MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mh- | 2025-12-17 02:46:13+00:00
I think a tangential interesting question is: how many monthly active users does Firefox have, that choose to use Firefox? Not people who "click the internet icon", etc.

Like you, I suspect the brand recognition and loyalty is much, much lower than many people in this thread believe it to be. Not talking about among the highly-technical HN audience; just at large.
by this_user | 2025-12-17 02:46:58+00:00
Imagine an actor who is playing a character speaking a language that they actor does not speak. Due to a lack of time, the actor decides against actually learning the language and instead opts to just memorise and train how to speak their lines without actually understanding the content. Let's assume they are doing a pretty convincing job too. Now, the audience watching these scenes may think that the actor is actually speaking the language, but in reality they are just mimicking.

This is what an LLM essentially is. It is good at mimicking, reproducing and recombining the things it was trained on. But it has no creativity to go beyond this, and it doesn't even possess true reasoning, which is how it will end up making mistakes that are just immediately obvious to a human observer, yet the LLM is unable to see them, because it just mimicking.
by colechristensen | 2025-12-17 02:47:50+00:00
It seems like you may not have much experience working in groups of people.

>... Is nobody in charge on the team?

This isn't how things work. You save your "you MUST do these things" for special rare instructions. A complex series of checks for code format/lint/various tests... well that can all be automated away.

And you just don't get large groups of people all following the same series of steps several times a day, particularly when the steps change over time. It doesn't matter how "in charge" anybody is, neither the workplace nor an open source project are army boot camp. You won't get compliance and trying to enforce it will make everybody hate you and turn you into an asshole.

Automation makes our lives simpler and higher quality, particularly CI checks. They're such an easy win.
by Adityakammati | 2025-12-17 02:47:56+00:00
Hey HN,

I got tired of "works on my machine". We all know the feeling: you pull the latest code, run \`npm start\`, and it crashes. You check \`git diff\`, and it's empty. You haven't touched a thing.

So why is it broken?

Usually, it's "environmental drift" — stuff Git doesn't track. • A dependency released a patch version that broke you (lockfile drift) • You switched to Node 20 but the project needs 18 • You missed a new \`.env\` key a teammate added

I built *why-broke* to catch exactly this. It takes a "good state" snapshot of your environment (node version, lockfile hash, env keys). When a build fails later, it diffs the current state against the last known good state.

It’s open source: [Link to GitHub] Install: \`npm i -g why-broke\`

Would love to hear what other "invisible" things break your builds.
by pizlonator | 2025-12-17 02:48:10+00:00
> Does fil-c have a way of disabling the capability model for regions of code? (Rust's `unsafe` blocks come to mind).

Nope

> Maybe if I ask enough stupid questions, you'll get pissed and get the kernel to build/work with fil-c just to prove a stranger on the internet wrong. :P

I love this attitude! :-)
by justatdotin | 2025-12-17 02:48:45+00:00
I love ML types, but I've concluded they serve humans more than they do agents. I'm sure it affects the agent, maybe just not as much as other choices.

I've noticed real advantages of functional languages to agents, for disposable code. Which is great, cos we can leverage those without dictating the human's experience.

I think the correct way forward is to choose whatever language the humans on your team agree is most useful. For my personal projects, that means a beautiful language for the bits I'll be touching, and whatever gets the job done elsewhere.
by chironjit | 2025-12-17 02:49:29+00:00
Adding my 2 cents worth to this: why is there not a Mozilla family internet suite of privacy browser, VPN, relay, tracker blocker, etc for one price? I already pay for family plans for other services, so this is a no brainer if it exists.

Right now, all of Mozilla's products are not even available in a standardised form in key countries. For example, I pay for Mozilla relay and VPN, and these are not available in the same countries!

Mind you, I'm lucky to have actual access to several countries, and so I can work around this. But really, why can't this team just put everything in one place for me?

Besides relay and Mozilla VPN, I am also paying for Bit warden password manager.

I'm also willing to pay for a privacy-first email(though I haven't done so yet), and please have a family plan that bundles all of this together!

If Norton can have an Internet Suite, why can't Mozilla?
by trimethylpurine | 2025-12-17 02:49:47+00:00
So if we're comparing, I personally know only two people here without healthcare. They don't have jobs, and won't get them because they just don't want them. They live by buying and selling trash on eBay or similar. They could get free healthcare, but they don't want to file their taxes or fill out forms. I've offered to help them.

And I've known at least as many living the same way in Europe.

You can lead the horse to water, but you can't stop bureaucrats from discouraging it with paperwork.

Same, same.

To be fair, the paperwork is annoying enough that I'm actually paying a dentist $5k for one of them to get work done, just because I'd rather do that than fight this person to file their taxes and fill out the healthcare forms before their teeth rot out of their head. And it would cost at least as much to get an attorney do it for them.

It's just not worth it to fight with them, and the reality is that if it was easy to fill out the forms, then my healthcare costs would just go up anyway to cover all those additional people.

Either way, someone has to pay. There is no free lunch.
by randycupertino | 2025-12-17 02:50:03+00:00
When BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) came to Pleasanton CA my fox-news brainwashed racist aunt and uncle and their neighbors where legitimately convinced black people from Oakland were going to come take BART out from Oakland and steal their TVs. And this was back in the day of the giant bulky heavy-backed rear-projection TVs. I was like... first of all they drive cars now and second of all who is going to take BART to come rob you and third of all who would want to carry this stupid heavy thing!! And if they were going to take your 150lb TV they would need a truck and a dolly, not take public transit to do so.

Pleasanton remained safe and bland despite allowing evil public transit.
by stevenwoo | 2025-12-17 02:50:11+00:00
The little but wealthy town of Los Altos Hills next to Palo Alto had Flock come in and install their camera surveillance after a string of burglaries and one or two home invasion style robberies, it's a mostly rural/suburban area. Believe it or not there are also still folks who come from cultures where they do not believe in banks in the USA, so there is a lot of cash and gold in those people's homes.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-12-17 02:50:43+00:00
Get there by what mechanism? In the near term a good model pretty much requires a GPU, and it needs a lot of VRAM on that GPU. And the current state of the art of quantization has already gotten us most of the RAM-savings it possibly could.

And it doesn't look like the average computer with steam installed is going to get above 8GB VRAM for a long time, let alone the average computer in general. Even focusing on new computers it doesn't look that promising.
by _heimdall | 2025-12-17 02:50:44+00:00
Local models are nice for keeping the initial prompt and inference off someone else's machine, but there is still the question of what the AI feature will do with data produced.

I don't expect a business to make or maintain a suite of local model features in a browser free to download without monetizing the feature somehow. If said monetization strategy might mean selling my data or having the local model bring in ads, for example, the value of a local model goes down significantly IMO.
Are tired of slow interpreted POSIX shells?
by TheCodingDecode | 2025-12-17 02:50:52+00:00
I just made a new shell with LLVM JIT and a Go syntax. This shell runs external commands using process(cmd[args]).then(cmd2 [args]). It has built-in Git and Docker functionality and Files module. It is safer as it's process and then functions ignore (;,&,|,etc). The .then() is the preferred syntax for piping. It can JIT ordinary Posix code using @posix decorator. Start building in Orbit Now. Please put questions in comments. We will welcome critical questions and problems that could arise.
by apawloski | 2025-12-17 02:52:18+00:00
> You can look at the data and see that about 50% of the difference in levels of social trust between people in Italy and Scandinavia [...] You can then use your eyes to look at Minnesota versus New Jersey and see more social trust and less corruption in the former than the latter. You can even tie cultural background back to concrete social indicators!

For months on here you have defended and cheer-led the most nakedly corrupt administration in our lifetimes. (Let's skip the part where we have to talk specific examples of his corruption - you know it, and I know it.) And now you are spouting ignorant anti-Italian stereotypes and acting like you care about corruption. Your inconsistency of values is utterly unpersuasive so far.

> The country that exists reflects that it was built by British settlers, with greenfield development by Germans and Scandinavians in the Midwest.

That does not include me, so if I were an immigrant today you would not let me in. If you were an immigrant today, would you let yourself in?

Surely you see the hypocrisy in that, especially if you consider yourself a valuable member of society. Maybe, just maybe, it's possible to be a great American if you're not British, German, or Scandinavian. And that's been true for millions and millions of non-British/German/Scandinavians through all of American history.
by uselesswords | 2025-12-17 02:53:40+00:00
> most responsible outlets don’t speculate on motives until there’s some evidence of a connection

That is simply not true, every single news outlet without fail speculates, uncritically quotes a speculator, or leaves out warranted critical speculation at their own discretion. Pick a news site that you think doesn’t do this and I will happily find an example from their front page.
by jameshilliard | 2025-12-17 02:53:41+00:00
> The crimes prosecuted by the ICC are accepted by the US as matters of universal jurisdiction under international law, so the US can have no legitimate objection to (1) any country exercising jurisdiction over them wherever they are alleged to occur

There's plenty of legitimate objections such as not trusting a foreign court to appropriately decide international law.

> (2) any country exercising its sovereign power to delegate its exercise of jurisdiction over them anywhere to an international tribunal, like the ICC, either generally, under specified terms (such as those in the Rome Statute), or ad hoc.

In the case of Afghanistan, neither the US nor the Taliban are delegating that sort of authority to the ICC.

> And they certainly have the least basis for doing so when the country on whose territory they are alleged to have occurred, and who would thus have jurisdiction whether or not they were matters of universal jurisdiction under international law, does so.

IMO that's a pretty weak argument, especially when you have states being prosecuted which are non-signatories to the Rome Statute or are not full UN member states like in the case of Palestine.

> The actual objection is not the broad principle you are trying to articulate, but it is to the idea of Israel being accountable under international law for crimes for which it has the full support of the US government, irrespective of any theory of law.

The UN has a very well documented history of bias against Israel.[0] It seems entirely reasonable to me that neither the US nor Israel would trust a UN court, especially for anything related to wars involving Israel.

[0] https://unwatch.org/2024-unga-resolutions-on-israel-vs-rest-...
by brailsafe | 2025-12-17 02:54:31+00:00
> If it turns out you can't copyright code that was generated with the help of LLMs a whole bunch of $billion+ companies are going to have to throw away 18+ months of their work.

Hmm, it is interesting to think about that situation. Intuitively it would seem to me like there's some nuance between whether work would need to be "thrown out" or whether it just can't be sold as their own creation, marking some kind of divide between code produced and used privately for commercial purposes vs code that is produced and sold/provided publicly as a commercial product. The risk in doing the latter, or entirely throwing out the code, seems like it would be a relatively cheap risk that those companies do anyway all the time.

However, if I as a small business owner made a tool to help other businesses based on LLM code that used some of my own prior work for context, then sold the code itself as a product or sold a product with it as a dependency, it would be a much greater liability for me if it turned out to include copyrighted && unlicensed work that was produced by an LLM that further can't be claimed as my own.

Privately, on servers or in internal tooling not sold commercially, it would perhaps be next to impossible to either identify or enforce those limits. Without explicit attribution to an agent, I have no idea (with certainty anyway) which code anyone on my team has produced with an LLM, and it's not available publicly—aside from pure frontend web stuff—so I wonder in what capacity it would even be possible to throw specific chunks out if it was hypothetically enforceable.
by nl | 2025-12-17 02:55:02+00:00
You realize that AI is driving huge advertising growth at Meta, right?

> Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, reported strong second-quarter 2025 earnings, driven primarily by robust advertising revenue growth. Total revenue reached US$47.52 billion, up 22% from last year, with advertising accounting for $46.56 billion, an increase of 21%, surpassing Wall Street expectations. The growth was fuelled by an 11% rise in ad impressions across Meta’s Family of Apps and a 9% increase in the average ad price. Net income climbed 36% to $18.34 billion, marking ten consecutive quarters of profit outperformance. The Family of Apps segment generated $47.15 billion in revenue and $24.97 billion in operating income, while Reality Labs posted a $4.53 billion operating loss.

> Much of this growth is credited to Meta’s AI advancements in its advertising offerings, such as smarter ad recommendations and campaign automation. Currently, over 4 million advertisers use the AI-powered Advantage+ campaigns, achieving a 22% improvement in returns. Building on this success, Meta plans to enable brands to fully create and target ads using AI by the end of 2026.

(emphasis mine)

https://www.campaignasia.com/article/metas-q2-ad-revenue-bea...
by pacjam | 2025-12-17 02:55:11+00:00
Yes! Letta Code also has a "danger" mode, it's `--yolo`. If you're running Claude Code in a sandbox in headless mode, Letta Code has that too, just do something like `letta -p "Do something dangerous (it's just a sandbox, after all)" --yolo`

More on permissions here: https://docs.letta.com/letta-code/permissions

Install is just `npm install -g @letta-ai/letta-code`
by colechristensen | 2025-12-17 02:55:26+00:00
Most contributions are required to assign copyright to the FSF, so it's not actually particularly open.

If the FSF is the sole copyright owner they're free to relicense it however they please, if no one else has any controlling interest of the copyright, the GPL doesn't restrict you from relicensing something you're the sole owner of (and it's doubtful there's a legal mechanism to give away rights to something you continue to own)

Again, the FSF under Stallman isn't about freedom it's about control.
by pezezin | 2025-12-17 02:55:46+00:00
I am not sure about the literacy rates, but I live in Japan and pretty much every single Japanese person I have ever talked to has told me how painful kanji are and how they wished the Japanese writing system was easier.

In comparison, my mother language is Spanish, a language with very simple spelling rules. My girlfriend is always surprised how she can read out loud a random Spanish text and even though she doesn't understand it, I will understand her easily (it also helps that both languages have very similar sounds).
by travisa | 2025-12-17 02:55:55+00:00
The linked documentation in the first paragraph is confusing. It sets things in `context`, then calls `supertramp()`, which doesn't even use `context.user_index` or `my_custom_allocator()` specifically, which is not defined in the example? Are we to assume that `new()` somehow makes use of `context.allocator` and `context.user_index`? It goes on to explain that new(x) is also `new(x, context.allocator)`, but never explains the relevance of `context.user_index` No wonder people "misunderstand"
by mapontosevenths | 2025-12-17 02:56:02+00:00
When I was young my parents were scared that the MTV generation couldn't focus long enough to watch the "real news".

Not long ago I feared that twitters short form content was shortening peoples attention spans so much that they would stop being able to appreciate nuance at all... Then came TikTok.

I don't know what comes next, but I promise you it will be worse. Either way, it's a race to the bottom and we're not there yet.

Maybe it will be Max Headroom's blipverts?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekg45ub8bsk
by amluto | 2025-12-17 02:56:37+00:00
Their integration with existing tools seems to be generally pretty good.

For example, uv-build is rather lacking in any sort of features (and its documentation barely exists AFAICT, which is a bit disappointing), but uv works just fine with hatchling, using configuration mechanisms that predate uv.

(I spent some time last week porting a project from an old, entirely unsupportable build system to uv + hatchling, and I came out of it every bit as unimpressed by the general state of Python packaging as ever, but I had no real complaints about uv. It would be nice if there was a build system that could go even slightly off the beaten path without writing custom hooks and mostly inferring how they’re supposed to work, though. I’m pretty sure that even the major LLMs only know how to write a Python package configuration because they’ve trained on random blog posts and some GitHub packages that mostly work — they’re certainly not figuring anything out directly from the documentation, nor could they.)
by bronco21016 | 2025-12-17 02:57:00+00:00
Isn't this just about context management? iOS Shortcuts has access to the same context: Mail, Calendar, Files. You could even add in Notes, Reminders, and Weather.

Use the new models action and write up a prompt and away it goes. Automate to run every morning or trigger it at any time of the day by clicking the Shortcut.

Here's one such example, although it does use ChatGPT instead of an Apple LLM model: https://techtiff.substack.com/p/the-iphone-shortcut-that-run...

Don't take that as promotion. Just one of the first that came up in Google.
by iJohnDoe | 2025-12-17 02:57:11+00:00
What’s the latest on this from the OP? Did Tim Cook’s team respond?

We live a dystopian world where a trillion dollar company can’t fix the account. Worse than that, out of their several hundred thousand employees, not a single one is capable or willing to fix it.

Speaks volumes about our species in general and where we are headed.

When the executives go on their spiritual retreats or their boondoggle get togethers to talk about company values to the employees; it would all seem so pointless and hypocritical when they can’t fix situations like this.
by pacjam | 2025-12-17 02:57:29+00:00
I think it's mostly complimentary, in the same way a linear MCP would be complementary to a MemGPT/Letta-style memory system

I guess the main potential point of confusion would arise if it's not clear to the LLM / agent which tool should be used for what. E.g. if you tell your agent to use Letta memory blocks as a scratchpad / TODO list, that functionality overlaps with Beads (I think?), so it's easy to imagine the agent getting confused due to stale data in either location. But as long as the instructions are clear about what context/memory to use for what task, it should be fine / complementary.
by eru | 2025-12-17 02:59:01+00:00
What you said certainly works, but I'm not sure computability is actually the biggest issue here?

Have a look at how SAT solvers or Mixed Integer Linear Programming solvers are used.

There you specify a clear goal (with your code), and then you let the solvers run. You can, but you don't need to, let the solvers run all the way to optimality. And the solvers are also allowed to use all kinds of heuristics to find their answers, but that doesn't impact the statement of your objective.

Compare that to how many people write code without solvers: the objective of what your code is trying to achieve is seldom clearly spelled out, and is instead mixed up with the how-to-compute bits, including all the compromises and heuristics you make to get a reasonable runtime or to accommodate some changes in the spec your boss asked for at the last minute.

Using a solver ain't formal verification, but it shows the same separation between spec and implementation.

Another benefit of formal verification, that you already imply: your formal verification doesn't have to determine the behaviour of your software, and you can have multiple specs simultaneously. But you can only have a single implementation active at a time (even if you use a high level implementation language.)

So you can add 'handling a user request must terminate in finite time' as a (partial) spec. It's an important property, but it tells you almost nothing about the required business logic. In addition you can add "users shouldn't be able to withdraw more than they deposited" (and other more complicated rules), and you only have to review these rules once, and don't have to touch them again, even when you implement a clever new money transfer routine.
by deaux | 2025-12-17 02:59:18+00:00
You've nerd sniped me!

No country is going to force their big multinationals to change their international name they chose back in the 50s and are now known as world-wide. Personal names aren't too chaotic either, as the choice presented when choosing a romanization is limited, people can't just make stuff up on the ground. They're off, but generally in the same ways.

> Nobody wants to be called Mr. I, O, U, An, or No.

An is pretty common - given the massive reach of KPop among global youth, I wouldn't be surprised if the most well-known 안씨 as of 2025 was an "An" (a member of the group 아이브). Roh has fallen out of favor, young 노s generally go with Noh, the Rohs are usually older people. I too do long for the day where an 이 or 우 just goes with I or U, or if they must, at least Ih or Uh :)

IMO you left out the worst offender, Park. At least with 이 or 우 I can see why people would be hesitant to go the proper route, as most of the world is unfamiliar with single-phoneme names, but 박s have no excuse.

With 이, there's a pretty good alternative as well, and what's more - it's actually already in use when talking about the greatest Korean in history, Yi Sun-Shin! So much better than "Lee".
by jbellis | 2025-12-17 02:59:46+00:00
Love to see people leveraging static analysis for AI agents. Similar to what we're doing in Brokk but we're more tightly coupled to our own harness. (https://brokk.ai/) Would love to compare notes; if you're interested, hmu at [username]@brokk.ai.

Quick comparison: Auditor does framework-specific stuff that Brokk does not, but Brokk is significantly faster (~1M loc per minute).