MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mickael-kerjean | 2025-12-18 06:34:16+00:00
I launched Filestash [1] as my response to the infamous “Dropbox should just be FTP” comment. Once I had a decent FTP experience, I kept going: adding support for pretty much every storage protocol, plugins to expose Dropbox (or anything else) over FTP, SFTP, MCP, or S3, and all the features I wished Dropbox had, with plugins to customize everything.

The base product is open-source and I make money from custom builds, additional plugins, paid support, and the occasional extra feature for companies with specific needs. It's a bit more than noodle profitable but quite under a normal salary.

[1] https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash
by versteegen | 2025-12-18 06:35:33+00:00
> A junior developer has no such skills. Their only approach will be to run the code, test whether it fulfills the requirements, and, if they're thorough, try to understand and test it to the best of their abilities.

This is also a supremely bad take... well, really it's mainly the way you worded it that's bad. Juniors have skills, natural aptitudes, as much intelligence on average as other programmers, and often even some experience but what they lack is work history. They sure as hell are capable of understanding code rather than just running it. Yes, of course experience is immensely useful, most especially at understanding how to achieve a maintainable and reliable codebase in the longterm, which is obviously of special importance, but long experience is not a hard requirement. You can reason about trade offs, learn from advice, learn quickly, etc.
by flaminHotSpeedo | 2025-12-18 06:36:10+00:00
Containers are never a security boundary. If you configure them correctly, avoid all the footguns, and pray that there's no container escape vulnerabilities that affect "correctly" configured containers then they can be a crude approximation of a security boundary that may be enough for your use case, but they aren't a suitable substitute for hardware backed virtualization.

The only serious company that I'm aware of which doesn't understand that is Microsoft, and the reason I know that is because they've been embarrassed again and again by vulnerabilities that only exist because they run multitenant systems with only containers for isolation
by gudzpoz | 2025-12-18 06:36:39+00:00
Your cursory search likely provided outdated info. [0] Quoting from it's maintainer: [1]

Waterfox is independent again: [0] And System1 are an “ad-tech” company but the term should be used loosely. The ownership made sense as they are a search engine aggregator and they own a bunch of old school search engines like DogPile, InfoSpace etc. Nothing to do with what people associate ad-tech with, i.e. tracking you across the web or collecting personal data.

[0] https://www.waterfox.com/blog/a-new-chapter-for-waterfox/

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37435511
by bradyriddle | 2025-12-18 06:37:10+00:00
Not quite a side project, but I launched CoPlay about 3 years ago. Slow but steady growth up to 6k MRR for 2025. I think we will just about double that in 2026.

CoPlay is a platform for managing fleets of gaming consoles, users and subscriptions for pediatric hospitals. Think of it as an mdm for Xbox devices/users that does managed subscriptions

https://coplay.io/
by D-Machine | 2025-12-18 06:39:32+00:00
Guidance needs to be more specific. Failing to use AI for search often means you are wasting a huge amount of time, ChatGPT 5.2 Extended Thinking with search enabled speeds up research obscenely, and I'd be more concerned if reviewers were NOT making use of such tools in reviews.

Seeing the high percentage of usage of AI for composing reviews is concerning, but, also, peer review is an unpaid racket which seems basically random anyway (https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/115231), and probably needs to die given alternatives like ArXiV and OpenPeerReview and etc. I'm not sure how much I care about AI slop contaminating an area that already might be mostly human slop in the first place.
by handoflixue | 2025-12-18 06:39:54+00:00
Can you point to the consumer project / open-source program I could have run 10 years ago, for free, to do any one of the tasks listed in the article, much less all of them? Remember, it also needs a UI that works without needing any programming skill, just by asking plain-English questions

I've been looking for something like this for the last 20 years, and this is the first time I've seen anything that can actually produce intelligent answers about the giant trove of personal documents I've got floating around.
by sph | 2025-12-18 06:40:21+00:00
The problem with firewalld is that it has the worst UX of any program I know. Completely unintuitive options, the program itself doesn’t provide any useful help or hint if you get anything wrong and the documentation is so awful you have to consult the Red Hat manuals that have thankfully been written for those companies that pay thousands per month in support.

It’s not like iptables was any better, but it was more intuitive as it spoke about IPs and ports, not high-level arbitrary constructs such as zones and services defined in some XML file. And since firewalld uses iptables/nftables underneath, I wonder why do I need a worse leaky abstraction on top of what I already know.

I truly hate firewalld.
by locknitpicker | 2025-12-18 06:40:39+00:00
> Yep, you're definitely not wrong. We see it all the time on GitHub. If a project hasn't gotten a new commit in 2 days then the project is claimed dead.

There is a difference between being dead and not actively maintained. If a popular FLOSS package isn't touched for many moons, do you think it just means it's done?
by Too | 2025-12-18 06:42:26+00:00
Is anyone paying for Prime just for streaming? I always saw it as a nice bonus included with free shipping and all the other discounts you get on Amazon, it breaks even very quickly. It cost half of a Netflix subscription. The content is also half the quality, so it’s not like I would like to pay anything for it anyway. I hate ads as much as anyone, after the ad introductions I just stopped slop watching.
by yes_man | 2025-12-18 06:42:30+00:00
Cancer sucks and I wish your father the best.

Also not a doctor or microbiologist, but just wanted to share my layman’s guess on why fixing enzymes will not completely solve the issue: there’s 2 strands of DNA and to fix the broken (mutated) strand you need to have one correct template strand intact so you know what it should be fixed into. It could be the nucleotides swapped places between strands or are deleted completely or otherwise both mutated, which would mean any repair will not revert the sequence to what it used to be.

The other comments so far are probably more informed.
by locknitpicker | 2025-12-18 06:43:45+00:00
> Certainly that depends on the nature of the software. For instance, I don't expect some header-only library that does what it's supposed to do to ever need updating.

If it's a headers-only library in a language such as C++, if the project is not dead then the very least anyone would expect from it is being updated to support any of the modern C++ versions.

Also, if the project is actively maintained then there is always a multitude of low-priority issues and features to address.

Being FLOSS also means anyone in the whole world is able to contribute anything. If no one bothers to do so, that is aligned with the fact the project is indeed dead.
by ozim | 2025-12-18 06:46:55+00:00
That’s riding hype machine and throwing baby with bath water.

Get an API and try to use it for classification of text or classification of images. Having an excel file with somewhat random looking 10k entries you want to classify or filter down to 10 important for you, use LLM.

Get it to make audio transcription. You can now just talk and it will make note for you on level that was not possible earlier without training on someone voice it can do anyone’s voice.

Fixing up text is of course also big.

Data classification is easy for LLM. Data transformation is a bit harder but still great. Creating new data is hard so like answering questions where it has to generate stuff from thin air it will hallucinate like a mad man.

The ones that LLMs are good in are used in background by people creating actual useful software on top of LLMs but those problems are not seen by general public who sees chat box.
by vander_elst | 2025-12-18 06:47:37+00:00
IANAL, but it seems it's a technicality on how the conditions of the contract changed? IIUC they forcibly changed the contract without notice. If they would have sent a notice first and then let the consumers decide whether to get out or move on with the new contact and new conditions, it would have been fine to serve ads. The title seems like a clickbait.
by uecker | 2025-12-18 06:48:33+00:00
Yes, but the arguments why we need to replace C code with Rust was not that it is better by "helping the programmer check themselves" but that we need to switch to memory-safe languages because it "removes a whole class of error". (of course, nobody has ever said this, this must be my imagination)

Finally, there are also a lot of ways to improve memory safety in C which are not nowhere exhausted even in the kernel. As long as this is not even the case, I find the argument that there is "too little support for the programmer" quite hollow.
by NicoJuicy | 2025-12-18 06:48:52+00:00
The algorithm was shared in the past. The scoring is pretty simple tbh

- the older it is, the less score

- the more votes and comments it has, the higher the score

- penalties reduce the score ( eg. By moderator)

How it works for the end-user:

- People browsing in newest, make it visible in the main page.

- Most people see the main page

Result: interesting topics go to the main page
by flowerthoughts | 2025-12-18 06:48:58+00:00
Readonly and rootless are my two requirements for Docker containers. Most images can't run readonly because they try to create a user in some startup script. Since I want my UIDs unique to isolate mounted directories, this is meaningless. I end up having to wrap or copy Dockerfiles to make them behave reasonably.

Having such a nice layered buildsystem with mountpoints, I'm amazed Docker made readonly an afterthought.
by locknitpicker | 2025-12-18 06:51:20+00:00
> Does it though? I mean I'm still teaching thread-safety and recursion to my interns... a solid foundation is a solid foundation.

I think you are confusing interiorizing some fundamentals with things moving fast. There are languages and frameworks rolling out higher level support for features covering concurrency and parallelism. While you focus on thread-safety, a framework you already use can and often does roll out features that outright eliminate those concerns with idiomatic approaches that are far easier to maintain. Wouldn't you classify that as moving fast?
by renewiltord | 2025-12-18 06:51:35+00:00
Yeah bro. If you go to YC and do well enough they'll tell you. They'll put you in the second chance pool. They'll tell you not to upvote from the profile page, or from a direct link to the YC story page.

But the reason they won't tell you is that the entire reason it works is because you don't know.
by nirui | 2025-12-18 06:51:43+00:00
Ideally, you don't need a "turn off" button. If you find the need to add a Disable button, the feature you're adding maybe already too on-the-nose.

How about if I need an AI to read the page, I could just right-click and select? It's the same way how the screenshot feature currently works.

(Wait, I just right-clicked and discovered there's a AI item on the menu. Maybe it's already how it works? If so, then it's not very on-the-nose and I can accept it existing)

> The bulk of Mozilla’s revenue coming from its Google search deal.

Just show a donation message already. If Wikipedia can collect that much donations just for hosting a set of websites, Mozilla, who's doing some really important work for the Internet and maybe humanity at this point, can only collect more.
by kqr | 2025-12-18 06:53:21+00:00
> If you post something interesting or meaningful, then people will respond.

That's an oversimplification. There are things that get responses because they're flamebait rather than interesting, and then even more interesting things that never get any discussion going.

I don't know if the residual factor is just "chance" or if there are controllable inputs involved.

(One thing I do suspect but cannot confirm is that article title has a large effect. Interesting stuff with bad title gets overlooked, and vice versa.)
by antognini | 2025-12-18 06:54:49+00:00
I've found that there can be a lot of randomness for what makes the front page. Not too many people read the "New" page and articles drop off it pretty quickly, so it can be hard for a niche article to attract the handful of votes it needs to appear on the front page. (Though there is a "second chance" feature which helps to ameliorate this issue.) So there's a lot of randomness to what makes it onto the front page.

For instance I submitted an article three times (spaced a year apart). The first two times the article got no upvotes. The third time it got 600+ and hit the top of the front page. It's just a matter of who happens to be looking at the New page at the time.
by wonderfuly | 2025-12-18 06:54:57+00:00
Last year, I came across NotebookLM and immediately noticed a pain point: importing the web pages I was browsing into NotebookLM required several steps. So in less than a day, I developed this Chrome extension: NotebookLM Web Importer[1], which allows for one-click importing. As NotebookLM has gained popularity this year, my extension has also seen great growth. So, in July, I added paid premium features to unlock additional features. It exceeded my expectations and quickly went over $500 a month. It now has over 100,000 users and is still growing.

[1] https://notebooklm-web-importer.com
by brohee | 2025-12-18 06:55:20+00:00
This is not a position based on anything factual. If you have evidence of a setting not being honoured it will be treated as a bug and fixed, there is no evidence of bad faith about that that I can recall.

As for about:config, if you submit working patches to better expose options you care about I'm pretty sure they'll be considered, but every complex software has obscure options not exposed through a polished UI and frankly it's OK...
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-12-18 06:56:09+00:00
Yeah, this is what I was trying to say in my original comment too.

Also I do not really use agentic tasks but I am not sure that gemini 3/3 flash have mcp support/skills support for agentic tasks

if not, I feel like they are very low hanging fruits and something that google can try to do too to win the market of agentic tasks over claude too perhaps.
by mechsy | 2025-12-18 06:56:30+00:00
Cancer sucks, I wish all the best towards a recovery.

You’d also have to ‘fix’ DNA: unless we can re-engineer a bunch of key enzymes and then re-encode the entire genome (or maybe key parts) with forward error correction without breaking everything else, it might work. You might also break evolution to some degree by making random point mutations less likely.

But what I learned so far is that as soon as you’d attempt something like this in bacteria, the fitness advantage from an evolutionary standpoint is negligible compared to the efficiency loss introduced by FEC, so your colony would get outcompeted by other bacteria unless there is a niche your resistant bacteria survive in (high radiation environments?). The efficiency loss induced ‘disadvantages’ would probably be less pronounced in mammals though - If (big if) you manage to not also break anything essential in the wonderful yet surprisingly efficient Rube Goldberg machine that is life.
by bryanrasmussen | 2025-12-18 06:56:31+00:00
>it’s to raise stock value by fake growth indicators

how does that work as a growth indicator, are there any known organizations that track your growth based on how many job postings you do, and then use that data to indicate your growth?

I don't doubt that it could happen, but if it did we would have to know about it, I also don't doubt that I don't know about it, but I would like to know.
by teekert | 2025-12-18 06:56:34+00:00
It starts with mutations (sometimes accelerated by mutagens (smoke, alcohol, etc) or inflammation (viruses, infections, etc) or just chance (things like asbestos up the division rate by constant physical damage and thus up the probability or an error in copying).

But there is much more to it. This is a nice paper for an overview: Hallmarks of Cancer (tng) [0]. It (among others) adds the very important and for years underestimated role of the immune system to the original 2000 paper.

[0] https://www.cell.com/fulltext/S0092-8674(11)00127-9
by kyralis | 2025-12-18 06:56:34+00:00
As a staff engineer at FAANG... tell me you've never worked at FAANG without telling me you've never worked at FAANG.

I've given talks on work/life balance -- and I stand by those talks enough to argue with directors and above when needed, though it rarely is -- and an important part of that talk is about how much better it can look when you can intelligently describe the limits of your knowledge, skills, and estimation.

If you get penalized for that, you're just in a shit role with a shit manager. Don't project that on the rest of us.
by bruce511 | 2025-12-18 06:56:50+00:00
>> I’m not sure he knows the type of person that actually uses Firefox

I'm sure he does, but he is trying to get different users.

The problem Firefox has is that it has accumulated "problem" users who are only there because they've left everywhere else.

In other words, people didn't choose Firefox cause its better, they chose it because it "wasn't x". They were offended by some action of their last browser, and left.

This is the worst user demographic to have. They'll only hang around till you do something that offends them. Which will inevitably happen.

With 2% market share the goal of the new CEO is not to pander to existing users. It's to convince new users to switch because Firefox is better.
by anovikov | 2025-12-18 06:56:55+00:00
TL;DR: success does not come from some particular trick let alone not from Chinese racial superiority, but simply from having no checks against competition and forcing a billion people and millions of businesses ruthlessly compete against one another, all stops be damned. Some of them eventually win but it's a fool's errand trying to find out why or how to replicate it - they simply won by merciless natural selection.

In order to have successes like that, you need to be OK with people working 996, live in rabbit cages, or having suicide nets under every window. You need to be OK with not having any social safety net in a country where people no longer have chindren so no hope for their help in old age, and have a socially pressed obligation to support - alone - penniless old relatives. You just need to press everyone through insane amount of competition and never ending stress.
by simonw | 2025-12-18 06:56:58+00:00
If your technology has competition that's already in the training data, the only way to make it equally accessible to LLM users is to ensure there is concise, available documentation that can be fed directly into those LLMs.

That's why "copy page" buttons are increasingly showing on manual pages eg. https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/get-started
by ChrisArchitect | 2025-12-18 06:57:30+00:00
[dupe]

Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46288491

Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46299934

No AI* Here – A Response to Mozilla's Next Chapter

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46295268

Make Me CEO of Mozilla

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46303809
by superdisk | 2025-12-18 06:57:40+00:00
This is true. There are a few stock topics that will consistently get the fanboys out (Postgres, Ruby, Rust, SQLite) which is, IMO, usually just uninteresting fodder. And then interesting stuff which requires some intellectual engagement very often rots.

HN does have a much higher ratio of gems to dirt than any other place though, so I'm still here for the forseeable future :)
by elric | 2025-12-18 06:58:22+00:00
As always: never run containers as root. Never expose ports to the internet unless needed. Never give containers outbound internet access. Run containers that you trust and understand, and not random garbage you find on the internet that ships with ancient vulnerabilities and a full suite of tools. Audit your containers, scan them for vulnerabilities, and nuke them from orbit on the regular.

Easier said than done, I know.

Podman makes it easier to be more secure by default than Docker. OpenShift does too, but that's probably taking things too far for a simple self hosted app.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-12-18 06:58:37+00:00
Yeah I have a similar opinion and you can go back almost a year when claude 3.5 launched and I said on hackernews, that its good enough

And now I am saying the same for gemini 3 flash.

I still feel the same way tho, sure there is an increase but I somewhat believe that gemini 3 is good enough and the returns on training from now on might not be worth thaat much imo but I am not sure too and i can be wrong, I usually am.
by hemmert | 2025-12-18 06:58:46+00:00
About 8 years in, Escape Team steadily keeps growing, which surprises me (I didn’t add any new missions for about 5 years):

https://www.escape-team.com

It‘s making about $700 on iOS and $300 on Android, solely from $2.99 IAPs for the later missions in the game (the first 2 missions are free).

I think a main reason for this is that escape rooms (and games) don’t „saturate“: you play them only once, because then you know the solutions. So another escape room (place, game, app) doesn’t cannibalize the market - it may rather strengthen the others by fostering it as a group activity.

I also put 0$ into ads- it solely spreads itself by being a group activity (3-5 people are best) and through its mission editor (people can make their own missions, used in school and for birthdays etc).

Curious to see where it goes next!
by kyralis | 2025-12-18 06:59:00+00:00
My advice to engineer is always:

Your job is to make sure that the decision makers, when they're not you, have the information needed to make competent decisions. You should keep arguing when (a) there is credible reason to believe that important information has not been heard or understood or (b) when new information has come to light that you credibly believe might change the decision. In the absence of those two, your should accept that you have done your job and should let your managers to theirs, even if you disagree with them. Bring it back up when (a) or (b) changes, and not until.
by lelanthran | 2025-12-18 06:59:28+00:00
Maybe instead of a title that says

Nano Banana is so good that you can use it to play a RPG at 1 frame a minute

Say instead

Nano Banana is so good that you can use it to "play" a RPG at 1 frame a minute

Because, you see, GP is not the only one who clicked the link with the expectation that the LLM was actually giving you an RPG game to play @ 1 frame/minute.
by rdtsc | 2025-12-18 07:00:32+00:00
> Dr Escalera adds that she has also heard examples of companies posting jobs to obtain and sell data.

How is that not illegal? Pretending to offer jobs just to suck in resumes to some database just seems like it should be illegal. Or just like running scams is illegal but they are in another country "so tough luck, you'll never get us"?
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-12-18 07:00:35+00:00
I was an employment counselor in the late 1990s. Even then, ½ to ¾ of realistic, worthwhile jobs were phantoms.

FF to now and hiring portals silently drop viable applicants for a long list of never disclosed reasons. I know temp agencies that hire, send the employee out on 1 job then never again.

I've never know a time when hiring wasn't crap for entire classes of viable applicants.