MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: There's a full suite of open alternatives to BigTech hardware now
by iris-digital | 2025-12-17 16:44:20+00:00
It's been a difficult two decades for those of us who expect the products we buy to respect our freedom and privacy. We've been marginalized by the mobile revolution for so long that we'd nearly given up looking for options.

While commiserating recently, we realized that several important missing pieces of the puzzle have neatly dropped under our noses while we weren't looking! What are they?

In no particular order, the Fairphone6 w/eOS, Furilabs FLX1s, Starlite Tablet, new Framework laptops, System76 servers, OpenWRT One, and a number of others already shipping. Software options are plentiful as well. The landscape has changed significantly in a few short years.

Of course, these products are not perfect. Right now you might be counting their flaws. But we feel there's a another way to look at the situation. That these are now good enough for the vast majority of folks—and they'll only get better, if further invested in.

The catch? One needs to wrangle numerous products from almost as many companies. That's tedious for normal folks and busy geeks alike, plus it splits investment into small portions.

So, how can we get these organizations to work together? We've brainstormed some ideas, such as a unified storefront, licensing, mergers, etc, but don't know how feasible they are. What do y'all think?

If we can help these products get attention, increase sales, and further investment, we'll complete a libre product line that much faster. These goals are detailed at "The Ethical Computing Initiative," https://aol.codeberg.page/eci/ BTW.

TL;DR—Many open, respectful products are listed at: https://aol.codeberg.page/eci/status.html Now they need our support!
by bullen | 2025-12-17 16:45:04+00:00
I'm 60Hz for life.

Maybe 120Hz if they come in 4:3/5:4 with matte low res panel.

But that's enough for VR which needs 2x because two eyes.

So progress ends there.

16 cores can't share memory well.

Also 15W is peak because more is hard to passively cool in a small space. So 120Hz x 2 eyes at ~1080 is limit what we can do anyways... with $1/KWh!

The limits are physical.
by meetpateltech | 2025-12-17 16:45:20+00:00
Deepmind Page: https://deepmind.google/models/gemini/flash/

Developer Blog: https://blog.google/technology/developers/build-with-gemini-...

Model Card [pdf]: https://deepmind.google/models/model-cards/gemini-3-flash/

Gemini 3 Flash in Search AI mode: https://blog.google/products/search/google-ai-mode-update-ge...
by autoexec | 2025-12-17 16:45:21+00:00
> If something is free (en masse), you are probably a product.

If something being free ever mattered to your privacy, it hasn't for a long time. Today no matter how expensive something is you are probably a product anyway. Unethical and greedy companies don't care how much money you paid them, they'll want the additional cash they'll get from selling you out at every opportunity. Much of my favorite software is free and doesn't compromise my privacy.
by dakshgupta | 2025-12-17 16:45:35+00:00
Hi, I'm Daksh, a co-founder of Greptile. We're an AI code review agent used by 2,000 companies from startups like PostHog, Brex, and Partiful, to F500s and F10s.

About a billion lines of code go through Greptile every month, and we're able to do a lot of interesting analysis on that data.

We decided to compile some of the most interesting findings into a report. This is the first time we've done this, so any feedback would be great, especially around what analytics we should include next time.
by uasi | 2025-12-17 16:45:44+00:00
You're right. I looked up 現代仮名遣いの告示 [0] for the first time, and it says 塔（とう） is officially pronounced as "too". I had it backwards - I thought that 塔 is "tou", but due to the varying sounds of う, people could (and often preferred to) pronounce it as "too" in everyday speech.

This kind of misconception seems not uncommon. There's an FAQ on NHK's website [1] that addresses the question of whether 言う（いう） is pronounced "iu" or "yuu". The answer is "yuu", and the article make it clear that: "It's not that [iu] is used for polite/careful speech and [yuu] for casual speech - there is no such distinction."

I think native speakers learn words by hearing them and seeing them written in hiragana, before learning the underlying rules, so they know "too" is written as とう, but might not realize that とう shouldn't be pronounced as "tou" or いう as "iu". These are at least less obvious than cases like は in こんにちは never being "ha".

Personally, if I heard someone say 塔 as "tou" or 言う as "iu", I probably wouldn't count it as incorrect, nor would I even notice the phonetic difference.

[0] https://www.bunka.go.jp/kokugo_nihongo/sisaku/joho/joho/kiju...

[1] https://www.nhk.or.jp/bunken/research/kotoba/20160801_2.html
Show HN: Eqlize – Query SQLite Using EdgeQL
by jcuenod | 2025-12-17 16:46:06+00:00
EdgeQL is interesting to me as one of the contenders to be a SQL successors. Eqlize is an experiment to bring its expressiveness to standard SQL databases without migrating to Gel (aka EdgeDB). So you can use it against Sqlite or PG (or, perhaps, some OLAP DB if you write an adaptor...)
by GaggiX | 2025-12-17 16:46:18+00:00
They went too far, now the Flash model is competing with their Pro version. Better SWE-bench, better ARC-AGI 2 than 3.0 Pro. I imagine they are going to improve 3.0 Pro before it's no more in Preview.

Also I don't see it written in the blog post but Flash supports more granular settings for reasoning: minimal, low, medium, high (like openai models), while pro is only low and high.
by samyok | 2025-12-17 16:46:20+00:00
Don’t let the “flash” name fool you, this is an amazing model.

I have been playing with it for the past few weeks, it’s genuinely my new favorite; it’s so fast and it has such a vast world knowledge that it’s more performant than Claude Opus 4.5 or GPT 5.2 extra high, for a fraction (basically order of magnitude less!!) of the inference time and price
by criddell | 2025-12-17 16:47:20+00:00
What are the best online courses you’ve taken?

On Coursera, I did Andrew Ng’s machine learning course and Dan Boneh’s cryptography course and both were excellent. Time well spent IMHO.

The next thing I want to take is a WinDbg course. Udemy has one that looks pretty good. I should probably also find a modern assembly language course…
by fariszr | 2025-12-17 16:47:33+00:00
These flash models keep getting more expensive with every release.

Is there an OSS model that's better than 2.0 flash with similar pricing, speed and a 1m context window?

Edit: this is not the typical flash model, it's actually an insane value if the benchmarks match real world usage.

> Gemini 3 Flash achieves a score of 78%, outperforming not only the 2.5 series, but also Gemini 3 Pro. It strikes an ideal balance for agentic coding, production-ready systems and responsive interactive applications.

The replacement for old flash models will be probably the 3.0 flash lite then.
Tell HN: HN was down
by uyzstvqs | 2025-12-17 16:48:18+00:00
- HN errored on all authenticated requests with 502 Bad Gateway. It did still respond to a limited amount of unauthenticated requests with presumably cached pages, which did not get updated. The last post on /newest claimed "0 minutes ago", but was actually much older (1:32:57 PM GMT) and not the newest post.

- This status page actually identified the outage: https://hackernews.onlineornot.com/ - Pages by Hund and Statuspal did not show the outage.

- The last post before the outage was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46301823 (1:39:59 PM GMT). The last comment was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46301848 (1:41:54 PM GMT).

- There was an average of ~4 seconds per comment just prior to the outage. Based on this, HN likely went down at 1:41:58 PM GMT.
by micromacrofoot | 2025-12-17 16:48:26+00:00
I understand where people are coming from with these takes... but look at the details, Mozilla is practically dead already. They are almost solely funded by Google.

Look at browser stats, what they're doing is not working and asking them to continue doing it will kill them. They have to change or they will die.

Their core audience (people on this site) is shrinking constantly. You can not save them.

I feel like this is a case where a bunch of smart people like something so much, or the idea of something, that they've completely blinded themselves to the facts.
by SilasX | 2025-12-17 16:48:42+00:00
They...already do that? They stopped allowing unsigned addons, even if you allow them in about:config (a power-user feature). Even Chrome allows you to toggle the option to do that -- in a more user-friendly way! -- and actually honors it, so I don't think it's the massive security hole everyone claims.

Edit: My Hitler parody of when Firefox introduced this (almost 10 years ago now!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taGARf8K5J8
by noirscape | 2025-12-17 16:49:08+00:00
If Mozilla were to kill adblockers, there's basically no reason to not use Chromium. It's pretty much the only relevant difference between Chromium and Firefox these days.

It's truly impressive how they've managed to do every user-hostile trick Google Chrome also did over the years, except for no real clear reason besides contempt for their users autonomy I suppose. Right now the sole hill Mozilla really has left is adblockers, and they've talked about wanting to sacrifice that?

It truly boggles the mind to even consider this. That's not 150 million, that's the sound of losing all your users.
by FeepingCreature | 2025-12-17 16:49:16+00:00
> There's an older tradition of rule-based machine translation. In these methods, someone really does understand exactly what the program does, in a detailed way

I would softly disagree with this. Technically, we also understand exactly what a LLM does, we can analyze every instruction that is executed. Nothing is hidden from us. We don't always know what the outcome will be; but, we also don't always know what the outcome will be in rule-based models, if we make the chain of logic too deep to reliably predict. There is a difference, but it is on a spectrum. In other words, explicit code may help but it does not guarantee understanding, because nothing does and nothing can.
by OkayPhysicist | 2025-12-17 16:50:07+00:00
Most of those sites are doing a little move called "lying". I occasionally (once every couple of months) run into a site claiming to not support Firefox. I can't recall a single site that wasn't a tech demo of some bleeding edge feature of Chrome that didn't magically start working when I turned on my Chrome UserAgent.

(Hey, if you work at Snapchat: fix your shit. Your desktop site is by far the most mainstream website I've come across that lies like this)
by ortusdux | 2025-12-17 16:50:12+00:00
Looks like 3 hrs

https://hackernews.onlineornot.com/incidents/yaz-eOJeARBL

https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/hacker-news

Strangely, nothing from the statuspal, which is the first google result

https://hacker-news.statuspal.io/
by user_7832 | 2025-12-17 16:50:15+00:00
Two quick questions to Gemini/AI Studio users:

1, has anyone actually found 3 Pro better than 2.5 (on non code tasks)? I struggle to find a difference beyond the quicker reasoning time and fewer tokens.

2, has anyone found any non-thinking models better than 2.5 or 3 Pro? So far I find the thinking ones significantly ahead of non thinking models (of any company for that matter.)
by coffeecoders | 2025-12-17 16:50:18+00:00
I've realized over time that I personally cannot learn from video at all. Even "great" lectures don't stick. Text does!

Being able to skim, jump around, re-read a paragraph or pause on a single sentence is how understanding actually forms for me.

What’s interesting is that LLMs lean hard into this strength of text, they make it interactive, searchable, and contextual.

To me, most of these platforms have optimized video for engagement. Its essentially "press play and hope it sticks".
by jug | 2025-12-17 16:50:42+00:00
Looks like a good workhorse model, like I felt 2.5 Flash also was at its time of launch. I hope I can build confidence with it because it'll be good to offload Pro costs/limits as well of course always nice with speed for more basic coding or queries. I'm impressed and curious about the recent extreme gains on ARC-AGI-2 from 3 Pro, GPT-5.1 and now even 3 Flash.
by simonsarris | 2025-12-17 16:50:56+00:00
Even before this release the tools (for me: Claude Code and Gemini for other stuff) reached a "good enough" plateau that means any other company is going to have a hard time making me (I think soon most users) want to switch. Unless a new release from a different company has a real paradigm shift, they're simply sufficient. This was not true in 2023/2024 IMO.

With this release the "good enough" and "cheap enough" intersect so hard that I wonder if this is an existential threat to those other companies.
by kelnos | 2025-12-17 16:51:45+00:00
> the way to get the attention and concern of the political establishment is to get out on the streets and make some noise.

Honestly I'm not even convinced this works so well anymore. (Not saying it never does, but I think it's effectiveness has dropped.) To me, it seems the main way to achieve political change is with money. More money than I have, unfortunately.
by alexgotoi | 2025-12-17 16:52:14+00:00
The funny part of “AI will make formal verification go mainstream” is that it skips over the one step the industry still refuses to do: decide what the software is supposed to do in the first place.

We already have a ton of orgs that can’t keep a test suite green or write an honest invariant in a code comment, but somehow we’re going to get them to agree on a precise spec in TLA+/Dafny/Lean and treat it as a blocking artifact? That’s not an AI problem, that’s a culture and incentives problem.

Where AI + “formal stuff” probably does go mainstream is at the boring edges: property-based tests, contracts, refinement types, static analyzers that feel like linters instead of capital‑P “Formal Methods initiatives”. Make it look like another checkbox in CI and devs will adopt it; call it “verification” and half the org immediately files it under “research project we don’t have time for”.

Will include this thread in my https://hackernewsai.com/ newsletter.
by albert_e | 2025-12-17 16:52:24+00:00
Corey Schafer on YouTube should be in your bookmarks --

Playlists ...

Python Programming Beginner Tutorials https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-osiE80TeTskrapNbzXh...

Python OOP Tutorials - Working with Classes https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-osiE80TeTsqhIuOqKhw...

Python Tutorials https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-osiE80TeTt2d9bfVyTi...
by jsdwarf | 2025-12-17 16:52:57+00:00
I wouldn't be so tough on the online certificates. The key value I get out of Coursera is an unbeatable "time to knowledge" and some proof it was me who attended the course through the id verification. Compare that to traditional in-person education, where you are bound to fixed course dates, long approval timelines etc. Until you get feedback from HR that you are eligible for a course/training, i've probably already completed it via my Coursera complete subscription.
by alexgotoi | 2025-12-17 16:53:14+00:00
Models are mediocre solo consumers: they skim, paraphrase and confidently miss the one subtle thing that actually matters. Humans are still better at deciding which three paragraphs in a 40‑page spec are load‑bearing. But as soon as you treat the model as a stochastic code monkey with a compiler, test suite, linter and some static tooling strapped to its back, it suddenly looks a lot more like “creation with a very fast feedback loop” than “consumption at scale”.

The interesting leverage isn’t that AI can read more stuff than you; it’s that you can cheaply instrument your system (tests, properties, contracts, little spec fragments) and then let the model grind through iterations until something passes all of that. That just shifts the hard work back where it’s always been: choosing what to assert about the world. The tokens and the code are the easy part now.

This might make it into this week's https://hackernewsai.com/ newsletter.
Google's AI quoted me verbatim 12 days later
by rkagerer | 2025-12-17 16:53:46+00:00
I recently posted a comment[1] on Reddit identifying errata in a diagram Asus published for their Pro WS WRX90E-SAGE SE motherboard.

Less than two weeks later, I was mildly surprised when I performed a Google search and found its AI quoting my words nearly verbatim, and presenting them with the confidence of fact: https://i.imgur.com/pgImAWh.png

I took the opportunity to play with search terms, to see just how generic a query could lead to a response lifted from my post. At the moment, googling "Asus Pro WS WRX90E-SAGE SE diagram has errata" does it [2], and to some extent even just "Does ASUS block diagram have errata" [3].

In this case, the comment is (mostly) correct - in fact, ASUS is working on fixing the diagram.

But what if I had made up the post, or worse, were a competitor trying to sabotage their reputation?

I'm not sure whether I should be impressed or scared. I'm amazed how quickly one obscure comment can be surfaced to look authoritative. The AI further amplified my sentiments in its responses by referring to "users" or "technicians" reporting these particular mistakes, when it's really just one person - me. While I know a human with good technical instincts could quickly gauge my comment and recognize its legitimacy, I'm not as confident the AI isn't just naively parroting.

I'm curious, are such tactics being used for "AI poisoning" attacks in the wild, and is there anything publishers can do to protect themselves?

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/threadripper/comments/18obxsd/comment/nses469/

[2]: https://i.imgur.com/Qf3pGnF.png

[3]: https://i.imgur.com/FvHiF5h.png
by csdreamer7 | 2025-12-17 16:53:48+00:00
There are a few reasons:

I haven't compared it in years, but Firefox's bookmark sync is better than Google's, it is a reason why I have stuck with it.

I think Firefox manages hundreds of tabs better than Chrome does as far as memory usage goes. I haven't used Chrome seriously in years, but people continue to complain about how RAM hungry Chrome is so I assume it is still an issue.

But Mozilla has been doing odd things that makes me question them. I would move to some Chromium based browser if ublock origin was... blocked... pun intended... because the web does prefer Chrome over Firefox. If this 3rd party browser is able to integrate some of the functionality of ublock origin that Firefox chose to remove; I would use it over the reasons I listed above in a heartbeat.
by dozheiny | 2025-12-17 16:54:02+00:00
I get what you’re saying, but I think you’re missing the point. Yes, the app needs OTP to log in, and yes, uploaded images are technically public—but what I was showing is different: once you’re authenticated, there’s basically no access control on user images. That’s not about OTP or being in a “public environment”; it’s a backend flaw. Anyone with minimal scripting can access all user photos without any extra checks.

Also, even if the API only gives “distance,” you can still roughly triangulate someone’s location within 200 meters, which I demonstrated. The post isn’t about blaming users—it’s about showing how sensitive data is exposed by design, which is a real privacy risk.
by kemayo | 2025-12-17 16:54:20+00:00
If people are curious, all the stats for Wikimedia properties are here: https://analytics.wikimedia.org/dashboards/browsers/#desktop...

As of December 7th, Firefox is 10.3% of traffic there. This makes it the #2 browser, after Chrome (at 62.2%) -- a spot it has been dueling with Edge over for the last year or so.

I'm inclined to think that "people visiting wikipedia" is a fairly representative sample of "normal users", overall.
by tekawade | 2025-12-17 16:54:29+00:00
Resonates well with me. I was thinking same lately as many other comments.

Random stranger on Reddit mentioned - *The art of frugal hedonism* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/216874949

This book is indeed eye opener. Though I am too deep to turn around quickly without crashing I am well on may way and there is many more miles to go. Hoping to take few of my friends with me too.
by bennydog224 | 2025-12-17 16:54:30+00:00
From the article, speed & cost match 2.5 Flash. I'm working on a project where there's a huge gap between 2.5 Flash and 2.5 Flash Lite as far as performance and cost goes.

-> 2.5 Flash Lite is super fast & cheap (~1-1.5s inference), but poor quality responses.

-> 2.5 Flash gives high quality responses, but fairly expensive & slow (5-7s inference)

I really just need an in-between for Flash and Flash Lite for cost and performance. Right now, users have to wait up to 7s for a quality response.
by ModernMech | 2025-12-17 16:55:04+00:00
I disagree, "vibe" characterizes how the LLM is being used, not that AI is being used at all. The vibe part means it's not rigorous. Using an LLM to autocomplete a line in an otherwise traditionally coded project would not be considered "vibe" coding, despite being AI assisted, because the programmer can easily read and verify the line is as correct as if they had typed it character by character.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-12-17 16:55:04+00:00
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/abandonment_(of_trademark)

> Abandonment of a trademark occurs when the owner of the trademark deliberately ceases to use the trademark for three or more years, with no intention of using the trademark again in the future. When a trademark is abandoned, the trademark owner may no longer claim rights to the trademark. In effect, this frees the trademark so that anyone else can use it without recourse from the original trademark owner.
by randomname4325 | 2025-12-17 16:55:10+00:00
Hear me out. I'm excited about this if it means making shopping better. I want a better shopping assistant. I want someone to do all the work for me (read reviews, do product spec comparisons, price, shipping etc) and just tell me what to buy for 85% of things I purchase online. ChatGPT has this potential, but sucks at it. I'm probably going to buy it on Amazon. Work together and it'll be magic for me.
by vegadw | 2025-12-17 16:55:27+00:00
I had a seaboard. They didn't catch on because the surface isn't very consistent, it's hard to actually hit a note and not bend without setting the "dead zone" pretty large, and the surface itself is just not a great texture to play on.

The ExpressiveE Osmose is proving to be quite popular. I have one, as do 3 other musicians I know personally. It's a very similar idea, but a lot more mechanical.

There's other options too. The Ableton Push 3, Linstrument, Haken Continuum, and a few other MPE synths/controllers all do a better job than the Seaboard by miles. The Osmose is my reccomendation for most people currently, based on the half dozen or so MPE controllers I've had my own hands on and it's price, but I'd love to get my hands on a Continuum.
by ge96 | 2025-12-17 16:55:38+00:00
Wrt temperature/randomization is it not possible for it to create something genuine. Even life there seems to always be some inspiration for things being made. How did Tesla go from Brushed to Brushless AC motors. There was some foundational knowledge of electricity similar to airplanes, the Wright Brothers their airplane seems backwards (like a canard) but still a plane/needs wings. Not something radical like ion engines for lift (much harder).
by thatoneengineer | 2025-12-17 16:55:42+00:00
One does not simply "get Rust performance".

Rust can go that fast because of guarantees its compiler enforces about what the code is doing, that JS emphatically doesn't.

By all means build your tooling and runtime in Rust if it helps, but "you can write high-performance code in JS with no Rust-like constraints" is fundamentally a nonsense pitch.