MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by marricks | 2025-12-18 19:37:08+00:00
Literally every other browser and most tech companies are shoving AI down users throats. Firefox isn't missing the boat by neglecting AI, they're missing it by being an alternative which reminds us how nice things can be without it.

The past 15 years has been a slow decline while they were trying to prove some relevancy outside of their core product. With mobile browsers being locked down a decline was going to happen anyways but if they stuck to their guns at least they wouldn't have wasted a bunch of money and maintained more of their base.

Who knows, their position sucks, but they're not going to win anyone by being the worst AI focused browser which happens to have an off switch.
by muzzio | 2025-12-18 19:37:12+00:00
Reviewing your own PR is underrated. I do this with most of my meaningful PRs, where I usually give a summary of what/why I'm doing things in the description field, and then reread my code and call out anything I'm unsure of, or explain why something is weird, or alternatives I considered, or anything that I would catch reviewing someone else's PR.

It makes it doubly annoying though whenever I go digging in `git blame` to find a commit with a terrible title, no description and an "LGTM" approval though.
by legitster | 2025-12-18 19:37:18+00:00
> PEN America defines a school book ban as any action taken against a book based on its content and as a result of parent or community challenges, administrative decisions, or in response to direct or threatened action by governmental officials, that leads to a book being either completely removed from availability to students, or where access to a book is restricted or diminished.

So I think one thing to keep in mind is that books added or removed from shelves based on the editorial choices of the library staff is not considered a book ban - and it's why books like Mein Kampf or Lolita don't also show up on these lists despite being very intentionally kept off the shelves by librarians.

Oftentimes school districts or libraries already have a system in place where offensive or non age-appropriate books can have restrictions placed on it based on parent or student feedback.

All this to say I think it makes book bans a bit muddier - in some instances they might be legitimate pushback on aggressive editorialization by librarians. But in most instances, they are self-obviously performative and unnecessary.
by wl | 2025-12-18 19:37:19+00:00
The valuable thing about the standard Egyptological pronunciation is that people can sit around a table, read a text, and understand what is being read without having to learn a strange new phonetic inventory. How close it sounds to the real thing is irrelevant for what it's used for. Anyone using phonetics to look at how Egyptian changed over time isn't using standard Egyptological pronunciation to do so. While Stuart Tyson Smith's reconstruction of an Egyptologist-approved dialect of Egyptian for the Stargate movie is pretty fun, it's not like we have any native speakers we can communicate with.
by bjourne | 2025-12-18 19:37:44+00:00
> Filtering content for children is not 'banning books'.

If "filtering content for children" is not banning books, then why is "filtering content for adults" banning books?

> By this definition, The Bible is the most "banned book" across the country

According to the source the high score is 147. Has the Bible been banned 148 times or more in the US?
by jfindper | 2025-12-18 19:37:56+00:00
>Which books and which law?

The one I was referring to:

https://www.sltrib.com/news/education/2024/08/02/utah-book-b...

"The law, which went into effect July 1, requires that a book be removed from all public schools in the state if at least three school districts (or at least two school districts and five charter schools) determine it amounts to “objective sensitive material”"

It seems like there may be more similar laws, per sibling comment.

>Aren't there other books that are banned for legitimate reasons like hate speech and racial hate that aren't included here?

I don't know, and I'm not sure how it is related to my comment. I did not create the list in the article and I don't maintain any other list of banned books.
by tsimionescu | 2025-12-18 19:37:58+00:00
There is an alternative possibility: you start out with a metabolic disorder, that will eventually grow into diabetes. Along the way, it will make you obese and cause (directly or indirectly) heart and kidney problems.

Unfortunately, since Ozempic treats diabetes with or without obesity, and it also treats obesity without diabetes, it won't help us figure out if obseisty is a cause or a side effect of diabetes. But there really is little reason to pretend it's clear either way.
by tptacek | 2025-12-18 19:38:13+00:00
That's odd, because I'm using plain-old-GPT5 as the backend model for a bunch of offensive stuff and I haven't had any hangups at all. But I'm doing a multi-agent setup where each component has a constrained view of the big picture (ie, a fuzzer agent with tool calls to drive a web fuzzer looking for a particular kind of vulnerability); the high-level orchestration is still mostly human-mediated.
by chlodwig | 2025-12-18 19:38:16+00:00
Reminder: a "book ban" is simply when a there is book that is acclaimed by the establishment, available in book stores across America, on the shelves of thousands of school libraries, but somewhere, some school board, or parent group does not want it in their curriculum or a tax-payer funded library. A "book ban" is parents and taxpayers overriding curation the decisions of government librarians.

It is simply a Russell conjugation: librarians curate books; parents and school boards ban books.

Personally, I don't trust librarians or school boards, and I put a lot of work into curating reading material for my own children. Many of the books I value are out-of-print, or unavailable in any public library, whereas almost all these so-called "banned books" are available in most public libraries. So yeah, these lists get a giant eye-roll from me.
Ask HN: How would you monetize an AI book-writing app?
by eibrahim | 2025-12-18 19:38:20+00:00
I built an AI-powered desktop app that helps write complete books - from brainstorming to publishing. I've used it myself to write 2 books for my kids.

The app walks you through 5 phases: brainstorm with AI, generate outline, develop characters, write chapters (AI maintains consistency across 50k+ words), then export to PDF/EPUB or publish to a bookstore.

It's local-first (SQLite, your data stays on your machine) and uses Google Gemini for generation. Users bring their own API key.

I'm genuinely stuck on monetization:

1. One-time purchase ($49-99?) - user brings own Gemini key 2. Free app + platform fee to publish on our bookstore 3. Free app + transaction fee on book sales 4. Subscription with included AI credits

Context: I'm a 25-year dev who's shipped ~15 side projects in the last 2 years thanks to AI productivity gains. This one feels like it has legs, but I keep second-guessing the business model.

For those who've monetized creative tools: what worked? What didn't?
by netsharc | 2025-12-18 19:38:29+00:00
I think Facebook did a study that making options opt-in means only a tiny tiny percentage of users will ever activate them. People never look around in settings.

I suppose if - after you click away the popup that says "Thank you for loving Firefox"(1) - a popup shows that says "Hey, hey, look at me, look we have this new feature, it'll blow you away. Do you want to enable it?" would be obnoxious but satisfies the idea of "opt-in".

(1) https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1791524 - I still remember how icked I was seeing this popup.
by amnaanwar | 2025-12-18 19:38:40+00:00
I met the Korbit founder and team at AI Dev World last year - smart, thoughtful group. The founder was deeply enthusiastic about their approach to PR analysis. They had a very academic, research-driven team behind the product, which showed in how rigorously they were approaching the problem. It was exciting work, and a good reminder of how much serious experimentation has been happening in AI code review over the past couple of years, even among teams that didn’t ultimately make it.
by nerdjon | 2025-12-18 19:38:40+00:00
I mean I get that point and I get what they think they are doing.

But (well until the last couple of years) you would have still seen "different" people on tv and in movies.

And I get that the point is to make it so the kids are not being exposed to different ideas and beliefs. I am just struggling to understand how that is actually a realistic idea in todays world.
by gorjusborg | 2025-12-18 19:38:41+00:00
Your actual job is to produce positive outcomes for your stakeholders. Code can be part of that, but doesn't have to be.

If you are dumping AI slop on your team to sort through, you are creating drag on the entire team's efforts toward those positive outcomes.

As someone getting dumped upon, you probably should make the decision (in line with the objective to producing positive outcomes) to not waste your time weeding through that stuff.

Review everything else, make it clear that the mess is not reviewable, and communicate that upward if needed.
by umanwizard | 2025-12-18 19:38:41+00:00
> simple, obvious answer to the effect of "yes, we understand extensions are a core feature of our browser and we plan to fully support extensions on Fenix and won't consider it done until we do". Instead, they talked about whitelisting a handful of extensions, and took three years from shipping Fenix as stable before they had a broad open extension ecosystem up and running again.

That answer is not as obvious to me as you claim it is. I don't use any browser extensions except 1password, which I would have no reason to use on a phone (at least assuming Android has builtin password manager functionality like iOS does).

I think you overestimate what fraction of people care about extensions.
by jfindper | 2025-12-18 19:38:48+00:00
>There's state-level law saying it's illegal to own or read some books on this list?

Sorry, I'll edit my comment to be more clear. It is illegal for school libraries to stock it, even if they (teachers, the district, the parents, etc.) want it to be carried.

As a reminder for readers, the title of the article contains "in U.S. schools". It is probably a safe assumption to use that context for the comments in this thread.
by canyon289 | 2025-12-18 19:38:55+00:00
Trust me as a daily at home Gemma user myself, I'm just excited for what's upcoming as you are, maybe even more because I have some hints for what's to come.

>My "dream" scenario is to have the "agentic" stuff run locally, and call into the "big guns" as needed.

FunctionGemma 270m is your starter pack for this, train your own functions to call out to whatever larger models you choose. It's been quite effective my testing, and the finetuning guides should show you how to add in your own capabilities.

Speaking from the research side its incredible how so many small models, not just Gemma, are achieving performance levels of must larger models from just a year or two ago. It's personally why I stay in this space.
by lukekim | 2025-12-18 19:39:08+00:00
CedarDB is a super cool project, we're fans!

CedarDB focuses on being a high-performance HTAP database whereas Spice's was built from day 1 to enable high-peformance data and search for data-intensive applications and AI.

So Spice natively has data acceleration, federation, hybrid-search (vector + BM25 full-text-search), and LLM inference in the core runtime so you can zero-copy data across them, which you would not normally see in a database like CedarDB.
by chasd00 | 2025-12-18 19:39:17+00:00
Yeah this is a strange way to define "banned books". I would think Hustler has to be universally "banned" in all US schools, it has to be in the top 10 most banned books. Or maybe because it's a magazine Hustler doesn't count so the author left it out...

The only books I can think of that are actually banned, as in it's against the law to obtain, in the US would be like a B2 bomber capability manual or some other classified documentation.
Show HN: Narrativee – Make sense of your data in minutes
by safoan_eth | 2025-12-18 19:39:42+00:00
Hi HN, I’m Safoan, founder of Narrativee.

We built Narrativee because we realized how it sucks it to get a clear picture from raw spreadsheet files. I found myself spending hours staring at rows and columns, trying to extract context and manually turn that data into documents I could actually share with my team.

The Problem Spreadsheets are great for calculation, but terrible for communication. To get the "story" behind the data, you usually have to screenshot charts or write long emails explaining what the numbers mean.

This is why we built Narrativee to remove that friction in minutes.

> You upload your spreadsheet (CSV/XLS), > Get an narrative document that explains the "what" and "why" behind your data > Edit & Share a readable report instead of raw numbers

We have a free plan, give it a try and let us know what we can improve !
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-18 19:39:44+00:00
> Somehow Codex for me is always way worse than the base models.

I feel the same. CodexTheModel (why have two things named the same way?!) is a good deal faster than the other models, and probably on the "fast/accuracy" scale it sits somewhere else, but most code I want to be as high quality as possible, and the base models do seem better at that than CodexTheModel.
by naravara | 2025-12-18 19:39:48+00:00
I’m reminded of a Reddit thread long ago about a reconstruction of Roman garum by some American scientists. In their paper they conclusively declared that it tasted foul and a Filipino Redditor replied saying “This actually sounds a lot like the fish sauce we use in SE Asia. I wonder if people from a different culinary tradition would find it less off putting or even tasty?” Cue a bunch of Redditors downvoting the poor sap to hell for daring to disagree with the scientists’ assessment of the flavor.
by dinkleberg | 2025-12-18 19:39:48+00:00
It depends on what you're building and if you're trying to build a business, or just make a few bucks on the side. If you're trying to build a business, your decision to open source it should be in service of that goal. Is it a developer tool/library with a commercial offering that builds on top of it where open-sourcing it is your main marketing source? If so, then that can be a solid strategy. But if they are just regular tools you're building, then likely there are far better marketing strategies than using open-source.

And that is great to want to give back with open source. But if you're just starting out on your business, then that is a major distraction from the main task at hand.
by alterom | 2025-12-18 19:40:30+00:00
>This whole thing just won't go away because many people are operating outside their area of expertise on this subject.

The point the author made in the article is that the reconstructors are well aware of this, and are, in a way, trolling the masses to raise awareness and attract attention to the classical art and museums.

Keeping history alive generally isn't a profitable enterprise.
by tptacek | 2025-12-18 19:40:41+00:00
Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by tastyfreeze | 2025-12-18 19:40:48+00:00
Without the banning method this is just click bait to sell books. Every book on a ban list is still easily available. It would be weird for something as explicit as a kama sutra book to be found in an elementary school library. It might be appropriate at a high school library. But any kid at any time can go to a public library or book store and find just such a book. The parents get to decide when sexually explicit material is appropriate for their children. Schools do the same by proxy. There is nothing wrong with this setup.
by catapart | 2025-12-18 19:41:05+00:00
I was about to use a quote to show you that "no, it's not like what is described in the thread", but you included the salient bit in the second quote, yourself.

It's not a gray area, and "opt-in" isn't something to be weasled-worded around. If the browser has the capability, I don't want it. I want to be able to add it with a plugin, and that's it. Plugins should have full control to whatever is necessary (same as adblock stuff; plenty of security but enough "user beware" to allow truly useful utilities). And AI features should all be plugins. Separate ones, if I had my way, but bundles if that makes more sense. I do not and will not need AI to browse. It's an enhancement. The core product (or at least ONE OF the products offered) should allow me to do without the enhancement. And opt in if I want to. There's nothing gray there, and I'm so fucking sick of mozilla trying to pull this "we disagree with common terminology" horseshit.
by cyberax | 2025-12-18 19:41:05+00:00
> I live in a big city with decent transit. I'm in my late 20s. Neither I nor any of my (white-collar professional) peers own cars. Do you have any idea how much money we save?

None. You're losing money by not living in a cheaper place and overpaying for transit. Transit is FREAKISHLY expensive in time and money, it's not even funny how inefficient it is.

> Our bike lanes are packed with bicycle couriers and the impact on traffic is practically zero.

So you're in Manhattan? Figures

> High rent is caused by low supply of high-density housing.

Wrong. Hint: Manhattan is one of the most expensive places in the US. And recently elected a socialist who was promising state-run grocery stores.

> Yeah, you know why people don't live in those places?

Because toxic urbanism strangled the democracy with bike lanes. There are no jobs because it's cheaper for companies to build offices in Downtowns of large cities, offloading the externalities.

This in turn makes housing near Downtowns more expensive because workers have to live there in order to get a job. This further increases the talent pool nearby, incentivizing more companies to open offices there.

Rinse, wash, repeat, and you get a misery-density housing spiral.
by i-dont-remember | 2025-12-18 19:41:13+00:00
I've been helping with a small portfolio of Slack apps under the brand https://happybara.io, including Nightowl (multi-DM broadcast for Slack, like BCC for email), and Channitor (channel management & auto-archiving).

It's been a really interesting journey making mistakes & learning from them. One mistake that made me feel foolish: I assumed no one would ever pay for one of the apps. A paywall was added "just in case" -> boom, customers almost immediately started signing up. I felt incredibly silly after that, especially for the number of times I've read on HN and similar sites "your work is valuable" and "charge more".
by pona-a | 2025-12-18 19:41:18+00:00
> You're very naive if you believe there is no way for the ISP to view your traffic just because you're over an https connection.

You seem to be under an impression an ISP's "Intercept Access Point" is somehow different from any downstream MitM. An ISP is certainly has more area than a coffee shop network, but the threat model stays mostly the same. Both I and Comcast can run tcpdump or mess with your packets to the extent cryptography permits.

There are only some realistic ways you could intercept a TLS connection, and that would be

1) For you to use TOFU, and the ISP to tamper with the initial key exchange. To stay undetected, you would have to ensure every vantage point after provides your compromised keys, expanding to potentially every cellular provider, home/business connections, and data-centers, potentially even outside your jurisdiction. This would be easiest if you could meddle near the backbone, until you realize the cost of deeply inspecting every packet, detecting the protocol, and transparently re-encrypting _all_ the internet. As soon as you verify out-of-band, even over a VoIP call, or the target crosses into a network you didn't compromise, your cover is blown. And you've only got shot at intercepting the key exchange, so you can't afford to be picky about who to target.

2) In practice, most traffic uses Certificate Authority roots from the browser's default set. As I've said before you can either plead with the citizens to install your intercept CA, or you can find one trusted by browsers without cross-jurisdictional threshold signatures and try to apply rubber hose cryptoanalysis until the rights certs get signed. A transparency log will mandate you publish your MitM cert onto an immutable global ledger, letting everyone know something fishy is going on. Your attack has succeeded, but at the cost of blowing your cover.

What an ISP, as well as me as a network admin, do see is the domain and IP, timing, and packet size. That does allow me to deduce a lot about you--large packets sent to whatsapp.com are probably images, many small ones may be a call. But that's about it unless you can get the keys.
by chaseadam17 | 2025-12-18 19:41:19+00:00
Agree it shouldn't be so binary. Only thing I'd add is that I believe it makes sense for schools to err towards restricting books until the upper age limit of "appropriate" because parents who choose to expose their kids to those topics earlier can still do so (e.g. by borrowing the book from the public library or giving their kid more permissive internet access) without having tax dollars used to undermine the values of those who don't. It's not an easy issue but for better or worse, I'd bet what books schools "ban" actually has fairly little impact on what kids are exposed to, so this might all be increasingly a mute point.
by canyon289 | 2025-12-18 19:41:39+00:00
So I didn't even know this was going to be made until recently, and when I saw it, it also blew my mind. I didn't realize how far along web ml community had pushed things, and was impressed by the creativity of the HF folks with visuals and "game flow".

Personally speaking its really neat to see other people who take these models and run with them, creating things I could haven't have imagined. I'm hoping many others in the open community do the same in the coming weeks and the new year
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-18 19:41:46+00:00
> When Claude screws up a task I use Codex and vice versa

Yeah, it feels really strange sometimes. Bumping up against something that Codex seemingly can't work out, and you give it to Claude and suddenly it's easy. And you continue with Claude and eventually it gets stuck on something, and you try Codex which gets it immediately. My guess would be that the training data differs just enough for it to have an impact.
by worik | 2025-12-18 19:41:47+00:00
What an outrageous list!

Mostly books about young people confronting the problems facing young people

A window into the minds of adults. A distorted window, I hope, or there is no hole for those adults

Protect children? Stop abusing, punishing and condemning them for being children. But no, ban books that might give them clues on coping

What outrageous behavior, bless the librarians
by tyfighter | 2025-12-18 19:42:15+00:00
Hardware bugs can be found during chip bring-up within the first couple of months back from the fab, but since I've worked in this area I've never actually seen a bug that couldn't be worked around. They happen, but they're rare and I've never experienced a chip needing a respin because of a bug.

There is documentation, but it's not as well organized as you might imagine. Documentation is usually only necessary when implementing new features, and the resulting code doesn't change often. There are also multiple instruction sets as there are a bunch of little processors you need to control.

Vulkan/DX12 aren't really "low-level" APIs. They're "low overhead", and honestly, no. Their code base is just as large and complicated, if not more so, than OpenGL/DX11.