MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by JamesSwift | 2025-12-16 17:26:59+00:00
Again, I think you are assigning too much importance to comments/questions in the RFC. Yes, there is probably an expectation that a comment/question is _acknowledged_, but I disagree there should be an expectation that it is _resolved_. The same as a PR.

If in a PR I left the comment that 'This architecture binds us to AWS. Have we estimated the engineering effort to remain cloud-agnostic in case we need to move to Azure next year?", it would be bad form for you to ignore the question and merge. It would be totally acceptable to either say "no, I didnt take that into account and I think its out of scope" or "yes, and that will be tackled separately". And it should always come with a consideration that there might need to be more information added to the PR, eg adding clarifying comments to the code.
by jrowen | 2025-12-16 17:27:26+00:00
> Billboards and other such ads, which were once commonplace are now solely the domain of ambulance chasing lawyers and car dealerships. TV ads are no better, production value has tanked, they look cheaper and shittier than ever, and the products are solely geared to the boomers because they're the only ones still watching broadcast TV.

This actually strikes me as a good thing. The more we can get big dumb ads out of meatspace and confine everything to devices, the better, in my opinion (though once they figure out targeted ads in public that could suck).

I know this is an unpopular opinion here, but I get a lot more value out of targeted social media ads than I ever did billboards or TV commercials. They actually...show me niche things that are relevant to my interests, that I didn't know about. It's much closer to the underlying real value of advertising than the Coca-Cola billboard model is.

> A lot of younger folks I know don't even bother with an ad-blocker, not because they like them, but simply because they've been scrolling past ads since they were shitting in diapers. It's just the background wallpaper of the Internet to them, and that sounds (and is) dystopian...

Also this. It's not dystopian. It's genuinely a better experience than sitting through a single commercial break of a TV show in the 90s (of which I'm sure we all sat through thousands). They blend in. They are easily skippable, they don't dominate near as much of your attention. It's no worse than most of the other stuff competing for your attention. It doesn't seem that difficult to me to navigate a world with background ad radiation. But maybe I'm just a sucker.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-12-16 17:27:39+00:00
This use case feels better served by a dedicated utility with a specialized UI rather than shoehorned into a browser. It'd fit the macOS services model (which adds items to context and application menus, e.g. "Research this…" when right-clicking a link or text selection) and could optionally also be summoned by the system app launcher (like Spotlight).
by ZeroConcerns | 2025-12-16 17:27:51+00:00
Well, if Apple were really clever, they'd have introduced an 'EU DMA CAPTCHA' by now, requiring anyone EU-adjacent-resident to mark all the evil EU bureaucrats in a picture of room before allowing them to resume their doomscrolling.

I mean, it absolutely worked for effectively sinking the GDPR, where pretty much everyone now equates that law with obnoxious 'cookie banners', to the point that these regulations are being relaxed, despite never requiring these banners in any way, shape or form in the first place.

But, yeah, despite that, I'd say they'll get away with this as well...
by Arcuru | 2025-12-16 17:27:57+00:00
> We are introducing a $0.002 per-minute Actions cloud platform charge for all Actions workflows across GitHub-hosted and self-hosted runners.

Charging for self-hosted runners is an interesting choice. That's the same cost as their smallest hosted runners [1]

[1] - https://docs.github.com/en/billing/reference/actions-runner-...
by parpfish | 2025-12-16 17:28:11+00:00
The small sample sizes is rational response from scientists in the face of a) funding levels and b) unreasonable expectations from hiring/promotion committees.

cog neuro labs need to start organizing their research programs more like giant physics projects. Lots of PIs pooling funding and resources together into one big experiment rather than lots of little underpowered independent labs. But it’s difficult to set up a more institutional structure like this unless there’s a big shift in how we measure career advancement/success.
by rdm_blackhole | 2025-12-16 17:28:18+00:00
> The moment Mozilla failed to stop being dependent on Google's money whilst being true to their own mission in being a 'privacy first browser' it already was the end and the damage in trust was done.

I understand your position but what is the alternative funding source that could keep a company making a free browser running?

Apple funds Safari's development but it's basically a side project for them, Google funds Chrome's development as side project to their ad business, Edge is the same for Microsoft.

Obviously we don't want Firefox to become ad-supported so that leaves either donations which to be honest does not work (see all the OS projects that ask for donations when you install NPM packages for reference) or they need to start charging money (we know how well that worked out for Netscape) or finally find another corporate sponsor willing to shove billions of dollars each year into a product that will not improve their bottom line.

I am all for alternatives and I agree with you that something needs to change but the real question is how?

Maybe I am presumptuous in this assumption but I am pretty sure that if Mozilla had another palatable solution on the table, they would have probably implemented it by now.

> After thinking about it, the only viable browser that is not funded by Google (Firefox 75%, Safari (>20%) and Chrome) is Ladybird.

Ladybird is sponsored by many big companies as well. What makes you think that somehow their fate will be any different than Firefox? Do you believe that Shopify for example is more altruistic than Google and therefore should be trusted more?

I personally don't.

In my opinion the problem is the expectation that things should be free always on the internet and we can thank Google and Facebook for that. Most people these days who are not in the tech world simply have no idea how many hours and how much money it takes to create something, having it used by people and iterating on it day in day out until it is in a good shape and can be used by the general public.

Therefore besides a small cohort of users in tech (like Kagi's customers for example who understand that a good search engine is not free), the vast majority of people will not accept to have to pay for a browser. Which brings us back to the question I asked above.

Who will fund this supposedly free for all browser that does not track you, that does not show you any ads, that does not incorporate AI features, that does not try to up-sell you or scam you? From my vantage point it's not like there are 100s of solutions to get out of this conundrum.
by ipython | 2025-12-16 17:28:24+00:00
The USDS and DOGE had completely different mandates. Non government experience makes sense when you’re trying to learn the lessons of industry to improve gov website accessibility, performance and ux.

On the other hand, trying to slash spending with no understanding of the agencies you’re working at- let alone any life experience for a lot of these folks- is a very different mandate.
by skywal_l | 2025-12-16 17:29:05+00:00
Do you realize what 1.300.000.000$ is? Say you invest most of it in a safe way to get you inflation + 2%. That gives you 26.000.000$ every year. You can pay 100 engineers with this. Firefox is a browser. Sure a browser is complicated but 100 motivated and talented engineers is more than enough to make a good product if you focus on what matters.

There is no excuse to what is going on.
by vablings | 2025-12-16 17:30:36+00:00
There are no reliable studies. There have been multiple demonstrated examples that user data has been shared, and systems have been hacked.

We have plenty of evidence of harm and no good evidence for effectiveness. We don't need to "save police resources" we need more well-trained capable police officers who are doing good police work AND good community work

"Austin spent $1.2 million on Flock cameras. They scanned 113 million license plates and got 165 arrests. That's $7,300 per arrest"
by kridsdale3 | 2025-12-16 17:30:40+00:00
Sure. HTML is a Markup-Language (it's in the acronym). Markdown is also a Markup Language. LLMs are super good at Markdown and just about every chatbot frontend now has a renderer built in.

A2UI is a superset, expanding in to more element types. If we're going to have the origin of all our data streams be string-output-generators, this seems like an ok way to go.

I've joined an effort inside Google to work in this exact space, though what we're doing has no plan to become open source, other groups are working on stuff like A2UI and we collaborate with them.

My career previous to this was nearly 20 years of native platform UI programming and things like Flutter, React Native, etc have always really annoyed me. But I've come around this year to accept that as long as LLMs on servers are going to be where the applications of the future live, we need a client-OS agnostic framework like this.
by lab700xdev | 2025-12-16 17:31:02+00:00
That is entirely fair feedback regarding the new accounts. We all have to start somewhere! That is exactly why I open-sourced the engine (Apache 2.0) and kept the logic in Python rather than a compiled binary - so you don't have to trust "me", you can audit scanner.py and safety.py yourself to see exactly how we parse the zip headers. Regarding Safetensors: I agree 100%. If everyone used Safetensors, this tool wouldn't need to exist, but looking at the Hugging Face hub, there are still millions of legacy .pt files being downloaded daily. This tool is a guardrail for the messy reality we live in, not the perfect future we want.
by rrradical | 2025-12-16 17:31:09+00:00
I tried Orion about a year ago. I tried using the profile sandboxing. Logging into my google account in one profile also logged me in in another profile.

I can definitely excuse some bugs (there were crashes for example that I didn’t overly mind; I understand I was using prerelease software). But something like account containers should be built fundamentally to disallow any data sharing. If data sharing is a bug, and not fundamentally disallowed by the architecture, then it’s going to happen again later.

So for that reason I’m not bullish on orion.
by lenerdenator | 2025-12-16 17:31:21+00:00
Technically, many of those things often were AI.

They just existed before the GenAI craze and no one cared because AI wasn't a buzzword at the time. Google Translate absolutely was based on ML before OpenAI made it a big deal to have things "based on AI".

But just putting stuff in your browser that hooks into third-party services that use ML isn't enough anymore. It has to be front and center otherwise, you're losing the interest of... well, someone. I'm not sure who at this point. I don't care, personally.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-12-16 17:31:24+00:00
> but blindly trust the 5GB binary model files (.pt) we download from Hugging Face.

I thought the ecosystem had mostly moved to .safetensors (which was explicitly created to fix this problem) and .gguf (which I'm pretty sure also doesn't have this problem); do you really need to download giant chunks of untrusted code and execute it at all?
by ajross | 2025-12-16 17:31:26+00:00
This was a kludgey hack that never managed to land upstream, yet utterly dominated (for a brief moment) the headspace of the early linux desktop.

It's funny how quickly things were moving at the time. In the mid 90's, GUI design elements were still in their infancy. Even basic stuff like "what do windows do?" was in flux. Traditional X window managers hadn't settled on anything like a regular usage model: twm was still in regular use, fvwm mostly cloned its UI, Sun was still defaulting to OpenWindows which was pretty and clever but sort of an evolutionary dead end, and other commercial unixes were running Motif which was a lot like a monochrome Windows 3.1 that used too many pixels. Macs were still stuck in the only-one-foreground-app-is-enough model with System 7 and had nothing to offer.

Then Windows 95 landed like a bomb: there was a CLOSE button in the corner of the window finally! And there was a start menu and a little status bar! And that's what we all decided we wanted, really badly. So it got cloned and picked up pervasively. Basically everyone not already part of one of the X11 camps was running this.

But the window was small. KDE kicked off mere months later, Gnome followed quickly after that, and we all forgot about fvwm95. But we for sure all remember it.
by pseudalopex | 2025-12-16 17:32:01+00:00
No Chromium fork developer not called Microsoft have the resources to maintain a web browser engine.

But focus on the license overlooks a more important threat. Google made Web Environment Integrity so services could require approved devices, operating systems, and browsers. Resistance led Google to remove it from desktop for now. But they kept something like it in Android. And they will try again.
Show HN: Tab Tangle a browser extension to help clean up tab hoarding
by langarus | 2025-12-16 17:32:14+00:00
I built this browser extension to help deal with the mess of after a research/work.

I always run into this issue that I have a million tabs open and then have to manually go through each to see if I still need it or not. So it ends up being work after work.

That's why I built this little extension to give you an overview of what you have and help you apply bulk actions to them.

If you have some time give it a go, feedback is much appreciated :).

No sign-ups, no logs, 100% free

Firefox: Tab Tangle – https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-tangle/

Chrome: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/tab-tangle/glflinnn...

Edge: https://microsoftedge.microsoft.com/addons/detail/tab-tangle...
by CrazyStat | 2025-12-16 17:32:38+00:00
A few points because I actually think Lindley’s paradox is really important and underappreciated.

(1) You can get the same effect with a prior distribution concentrated around a point instead of a point prior. The null hypothesis prior being a point prior is not what causes Lindley’s paradox.

(2) Point priors aren’t intrinsically nonsensical. I suspect that you might accept a point prior for an ESP effect, for example (maybe not—I know one prominent statistician who believes ESP is real).

(3) The prior probability assigned to each of the two models also doesn’t really matter, Lindley’s paradox arises from the marginal likelihoods (which depend on the priors for parameters within each model but not the prior probability of each model).
by retrac | 2025-12-16 17:32:42+00:00
It's not a line that's crossed. It's just the standard in Canada.

In Britain, aeroplanes are made of aluminium and they have tyres. The Ministry of Defence sends them out on manoeuvres in theatres of combat, where the pilots have generally excelled due to regular practice.

In America, airplanes are made of aluminum and they have tires. The Department of Defense sends them out on maneuvers in theaters of combat, where the pilots have generally exceled due to regular practise.

In Canada, airplanes are made of aluminum and they have tires. The Department of National Defence sends them out on manoeuvres in theatres of combat, where the pilots have generally excelled due to regular practice.
by mlhpdx | 2025-12-16 17:32:47+00:00
Nice. JSON over UDP is convenient, but has some drawbacks. But first your questions:

The answer to a) depends: If the payload is larger than can fit in a single datagram (the exact number can vary a bit) it has to be split. Each packet has some chance of loss. If it has to arrive, it has to be acknowledged and if split reassembled. So not bigger packets, but more of them.

For b) use WireGuard encryption. Not necessarily the VPN, just the handshake and transport protection. It’s very well aligned with UDP and lightweight enough to work on battery powered devices. I’ve added WireGuard termination to UDP Gateway specifically for this requirement.

Why am I not a fan of JSON over UDP? Extra serialization, extra size, extra constraints. None of those are huge deals, but I prefer something like MessagePack or CBOR for compact message sizes.
by blacksmith_tb | 2025-12-16 17:32:50+00:00
I gave Slate my $50, though since the price is creeping up (not their fault), I may or may not bite. I am hoping the Nio Firefly[1] becomes the EV equivalent of the VW Beetle and conquerors the world, but I am not holding my breath on it making it to the US in the present (political) climate.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefly_(vehicle)
by nostrademons | 2025-12-16 17:32:50+00:00
Both cooperative and non-cooperative games are relevant. Actually, I think that one of the most intriguing parts of game theory is understanding under what conditions a non-cooperative game becomes a cooperative one [1] [2].

The really simple finding is that when you have both repetition and reputation, cooperation arises naturally. Because now you've changed the payoff matrix; instead of playing a single game with the possibility of defection without consequences, defection now cuts you off from payoffs in the future. All you need is repeated interaction and the ability to remember when you've been screwed, or learn when your counterparty has screwed others.

This has been super relevant for career management, eg. you do much better in orgs where the management chain has been intact for years, because they have both the ability and the incentive to keep people loyal to them and ensure they cooperate with each other.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tit_for_tat

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evolution_of_Cooperation
by usernamevasile | 2025-12-16 17:32:51+00:00
Hi HN,

While building and shipping several side projects, I kept repeating the same mistake: I’d focus on code and infra, then copy-paste Terms, Privacy Policies struggling to fit themtogether.

Legup.dev is a small pre-flight check I built for myself which I thought I coudl open to anyone. It helps spot obvious issues across: – Terms of Service – Privacy policies – Open-source license usage

It’s not legal advice and not a replacement for lawyers — more like a sanity check to catch inconsistencies before shipping or sharing a demo.

Curious how others here handle this: – Do you think about legal/docs at all when shipping? – What do you knowingly ignore?
by grayhatter | 2025-12-16 17:33:02+00:00
> But Let's Encrypt is not responsible for this move, and did not vote on the ballot.

"Did not vote", and "not responsible", is definitely a take...

They could call their bluff. I would. The CA/browser forum made a mistake here. And they can only get away with it if the players involved comply.

Browers have an incentive to increase the complexity, good engineers would resist that.
by everforward | 2025-12-16 17:33:09+00:00
> It does not matter if they are random or not.

Again, sometimes it does, the article lists a few of them. Making it harder to scrape, unifying across databases that share a keyspace, etc.

> And how does surrogate key help? I don't know the surrogate key that identifies my records in your database. Even if you use them internally it is an implementation detail.

That surrogate key is linked to literally every other record in the database I have for you. There are near infinite ways for me to convert something you know to that surrogate key. Give me a transaction ID, give me a phone number/email and the rough date you signed up, hell give me your IP address and I can probably work back to a user ID from auth logs.

The point isn't that you know the surrogate key, it's that _everything_ is linked to that surrogate key so if you can give me literally any info you know I can work back to the internal ID.

> This complexity is there whether you want it or not and you're not going to eliminate it with surrogate keys. It has to be explicitly taken care of.

Okay, then lets do an exercise here. A user gives you a transaction ID, and you have to tell them the date they signed up and the date you first billed them. I think yours is going to be way more complicated.

Mine is just something like:

SELECT user_id FROM transactions WHERE transaction_id=X; SELECT transaction_date FROM transactions WHERE user_id=Y ORDER BY transaction_date ASC LIMIT 1; SELECT signup_date FROM users WHERE user_id=Y;

Could be a single query, but you get the idea.

> DBMSes provide means to tackle this essential complexity: bi-temporal extensions, views, materialized views etc.

This kind of proves my point. If you need bi-temporal extensions and materialized views to tell a user what their email address is from a transaction ID, I cannot imagine the absolute mountain of SQL it takes to do something more complicated like calculating revenue per user.
by palmotea | 2025-12-16 17:33:30+00:00
> Globalization benefits capital in rich countries and labor in poor countries.

Globalization is about benefiting capital in rich countries, any benefits to people poor countries is an unintended side-effect.

> I can agree that globalization can be bad for labor in rich countries.

It may seem that way if you restrict your view to say, China, but it's more complicated than that, and there's more to the world than the "developed world" than Asia.

For instance: IIRC, Africa has had problems with local producers getting run out of business by Chinese knock-offs (e.g. https://www.dw.com/en/how-nigeria-lost-its-textile-market-to...), without the "benefit" of foreign sweatshop employment you've seen in Asia.

My understanding is protectionism would probably be better for Africa, as cheap imports block development of local industry and agriculture, trapping it a low level of development.

Edit: And maybe the problem is worse than I understood: https://www.semafor.com/article/11/13/2025/chinas-everything...:

> China is now competing head-on not just against other advanced economies but the most vulnerable ones. In effect, it is blocking the ladder to prosperity for countries in the Global South.

> Indonesia lost 250,000 jobs in its backbone textile industry between 2022 and 2024 because of a deluge of Chinese imports, according to the Indonesia Fiber and Filament Yarn Producer Association — and another half-million may now be at risk....

> In Thailand, the Chinese export tsunami has precipitated a crisis among smaller firms making car parts, electrical equipment, and consumer goods, stoking fears of deindustrialization. Village-based cottage industries are particularly at risk; for example, makers of hand-painted ceramic “rooster” bowls have been idled en masse by Chinese fakes that sell for one fifth of the price.

> China’s exports to Southeast Asia are now larger than those to the US. Malaysia’s semiconductor industry, a key growth-engine, is feeling the pressure. Electronics manufacturers in the Philippines are struggling. Vietnam has erected tariff barriers to Chinese hot-rolled coil steel products....

> Yet China keeps piling on the trade pressure. Africa is the new hotspot for Chinese exports: In September, Chinese shipments to the continent surged 56% year-on-year. In the same month, shipments to Latin America were up 15.2%. Some of China’s exports to emerging economies, particularly in Asia, are being rerouted to the US to get around US tariffs, but they also compete with local manufacturers in those firms’ home markets, while displacing their overseas sales.