MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by meesles | 2025-11-13 17:39:05+00:00
I don't understand why we need VC-backed extensions to filter sites, these tools have existed for a long time under open-source codebases and community-driven blocklists.

I think it's better to use Tampermonkey/Greasemonkey. Rules are deterministic, you have full control, and you don't have to worry about monetization or malicious data collection in the future.

There have been multiple incidents in the past of extensions like these being sold off to sketchy third party companies which then use the popularity to insert malware into folks' machines.

I really recommend against this. The AI spin doesn't add much since most sites have had rules that work for years, they don't change that often. Please don't build up this type of dependence on a company for regular browsing.
by jimbomins | 2025-11-13 17:39:07+00:00
An AI may be making an ultimately random choice (prove the CEO isn't) but it's actual options are weighted on statistical grounds from much wider sources of data than a human can knowingly handle.

I say knowingly because actually the sum total of accumulated info for just a month or two of human activity eclipses even today's LLM.

And the CEO decisions are frequently flawed because there's a strong filter of the information from below.

Perhaps a crowd sourced (employee sourced) decision making process would be best with the wisdom of crowds.
by mrandish | 2025-11-13 17:39:39+00:00
> can't pick winners.

Mayoshi Son isn't playing the VC game like most traditional VC funds. He's operating on a massive scale and his LPs are sovereign wealth funds, who can have other geo-political priorities than pure profit.

Some people don't know that the usual VC game is often still be profitable for the VC even if their fund isn't profitable. VCs are investing the money of their LPs (Limited Partners), who are usually very large institutional investors with billions under management (think state pension funds, Harvard endowment). Most of the LP's funds are invested in a diversified blend of safer, lower-return vehicles but they take up to 5% and invest it in high-risk, high-return things like venture capital and hedge funds. But they spread it across a dozen or more firms with different strategies.

So each VC is playing a portfolio bets and their LPs are playing a portfolio of porfolios. The LPs just need one of their 12+ VC funds to be a lead investor on a unicorn win. This math usually works out in their favor (there's now >50 years of data). VC funds charge their LPs a yearly management fee of a few percent of the invested capital - whether the fund makes money or not. Over the 10 year life of a fund, this adds up and covers the VCs overhead and very generous salaries - usually >$500K at larger firms. In the VC's view, $500K/yr isn't getting long-term "rich" but it'll pay for a pretty lux life. Even with the VC taking out fees, the LP's math still works thanks to only needing one VC firm to win and if one or two more of their VC funds just return 2x or 3x. It maths up even better.

When your personal worst-case downside is $500K/yr minimum with substantial upside, it's not a bad gig. However, these VC types are generally top-of-class Ivy League grads, who are clearly very sharp and ultra high-potential - the type who'd expect $500K earning opptys on Wall Street, consulting, investment banking, etc.
by walletdrainer | 2025-11-13 17:39:40+00:00
F35 has far better bvr capabilities than the eurofighter and in practice ends up being far more useful in the air superiority role.

Eurofighter is really only good for peacetime patrols, the F35 will detect and shoot down enemies in real conflict far before the Eurofighter can do anything.

In a bizarre hypothetical conflict you would certainly not want to engage a F35 in an Eurofighter, the Eurofighter would be knocked out of the sky long before it could even see the F35. It certainly couldn’t turn on it’s radar.

There are extensive public studies available from e.g. the Danish government that ended up with the conclusion that the F35 is far superior in air-to-air combat. https://www.fmn.dk/globalassets/fmn/dokumenter/strategi/kamp...
by sharts | 2025-11-13 17:39:41+00:00
Just invest in a reasonably diverse index fund ( or a few). This is actually the optimal drama free way to go for most.

In the long run nobody out performs consistently anyway. We all get hit due to market events.

You may be giving CEOs much more credit than is due. And for all that they actually do, the outperformer is a rarity not the norm.

LLM could certainly fit this. Particularly when trained with all the MBA nonsense education in the world. It wouldn’t be the end of the world and it wouldn’t be substantially better/worse. But it would be cheaper.
by oidar | 2025-11-13 17:39:43+00:00
Listen, I love customizing the web - I use Greasemonkey extensively - but I don't see a path to monetization here. Greasemonkey and Tampermonkey exist, for free. Why would someone pay for this? AI generation is neat, but once a script is creating and working - why wouldn't a user just hop over to Claude and remake the script? Besides burning tokens - these free alternatives exist. An API price hike could make it fall apart even more.

Power users already know about customizing the Web with greasemonkey and those who don't really don't know why they would want this. It's trying to be all things to all people - it's an everything extension. You need to make this work BETTER than the free tools. And this is before even thinking about the legal grey area of modifying websites and then sharing modifications to those websites.
by rsynnott | 2025-11-13 17:39:59+00:00
Possible complicating factor is that at about the same time Irish Rail started experimenting with radical new concepts like having trains that were not from the early 1960s, and having more than one commuter line in the entire country. So possibly hard to read too much into it; there’s an argument that Irish journeys just went up because the system was becoming rapidly less terrible.

(I remember being amazed as a kid in the 90s on encountering a mainline train that had automatic doors. Irish Rail was pretty behind the times for a long time.)
by layla5alive | 2025-11-13 17:40:15+00:00
This is so very sad and so very ripe for disruption.

So many of the top players in our modern late stage capitalism economy fit this mold of having a terrible user experience with a large unsatisfied user base. Usually it's not even a monopoly, but all the top players are roughly equally awful to their users.

I'm tempted to start some companies to just do the thing in a way that doesn't suck for the actual paying customers. I think just doing a good/competent/user-needs-centric job at the same basic product would be enough to disrupt the market in many cases.
by array_key_first | 2025-11-13 17:40:57+00:00
I don't know, maybe? What's the cut off point for how long it takes to remove something?

Removing paint takes a long time. Removing glue doesn't take a long time. Removing a sticky note takes almost no time.

If I leave a sticky note on your car, is that graffiti? Is glue graffiti?
by nixpulvis | 2025-11-13 17:41:17+00:00
Zed is the only modern IDE-like editor which is fast enough to replace (n)vim for me. I plan to use it for more and more projects, but I've had minor issues with it's Vi-mode.

I'll always remain someone plugged into vim because I need it sometimes when shelled over a terminal. Editing files over SSH can work with editor support, but is often less reliable or fast than jumping through whatever hoops I need to to get an SSH connection once and then doing everything from there.
by mv4 | 2025-11-13 17:41:49+00:00
"I cut my healthcare costs by 90% by canceling insurance and doctor visits."

In all seriousness, this is a recurring pattern on HN and it sends the wrong message. It's almost as bad as vibecoding a paid service and losing private customer data.

There was a thread here awhile ago, 'How We Saved $500,000 Per Year by Rolling Our Own “S3' [1]. Then they promptly got hacked. [2]

[1] https://engineering.nanit.com/how-we-saved-500-000-per-year-...

[2] https://www.cbsnews.com/colorado/news/colorado-mom-stranger-...
by westurner | 2025-11-13 17:41:49+00:00
From "TikTok has turned culture into a feedback loop of impulse and machine learning" (2025) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45200337 :

> Vine had 6 second short form video in 2012.

> Vine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vine_(service)

> Short-form content: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short-form_content

Did Vine have that impact back in the day?
by mjamesaustin | 2025-11-13 17:42:07+00:00
Of course the voters who have much more political power than is fair, would be unhappy if we transitioned to a system where all voters have an equal amount of political power.

This point is always brought up as if it's inherently bad for rural concerns to get overruled by urban ones, but TOTALLY FINE if urban concerns get overruled by rural ones. Our current system is a crazy double standard, and inherently unfair.
by lrvick | 2025-11-13 17:42:07+00:00
Just to name a few of the projects I work on, use, or find most interesting:

https://keyoxide.org/

https://git.distrust.co/public/keyfork

https://git.distrust.co/public/airgap

https://codeberg.org/heiko/openpgp-pkcs11

https://codeberg.org/openpgp-card/openpgp-card-tools

https://sequoia-pgp.org/

https://github.com/rpgp/rpgp

https://www.nitrokey.com/news/2021/new-nitrokey-3-nfc-usb-c-...

https://doc.qubes-os.org/en/latest/user/security-in-qubes/sp...
by graemep | 2025-11-13 17:42:34+00:00
I noticed the same thing in the UK.

There is a certain group of women who cannot accept that women can be at fault, for example that a woman can be an abuser, regardless of the facts.

> As a visible and ethnic minority I did not encounter such rhetoric growing up in predominantly immigrant socially conservative suburban environments.

Not even social liberal ethnic members of minorities seem to be as inclined to do it was affluent white women.

I think some people who are actually privileged play up being women (or being gay, or ethnic minority, or whatever) in order to play at belonging to an oppressed group. Its a bit like people claiming to be working class because they were as children, even if they are now living in a mansion.

I am visible ethnic minority but did not grow up in a predominately immigrant or socially conservative area in the UK. I have lived elsewhere though.
by CrackerNews | 2025-11-13 17:43:16+00:00
The idea of this style of research and engineering in general is to create an approximation of observations of nature.

To follow completely in your footsteps would require recreating the totality of physical evolution that led to intelligence within a fraction of the time. This isn't feasible to an investor expecting returns within a reasonable timeline.

Getting to this point leaped from text generation to image generation to video generation, and now these three approaches are experimenting on what the next step should be. These three approaches did not come from an isolated vacuum and are the result of iterative progress.

The general idea now is to take the video model and give it 3D spatial capabilities to better model the implicitly symbolic and virtual worlds it is depicting and reason what would happen next. Fei-Fei Li wants to produce a 3D scene asset. DeepMind wants to simulate what can happen in that 3D scene. Yann LeCun wants to expand upon the symbolic reasoning by adding another layer of intelligence.

Traditional AI balk at the lack of inherent agentic purpose and goals, but LLMs separately evolved from pattern matching and statical analysis of the digital output of human labor.

A number of people in the LLM field have accepted that recreating the animal brain is not the point. Instead they work on a unique digital intelligence as if it was select fragments of the human brain existing in a digital world, informed by neuroscience research.

I think LLMs may not reason like a human with skin in the game, but humans are rather flawed in making sense of the nihilistic stage of history we find ourselves in. It is difficult for at least half of humanity on an IQ level to reason with what we have created. I think there is a case for a separate digital intelligence to analyze and make sense of the digital world which only seems to merge further with reality. Maybe this is a transhumanist singularity not in a technological term, but in terms of human idealism in creating values for ourselves.
by CupricTea | 2025-11-13 17:43:38+00:00
I still remember when Valve first showed an early alpha unreleased version of Steam running natively in Ubuntu for the first time in the early 2010s. It blew my mind that a major company, especially an entertainment company, was targeting Linux at this scale.

Of course, Wine was very lackluster in those days, and for a while I was worried they'd eventually give up with the monumental effort that would be involved in getting it up to snuff.

It's now over a decade later and they're still at it and have made monumental leaps. Valve truly was and still is playing the long game here.

Imagine if Microsoft had never threatened their business with the Windows 8 store and the anxiety of Microsoft locking down their platform.
by petcat | 2025-11-13 17:43:42+00:00
> You will never make money on public transportation, nor should you—it's a public service.

My understanding is that in the US Amtak runs a net-positive operating income in the Northeast Corridor (Boston-NYC-Philly-DC) but it all goes toward subsidizing unprofitable routes throughout the rest of the country. To the tune of the entire system running a $2 billion loss every year.

So in theory you could get some private rail to run trains up and down the northeast seaboard, upstate NY, Long Island, and possibly come out with a net profit.
by toast0 | 2025-11-13 17:44:18+00:00
> Intelligent, robust design at one provider (like AWS) is way more resilient, and intra-zone transfer is cheaper than going out to the cloud ($0.02/GB vs $0.08/GB).

If traffic cost is relevant (which it is for a lot of use cases), Hetzner's price of $1.20/TB ($0.0012 / GB) for internet traffic [1] is an order of magnitude less than what AWS charges between AWS locations in the same metro. If you host only at providers with reasonable bandwidth charges, most likely all of your bandwidth will be billed at less than what AWS charges for inter-zone traffic. That's obscene. As far as I can tell, clouds are balancing their budgets on the back of traffic charges, but nothing else feels under cost either.

> For example, during the AWS outage, my company was in us-east-1, and we never had any issues, because we didn't depend on calling AWS APIs to continue operating. Things already running continue to run.

This doesn't always work out. During the GCP outage, my service was running fine, but other similar services were having trouble, so we attracted more usage, which we would have scaled up for, except that the GCP outage prevented that. Cloud makes it very expensive to run scaled beyond current needs and promises that scale out will be available to do just in time...

[1] https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/general/traffic/
by xrd | 2025-11-13 17:44:25+00:00
You make some good points, and I need to revisit Zed+AI to see where things are at. This probably proves you are a better developer than me.

But, also, after reading your comments, I'm just not sure I need an "editor" anymore. I love that I can npm install claude anywhere. Zed does not exist for ARM servers yet, but I can install claude there, and it can troubleshoot my database connections, and edit code, and grep files. Those are all the things I used an editor for, because an editor has better ergonomics than using the CLI. I'm sad to say "misspelled prompts" might have better ergonomics for me.
by giantg2 | 2025-11-13 17:44:46+00:00
"Suggesting that every US citizen ought to have an equal voice is completely different from disenfranchisement and I'm not sure why you are trying to muddy the waters here."

I'm pointing out the historical concern that is still valid today. The purpose of the Senate isn't to represent people, but to represent the states. The House represents the people and that already has the proportional representation you are seeking.
by tracker1 | 2025-11-13 17:45:09+00:00
IMO, virtual servers and dedicated server hosting is really commoditized at this point. So you have a lot of options... assuming you have appropriate orchestration and management scripted out, with good backup procedures in place, you should be able to shift to any other provider relatively easily.

The pain points are when you're also intwined with specific implementations for services from a given provider... Sure, you can shift from PostgreSQL on a hosted provider to another without much pain... but say SQS to Azure Simple Queues or Service Bus is a lot more involved. And that is just one example.

The is a large reason to keep your services to those with self-hosted options and/or self-hosting from the start... that said, I'm happy to outsource things that are easier to (re) integrate or replace.
by leetrout | 2025-11-13 17:45:14+00:00
> it feels like much of the low hanging fruit opportunities in software is disappearing faster and faster.

Yes I agree but so many things that might seem "done" (and in someways I think software/SaaS as an ecosystem is "done" compared to where we came from).

BUT - so many companies just bloat themselves and their products. I think the end of ZIRP is going to have an effect on that (more enshitification / rent seeking for sure) and I think there will be an opportunity to iterate and make copyware that doesn't take the higher development efforts.

We really need a winning electron alternative that is more resource friendly. That, IMO, will be a big game changer and I know there are lots of promising alternatives already.
by mikaylamaki | 2025-11-13 17:45:24+00:00
People have been doing collaborative text editing since the 60s actually! See, The Mother Of All Demos[0], referenced in our first blog post[1] :D

I'd say CRDTs are also a big change. CRDTs make live collaboration much more robust for all parties involved, and they only started to reach maturity in the mid-late 2010s

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos

[1] https://zed.dev/blog/crdts
by freshtake | 2025-11-13 17:45:25+00:00
This looks cool and could be a much needed step towards fixing the web.

Some questions:

[Tech]

1. How deep does the modification go? If I request a tweek to the YouTube homepage, do I need to re-specify or reload the tweek to have it persist across the entire site (deeply nested pages, iframes, etc.)

2. What is your test and eval setup? How confident are you that the model is performing the requested change without being overly aggressive and eliminating important content?

3. What is your upkeep strategy? How will you ensure that your system continues to WAI after site owners update their content in potentially adversarial ways? In my experience LLMs do a fairly poor job at website understanding when the original author is intentionally trying to mess with the model, or has overly complex CSS and JS.

4. Can I prompt changes that I want to see globally applied across all sites (or a category of sites)? For example, I may want a persistent toolbar for quick actions across all pages -- essentially becoming a generic extension builder.

[Privacy]

5. Where and how are results being cached? For example, if I apply tweeks to a banking website, what content is being scraped and sent to an LLM? When I reload a site, is content being pulled purely from a local cache on my machine?

[Business]

6. Is this (or will it be) open source? IMO a large component of empowering the user against enshittification is open source. As compute commoditizes it will likely be open source that is the best hope for protection against the overlords.

7. What is your revenue model? If your product essentially wrestles control from site owners and reduces their optionality for revenue, your arbitrage is likely to be equal or less than the sum of site owners' loss (a potentially massive amount to be sure). It's unclear to me how you'd capture this value though, if open source.

8. Interested in the cost and latency. If this essentially requires an LLM call for every website I visit, this will start to add up. Also curious if this means that my cost will scale with the efficiency of the sites I visit (i.e. do my costs scale with the size of the site's content).

Very cool.

Cheers
by franga2000 | 2025-11-13 17:45:44+00:00
If one week is slow and three months is also slow, why should a company switch from three months to one week?

To borrow from a different context, if eating meat every day is being an evil animal abuser and being vegetarian but liking cheese sauce on you pasta is being an evil animal abuser, why should anyone consider eating less meat?

Warning: not very well thought-out generalisation ahead

We need to be able to express nuance, otherwise everything turns into a shitshow like, for example, the current state of political and social discourse. Americans will vote for privatisation because public healthcare is "literally communism" and "communism is the devil". Twitter users will vote for white supremacists because they get called "literal nazis" for the big nose jokes they occasionally make.
by NorwegianDude | 2025-11-13 17:45:50+00:00
To be fair, a single server is way more reliable than cloud clusters.

Just look at the most recent many hour long Azure downtime where Microsoft could not even get microsoft.com back. With that much downtime you could physically move drives between servers multiple times each year, and still have less downtime. Servers are very reliable, cloud software is not.

I'm not saying people should use a single server if they can avoid it, but using a single cloud provider is just as bad. "We moved to the cloud, with managed services and redundancy, nothing has gone wrong...today"
by BJones12 | 2025-11-13 17:46:03+00:00
> Historically when a pendulum swings one way, eventually it swings back. But I'm having trouble how we're going to swing back, when both sides have swung to and then doubled down on polarization.

It may not have to. There are societies where men and women can vote, and there are societies where men can vote. If there is enough male anger at the left then men can disenfranchise women (heavily correlated with Democrats) and the left loses viability due to lack of votes. And that can be the new stable equilibrium.
by mattcantstop | 2025-11-13 17:46:10+00:00
One of the main things that I want changed for conversation mode is I don't want it to be so sensitive to any background noise. ChatGPT can be reciting back and answer and someone across the room turns a page in a book and it stops dictating, and then, instead of finishing the previous answer, starts to answer the same question in a different way. ChatGPT is way too deferential for any noise during the conversation.
by vinckr | 2025-11-13 17:46:13+00:00
that's fair! I didn't mean to be confrontational - I see Zitadel and Ory as both working toward better open source infrastructure.

At Ory, features like high-availability setups, zero-downtime upgrades, large scale multi-tenancy, and formal SLAs are part of the commercial offering. In most cases, if you’re not operating Ory at large enterprise scale, you won’t need those.

It’s a reasonable tradeoff: the commercial offering covers the costs of maintaining those capabilities and helps fund continued open source development. Big organizations that rely on Ory in production should ideally help sustain the ecosystem they depend on.
by jmadeano | 2025-11-13 17:46:18+00:00
Fair feedback. If you scroll down (or press "See it in action") there are some examples.

We definitely could invest more in a flashy landing page, but we're early, and we've focused more on trying to build a product that is useful than one that is well-marketed. For Silicon Valley, we have our priorities reversed, but I enjoy the product building :)