MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mananaysiempre | 2025-12-17 00:06:26+00:00
> especially when talking about code or other stuff that benefits from more richer formatting

Telegram has GFM-style fenced code blocks including language indication for syntax highlighting (e.g. ```python), what else could one want for code? (I guess syntax-highlighted inline monospaced blocks, it does indeed not have them.)

I wouldn’t say Telegram is perfect. The polish and the actual experience of using it are great. Yet when you look closely, it’s as rickety as you’d expect given the insane rate of shipping features that they’ve sustained until quite recently. (For instance, there were a few weeks where porn spambots in public chats would post single—thus animated—emoji, seemingly because the UI didn’t allow you to open the context menu on those in order to report spam, because the usual single-tap handler for that was overriden by the handler that would play the emoji animation.)

And the discoverability is in the toilet. Did you know that you can preview a chat without marking its messages read by long-pressing on the image? That works on Android—except on a tablet where your screen is large enough that you get the two-pane view; I thought for weeks they had removed that feature until I realized the tablet was the problem. And the only thing that mentions its existence is AFAIK an item in release notes from 2018[1,2]. Did you know that you could pop out individual chats into their own AIM/ICQ-style windows on desktop? I don’t think it’s documented anywhere, but it’s in the context menu.

If it were the 2000s I wouldn’t have given Telegram any HCI design awards. But everything else is considerably worse, with the possible exception of (indeed) Discord. (I prefer Telegram’s abundant tools for scrubbing through history though, it’s one of the few things in that category that’s actually better a calendar of posts like blogs used to have.)

[1] https://telegram.org/blog/unread-replace-2x#and-three-more-o... (it didn’t even make the headline!)

[2] Just found out (via the comments in https://bugs.telegram.org/c/52) that this actually exists on desktop too: Alt-click the chat. Argh.
by xyzzyz | 2025-12-17 00:06:47+00:00
You can progressively tax consumption by combining high, non-progressive consumption tax with negative income tax rates. Something like, everyone gets some small UBI, and also extra income for every dollar made.

For example, let's introduce 35% consumption tax, but introduce $1k/year UBI and extra 30% on income between $0 and $30k, then additional 20% on income between $30k and $60k, and then 10% on income between $60k to $100k, and 0% on any income above that.

Then, if you make $30k, your gross take home pay is actually $30k + $1k + 30% * $30k = $40k, and if you make $200k, your gross take home pay is $200k + $1k + 30% * $30k + 20% * ($60k-$30k) + 10% * ($100k-$60k) = $220k.

At the same time, if you make $30k, if you spend all of it on consumption, you pay 35% * $40k = $14k in taxes, so your net take home pay after taxes is $40k-$14k = $27k. On the other hand, if you make $200k and consume all of it, you pay $77k in consumption tax, and your net take home pay is $220k - $77k = $143k. All very progressive.

Now, the person making $200k is highly incentivised to avoid some of this tax, and instead of consuming all of it, he might only want to consume half of it, and invest the other half. This is great, because then the other half will (hopefully) get invested in a productive activity, so that in future there's even more production.
by sfn42 | 2025-12-17 00:06:50+00:00
Obviously I'm not talking about the cases where it doesn't matter. I'm talking about the cases where it does.

I fixed one where a report took 25 minutes to generate and after switching out an O(n^2) list lookup with a dict it too less than 5. Still embarrassingly slow but a lot better.

There's also a lot of cases where it didn't matter when the dev wrote it and they had 400 rows in the db but 5 years later theres a lot more rows so now it matters.

Doesn't cost anything to just use a better algorithm. Usually takes exactly the same amount of time, and even if it is marginally slower at small n values who cares? I don't give a shit about saving nanoseconds. I care about the exponential timewaste that happens when you don't consider what happens when the input grows.

For small inputs it doesn't matter what you do. Everything is fast when the input is small. That's why it makes sense to prefer low complexity by default.
by kevmo314 | 2025-12-17 00:07:46+00:00
> Machine learning technologies like the Bergamot translation project offer real, tangible utility. Bergamot is transparent in what it does (translate text locally, period), auditable (you can inspect the model and its behavior), and has clear, limited scope, even if the internal neural network logic isn’t strictly deterministic.

This really weakens the point of the post. It strikes me as a: we just don't like those AIs. Bergamot's model's behavior is no more or less auditable or a black box than an LLM's behavior. If you really want to go dig into a Llama 7B model, you definitely can. Even Bergamot's underlying model has an option to be transformer-based: https://marian-nmt.github.io/docs/

The premise of non-corporate AI is respectable but I don't understand the hate for LLMs. Local inference is laudable, but being close-minded about solutions is not interesting.
by 1718627440 | 2025-12-17 00:08:44+00:00
And in the code in C it looks like this, which is also a proper solution, I did not measure the time, it took me to write that.

name = cgiGetValue (cgi, "name"); if (!name) name = SOME_DEFAULT;

If you allow for GCC extensions, it looks like this:

name = cgiGetValue (cgi, "name") ?: SOME_DEFAULT;
by scrollaway | 2025-12-17 00:08:45+00:00
It’s a classic issue that you give access to superpowers to the general population and most will use them in the most boring ways.

The internet is an amazing technology, yet its biggest consumption is a mix of ads, porn and brain rot.

We all have cameras in our pockets yet most people use them for selfies.

But if you look closely enough, the incredible value that comes from these examples more than makes up for all the people using them in a “boring” way.

And anyway who’s the arbiter of boring?
by quink | 2025-12-17 00:08:54+00:00
How? Near enough no one was using the Kunrei system for any of that. If anything this will make it more consistent or at least no worse. Macrons are the biggest inconsistency but that’s always been the case.

It was either Hepburn, the English title (i.e. rock instead of rokku), or just most sensibly kana/kanji that would have been used for this everywhere, never other romanisation systems, to within a rounding error.
by ghaff | 2025-12-17 00:09:16+00:00
I don't live in Boston--about 60 to 90 minutes outside.

So, sure, I could pay for a delivery or rent something from Lowe's if I needed to for a specific purpose but I routinely use my mid-size SUV for weekend trips, transporting a canoe, picking up construction supplies, and the like. I need a vehicle in any case and it makes sense to own a somewhat larger one than I really need day to day to run to the grocery store, especially given that parking isn't an issue and my gas mileage really isn't bad.

If one actually lives in a city (which I don't), renting a vehicle can actually be something of a hassle on a weekend based on what I saw people go through when I was in a ski house after school.
by bdangubic | 2025-12-17 00:09:21+00:00
> Baseline is in the end anti-democracy and anti-truth. And Google is heavily pushing for that.

Google et al do not give a hoot about being “left” or “right” - they only care about profit. Zuck tattooed rainbow flag while Biden was President and is currently macho-man crusader. If Youtube can make money from videos about peace and prosperity that’s what you’d see behind the VPN. since no one watches that shit you get Tucker
by ggm | 2025-12-17 00:09:48+00:00
If more people were obligated to undergo KYC to get posting rights, Less people would be able to objectively claim to be other than they are.

If more channels were subject to moderation, and moderators incurred penalty for their failure, channels would be significantly more circumspect in what they permitted to be said.

Free speech reductionists: Not interested.
by Kiboneu | 2025-12-17 00:10:03+00:00
This conviction doesn't seem to acknowledge the problem at scale. Decades of great UI development will still leave out edge cases that users will need to use the tool for. This happens fundamentally because the people who need to use the tools are not the people who make them, they rarely even talk to each other (instead they are "studied" via analytics).

When /humans/ bring up the idea of integrating LLMs into UIs, I think most of the time the sentiment comes from legitimate frustration about how the UI is currently designed. To be clear, this is a very different thing than a company shimming copilot into the UI, because the way these companies use LLMs is by delegating tasks away from users rather than improving their existing interfaces to complete these tasks themselves. There are /decades/ of HCI research on adaptive interfaces that address this, in the advent of expert systems and long before LLMs -- it's more relevant than ever, yet in most implemenations it's all going out the window!

My experience with accounting ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H bookkeeping / LLMs in general resonates with this. In gnu cash I wanted to bulk re-organize some transactions, but I couldn't find a way to do it quickly through the UI. All the books are kept in a SQL db, I didn't want to study the schema. I decided to experiment by getting the LLM to emit a python script that would make the appropriate manipulations to the DB. This seemed to take the best from all worlds -- the script was relatively straightforward to verify, and even though I used a closed source model, it had no access to the DB that contained the transactions.

Sure, other tools may have solved this problem directly. But again, the point isn't to expect someone to make a great tool for you, but to have a tool help you make it better for you. Given the verifiability, maybe this /is/ in fact one of the best places for this.
by aidenn0 | 2025-12-17 00:10:28+00:00
Even with official names of media you can get stuck.

Consider 彼氏彼女の事情[1]. The Japanese name is the same for the Manga and Anime, but the official names for the US localization of each are different (the manga went with a romanization of an abbreviation of the Japanese name Kare Kano while the Anime went with a translation of the full name His and Her Circumstances.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kare_Kano
by jaggederest | 2025-12-17 00:10:29+00:00
Even going beyond Ada into dependently typed languages like (quoth wiki) "Agda, ATS, Rocq (previously known as Coq), F*, Epigram, Idris, and Lean"

I think there are some interesting things going on if you can really tightly lock down the syntax to some simple subset with extremely straightforward, powerful, and expressive typing mechanisms.
by Wowfunhappy | 2025-12-17 00:11:26+00:00
> [Update]: as I posted below, sample use cases would include translation, article summarization, asking questions from a long wiki page... and maybe with some agents built-in as well: parallelizing a form filling/ecom task, having the agent transcribe/translate an audio/video in real time, etc

I don't want any of this built into my web browser. Period.

This is coming from someone who pays for a Claude Max subscription! I use AI all the time, but I don't want it unless I ask for it!!!
by Telaneo | 2025-12-17 00:11:39+00:00
I'd imagine the same; skipping evolution entirely is hard. Dismissing it however, is not that uncommon.

> Between 2007 and 2019, there definitely was progress: from 51 percent of high school biology teachers reporting emphasizing evolution and not creationism in 2007 to 67 percent in 2019. It was matched by a drop from 23 to 12 percent of teachers who offer mixed messages by endorsing both evolution and creationism as a valid scientific alternative to evolution, from 18 to 15 percent of teachers who endorse neither evolution nor creationism, and from 8.6 to 5.6 percent of teachers who endorse creationism while not endorsing evolution.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/evolution-educati...
by Xelbair | 2025-12-17 00:11:58+00:00
>This whole backlash to firefox wanting to introduce AI feels a little knee-jerky. We don't know if firefox might want to roll out their own locally hosted LLM model that then they plug into.. and if so, if would cut down on the majority of the knee jerk complaints. I think people want AI in the browser, they just don't want it to be the big-corp hosted AI...

Because the phrase "AI first browser" is meaningless corpospeak - it can be anything or nothing and feels hollow. Reminiscent of all past failures of firefox.

I just want a good browser that respects my privacy and lets me run extensions that can hook at any point of handling page, not random experiments and random features that usually go against privacy or basically die within short time-frame.
by bugarela | 2025-12-17 00:12:25+00:00
Me and my team have recently done an experiment [1] that is pretty aligned with this idea. We took a complex change our colleagues wanted to make to a consensus engine and tried a workflow where Quint formal specifications would be in the middle of prompts and code, and it worked out much better than we imagined. I'm personally very excited about the opportunities for formal methods in this new era.

[1]: https://quint-lang.org/posts/llm_era
by dabockster | 2025-12-17 00:13:10+00:00
Your points are valid. But what made me finally switch was that it is open source, that it has been out for roughly a decade now, and that Brendan Eich's opinions from 2014 are mostly based on his Catholic faith at the time (which obviously is likely to have changed/evolved now that we're a decade later).

> Moreover, I don't really understand how Brave expects to be a viable business without deeply betraying their userbase at some point.

They have a way better merch store than Mozilla. They should expand that.

"MERCHANDISING! Where the real money from the movie is made!"
by inkysigma | 2025-12-17 00:13:27+00:00
> Large language models are something else entirely*. They are black boxes. You cannot audit them. You cannot truly understand what they do with your data. You cannot verify their behaviour. And Mozilla wants to put them at the heart of the browser and that doesn't sit well.

Am I being overly critical here or is this kind of a silly position to have right after talking about how neural machine translation is okay? Many of Firefox's LLM features like summarization afaik are powered by local models (hell even Chrome has local model options). It's weird to say neural translation is not a black box but LLMs are somehow black boxes that we cannot hope to understand what they do with the data, especially when viewed a bit fuzzily LLMs are scaled up versions of an architecture that was originally used for neural translation. Neural translation also has unverifiable behavior in the same sense.

I could interpret some of the data talk as talking about non local models but this very much seems like a more general criticism of LLMs as a whole when talking about Firefox features. Moreover, some of the critiques like verifiability of outputs and unlimited scope still don't make sense in this context. Browser LLM features except for explicitly AI browsers like Comet have so far had some scoping to their behavior, either in very narrow scopes like translation or summarization. The broadest scope I can think of is the side panels that show up which allow you to ask about a web page with context. Even then, I do not see what is inherently problematic about such scoping since the output behavior is confined to the side panel.
by ok123456 | 2025-12-17 00:13:30+00:00
It's not baffling if you read his Enshitification book. This is phase 2.

In 2010, people were saying it was very reasonable to start prioritizing publishers' ability to reach you over your organic contacts. After all, Facebook is providing this utility for free; shouldn't they be able to extract some additional revenue from their platform? And here we are in 2025...
by flavio81 | 2025-12-17 00:13:47+00:00
>Coalton strives to implement Haskell or ML-adjacent semantics (in the type system, for example) with Lisp syntax. "With" here meaning that it is both implemented in and written with Lisp syntax.

Not exactly. Coalton brings ML-style strong typing to Common Lisp. But Coalton code is also Lisp code.

The backend, thus, is Common Lisp, and it is available at all times, thus leveraging all its power.
by jazzyjackson | 2025-12-17 00:15:01+00:00
It's not necessarily close minded to choose to abstain from interacting with generative text, and choose not to use software that integrates it.

I could say it's equally close minded not to sympathize with this position, or various reasoning behind it. For me, I feel that my spoken language is effected by those I interact with, and the more exposed someone is to a bot, the more they will speak like that bot, and I don't want my language to be pulled towards the average redditor, so I choose not to interact with LLMs (I still use them for code generation, but I wouldn't if I used code for self expression. I just refuse to have a back and forth conversation on any topic. It's like that family that tried raising a chimp alongside a baby. The chimp did pick up some human like behavior, but the baby human adapted to chimp like behavior much faster, so they abandoned the experiment.)
by JuniperMesos | 2025-12-17 00:15:23+00:00
My prediction is that it was a random home invasion robbery committed by someone with multiple previous felonies who had no idea that the person living in the house they were trying to rob was a MIT professor.

But I have no more information than anyone else does, I'm making a low-confidence educated guess, and at some point in the near future it's very likely that the professionals whose job it is to investigate serious crimes will have a better idea of what actually happened than anyone posting in this thread.
by shagie | 2025-12-17 00:15:36+00:00
The chart with that data is https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/6516123533d9510e36f3259c/...

Starting at 2019 and saying "pre-pandemic levels" might be a bit disingenuous since that was a leap to a boom... and the bust we're seeing now.

https://www.cbre.com/insights/articles/tech-boom-interrupted

At $113B, 2019 was the third-highest year on record for VC deal volume. 2019 had the second-highest volume of “mega rounds” ($100M deals or greater)–mega rounds represented 44% of total annual deal volume. Revenue grew by an average of 12.2% in 2019 and the total revenues of the tech giants was greater than the GDP of four of the G20 nations.

Yes, tech hiring in 2025 is down from 2019. That's a lot like saying "tech hiring is down from 2000" in 2003.
by dabockster | 2025-12-17 00:16:36+00:00
> Firefox's only unique selling point is "We aren't a massive data vampire."

The fact that they haven't moved away from apparently needing 90%+ of their money to come from Google, after more than a decade of that being an issue, means that claim is a moot point. This "AI first" move was probably heavily influenced by Google behind the scenes too.
by mindcrash | 2025-12-17 00:16:43+00:00
They are not "wanting" to introduce AI, they already did.

And now we have:

- A extra toolbar nobody asked for at the side. And while it contains some extra features now, I'm pretty much sure they added it just to have some prominent space to add a "Open AI Chatbot" button to the UI. And it is irritating as fuck because it remembers its state per window. So if you have one window open with the sidebar open, and you close it on another, then move to the other again and open a new window it thinks "hey, I need to show a sidebar which my user never asked for!". Also I believe it is also opening itselves sometimes when previously closed. I don't like it at all.

- A "Ask an AI Chatbot" option which used to be dynamically added and caused hundreds of clicks on wrong items on the context menu (due to muscle memory), because when it got added the context menu resizes. Which was also a source of a lot of irritation. Luckily it seems they finally managed to fix this after 5 releases or so.

Oh, and at the start of this year they experimented with their own LLM a bit in the form of Orbit, but apparently that project has been shitcanned and memoryholed, and all current efforts seem to be based on interfacing with popular cloud based AIs like ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Gemini and Mistral. (likely for some $$$ in return, like the search engine deal with Google)
by throw234234234 | 2025-12-17 00:17:27+00:00
I wouldn't be surprised if it is only software and creative jobs that die. Whilst I still find it expensive to buy a house, get food, and the grunt work will still need labor.

What that means for society where there are extremely rich people who owns resources and capital, and everyone else is only valued for their dexterity and physical labor (vs skills) I can only guess.

I do think the AI labs have potentially unleashed a society changing technology that ironically penalizes meritocracy and/or intelligence by making it less scarce. The jobs left will be the ones people avoided for a reason (health, risk, etc)
by NemoNobody | 2025-12-17 00:17:51+00:00
This is exactly what will happen and is well deserved/can only be expected.

The biggest problem with this, is the real reason we are sinking "drug boats" - "Pirate America" as I like to think of it.

You reverse engineer our tech giants - you don't get to participate in global trade.

Outside of an invasion of the US - something I don't know would even work (Canada full compliance would be required to have any chance at all) - I don't think there is a course of action to prevent/sidestep that course of action.

I assure you, the powers that be, already know this.
by willis936 | 2025-12-17 00:17:58+00:00
You are demonstrating a fundamental misunderstanding of trust. Aaron Katersky and Josh Margolin put their name on the line because without that you wouldn't know the provenance of the information and wouldn't know if you should trust it. Citing an unnamed officer making claims that they have insufficient evidence for is not good journalism, so their reputation takes a hit. The officer also deserves this reputational hit since they are making the unsubstantiated claim.

To be very clear here, the claim is that "there is nothing to suggest the two sets of predmeditated murders within a week within an hour are related". The fact that they're the same demographic, high profile, using the same weapon, close in proximity, and close in time are all concrete things that relate them. It is embarrassing to state otherwise, so the officer was not named. However the reporters are not immune to this, so they take the hit.

I am not stating the positive "they are related", I am refuting the negative "they are unrelated".

And as for my identity: I am not a reporter or public official. You don't need to and shouldn't use me as a source of truth. I am a member of the public applying logic to facts. I am closer to this event than you but I won't say more. As a member of HN who respects privacy I'm sure that should be enough for you.