the opening sentence a bit weird.

Going further, most people talking about different sectors having different margins are talking about the gross profit margin. In a retailer gross profit could be the sales minus the cost of the things that got sold and probably the cost of the people in the stores. In a service business it is normally the sales minus the cost of people doing the work that was sold. At a hosting company it could be the sales- minus the electricity, Internet, engineers.

The important distinction is that gp does not normally include 'head office costs', accountants and other parasites, so it is easier to compare the different segments from the amount they are going to contribute towards your fixed costs.
by glenneroo | 2025-11-14 15:09:58+00:00
That's not quite true - when did you get your free Quest 1? Only January of this year did Meta officially stop allowing devs to support those devices which IMO is not nice, but probably necessary to put resources towards newer devices since it was extremely outdated and very hard to keep supporting. The Quest 1 launched in May 2019, so it got almost 6 years of updates and if you have one, you can still install older versions of existing apps that choose to support it (which admittedly is very rare). I shut off support for my game back in 2024 when they recommended it, since the device is less than half as powerful as the Quest 2, very few users still had one, and the Q1 was a hard target to hit performance-wise vs newer devices. If you spend $50 to get a Quest 2 you'll get a couple years of updates or even better, spend $299 to get a 3S which is an amazing piece of kit and will probably be supported for at least 5 more years since it just came out.
by lapcat | 2025-11-14 15:10:24+00:00
Well, consider the subtext of the article: "We’re in an era of the cult of the entrepreneur."

But it's only the ultra-wealthy entrepreneurs who have a cult following and are worshipped for their "risk taking." Whereas small business owners like me don't have a cult following.

I don't make more money than BigCo engineer employees, so nobody really cares about my risk taking. They only care about "risks" that generate massive, ostentatious rewards.

The cult wouldn't need deprogramming if there was no cult.
by benterix | 2025-11-14 15:10:39+00:00
If you want a short answer: most people don't.

But a more nuanced is: the term "AI" has become almost meaningless as everything is being marketed as AI, with startups and bigger companies doing it for different reasons. However, if you mean GenAI subset, then very few people want it, in very specific products, and with certain defined functionality. What is happening now though is that everybody and their mum try to slap it everywhere and see if anything sticks (spoiler: practically nothing does).
by belter | 2025-11-14 15:10:57+00:00
> The water issue really is a distraction which harms the credibility of people who lean on it

Is that really the case? - "Data Centers and Water Consumption" - https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-co...

"...Large data centers can consume up to 5 million gallons per day, equivalent to the water use of a town populated by 10,000 to 50,000 people..."

"I Was Wrong About Data Center Water Consumption" - https://www.construction-physics.com/p/i-was-wrong-about-dat...

"...So to wrap up, I misread the Berkeley Report and significantly underestimated US data center water consumption. If you simply take the Berkeley estimates directly, you get around 628 million gallons of water consumption per day for data centers, much higher than the 66-67 million gallons per day I originally stated..."
by vidarh | 2025-11-14 15:11:16+00:00
Yeah, I just gave an example elsewhere of turning a Notion page into a JSON object, that Claude Code trivially did with Playwright, but that'd be far nicer if I could just click a button to talk about the current page. I'd be happy for it to be sandboxed, as long as it's easily accessible.

Really, I intend to push it into a Google Sheet, and ideally I'd just want a bookmark to do that, but for now I guess I'll settle for a script I can give a URL to. For a lot of people's daily manual chores, the ability to ask an LLM to solve it, and bookmark a "ask this again about another page" action would be a gamechanger.
by everdrive | 2025-11-14 15:11:35+00:00
>95% of web pages are garbage and a summary is fine.

Mmm, summarized garbage.

>Also I imagine you frequently read summaries of books

This isn't what LLM summaries are being used for however. Also, I don't really do this unless you consider a movie trailer to be a summary. I certainly don't do this with books, again, unless you think any kind of commentary or review counts as a summary. I certainly would not use an LLM summary for a book or movie recommendation.
by slightwinder | 2025-11-14 15:11:38+00:00
> Does anyone want AI in anything?

Well, if you phrase it this way, then yes, people want this. AI can be useful, and integration is beneficial. But if we are talking about the momentary hype, then no, most people are against stupidly blindly shoving AI into something and getting annoyed with it the whole time.

Personally, I would prefer for apps to safely open up for any kind of integration, and AI being just one automation of many, whatever one prefers. It's so annoying for everything being either a walled garden, guarding every little bit they can grab; or having apps open, but so limited in what they actually can do, that you are basically forced to the walled gardens.
by mytailorisrich | 2025-11-14 15:12:32+00:00
The invasion of Europe is the standard, accepted term because that's what happened. There is nothing controversial or personal opinion there. You can call it the Allies invasion because there weren't only US troops but this was US-led and US-dominated, and the result was US domination. (It's like the Allied/US-led invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, I suppose...)

Anyway, this and y whole reply are beside the point, which is still that Europe has been a vassal of the US since it was invaded by the US during WWII. I don't think this is controversial, either, unless you stop your analysis at the very superficial narrative fed to the public (i.e. propaganda).

The US still have about 50 military sites across Europe and hold huge military, political, and economic sway over the continent. There is a reason De Gaulle decided to pull out of NATO's integrated command and to close the US bases in France: You can't even try to maintain a meaningful level of independence when you have a foreign military on your soil.
by IAmGraydon | 2025-11-14 15:12:45+00:00
>…Musk would regularly characterise Hassabis as a supervillain who needed to be stopped. Musk would make unequivocally clear that OpenAI was the good to DeepMind’s evil. … “He literally made a video game where an evil genius tries to create AI to take over the world,” Musk shouted [at an OpenAI off-site], referring to Hassabis’s 2004 title Evil Genius, “and fucking people don’t see it. Fucking people don’t see it! And Larry [Page]? Larry thinks he controls Demis but he’s too busy fucking windsurfing to realize that Demis is gathering the power.”

There are some deeply mentally ill people out there, and given enough influence, their delusions seem to spread like a virus, infecting others and becoming a true mass delusion. Musk is not well, as he has repeatedly shown us. It amazes me that so many other people seem to be susceptible to the delusion, though.
by sunscream89 | 2025-11-14 15:12:47+00:00
> Determining the entropy of a system typically entails measuring its heat capacity. That approach is harder to apply when the system consists of a very small number of electrons corralled in a tiny device. Fortunately, the entropy of such systems can be derived from the chemical potential, which is the energy needed to pack in an additional electron.

Does this not call for “entropy” to be redefined as “the distribution of potential over negative potential (manifold surface area)”?

Does this not support the growing movement that entropy is not a footnote of thermodynamics, rather thermodynamics is a footnote of entropy?

Heat is only the ultimate exhaust of all work, and all existence generates work through interaction (interference.)

Entropy is the distribution of potential over the surface area of negative potential.
by badsectoracula | 2025-11-14 15:13:19+00:00
I've done some summarizing with my own small Tcl/Tk-based frontend that uses llama.cpp to call Mistral Small (i.e. all is done locally) and i do know that it can be off about various things.

However 99% of the times i use this isn't because i need an accurate summary but because i come across some overly long article that i do not even know if i'm interested in reading, so i have Mistral Small generate a summary to give me a ballpark of what the article is even about and then judge if i want to spend the time reading the full thing or not.

For that use case i do not care if the summary is correct, just if it is in the ballpark of what the article is all about (from the few articles i did ended up reading, the summary was in the ballpark well enough to make me think it does a good enough work). However even if it is incorrect, the worst that can happen is that i end up not reading some article i might find interesting - but that'd be what i'd do without the summary anyway since because i need to run my Tcl/Tk script, select the appropriate prompt (i have a few saved ones), copy/paste the text and then wait for the thing to run and finish, i only use it for articles i'm in already biased against reading.
by vidarh | 2025-11-14 15:13:26+00:00
> Can you give an example?

Recipe pages full of fluff.

Review pages full of fluff.

Almost any web page full of fluff, which is a rapidly rising proportion.

> And how would I know the LLM has error bounds appropriate for my situation?

You consider whether you care if it is wrong, and then you try it a couple of times, and apply some common sense when reading the summaries, just the same as when considering if you trust any human-written summary. Is this a real question?