MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by _the_inflator | 2025-12-19 10:13:07+00:00
Yes, interesting shift in perspective that hackers now kind of use blackhat-techniques to do forensic analysis in regards to ownership. In the earlier days we cracked games to hypocritical free them of their perceived handcuffs. Hence "Free Software". Code was free and can be used and reused by anybody.

Of course due to litigation and legal implications the statements in Masters of Doom are intentionally vague. The same goes for the founder's talks. No one lied or portrayed themselves in a ubermensch fashion, it was just talking in corporate language speak when you are not allowed to provide more details in public. There seems to be serious legal risk and maybe it got solved or not, but judging from the book's perspective, I believe that they solved the issue in combination with a non-disclosure agreement.

I think that the "Great artists steal" mantra is especially applicable to ID's early days. And code reuse is simply a variance - stealing from yourself.

In no way does the usage of third party libraries damage the ID myths. For example, owning IP and authorship is not the same. Also: one can use a programming framework for a below average app while another one builds an awesome app.

And this is what's MoD underlying theme: going your own way because you see a chance while staying in the current context. In the end, ID did what Softdisk did: developing and publishing games. One only with moderate success while the other conquered the world.

Latin alphabet epitomizes this day by day. 26 letters which seem laughable, but a fool with a great tool is still a fool. ;)
by heavyset_go | 2025-12-19 10:13:49+00:00
When Microsoft completely integrates its LLM into Windows, would you rather give that access to your browser, or would you rather plug in your own local model / turn it off entirely while browsing?

If a global LLM becomes standard, I'd want to plug in my own local model or disable it entirely, but I don't think Microsoft nor Apple are going to open up their operating systems and make it easy to do that any time soon. The option to granularly use your own models is a plus to me in that situation.
by nottorp | 2025-12-19 10:15:42+00:00
> unable to equivocate what the fuck it's problems actually are

... or doesn't care to discuss it any more. RedHat's push was succesful, linux is not a hobby OS any more, you won.

I can agree with you that linux needed something better than sysv init.

I can't agree with you that this monolithic solution that takes over more and more services is better.

Oh, you want a specific complaint?

Why the fuck does systemd lock up the entire startup process for 2 minutes if you start a desktop machine without network connectivity?
by hackinthebochs | 2025-12-19 10:15:43+00:00
LLMs are extrapolation machines. They have some amount of hardcoded knowledge, and they weave a narrative around this knowledgebase while extrapolating claims that are likely given the memorized training data. This extrapolation can be in the form of logical entailment, high probability guesses or just wild guessing. The training regime doesn't distinguish between different kinds of prediction so it never learns to heavily weigh logical entailment and suppress wild guessing. It turns out that much of the text we produce is highly amenable to extrapolation so LLMs learn to be highly effective at bullshitting.
by uecker | 2025-12-19 10:15:55+00:00
There were certainly a lot of people running around claiming that "Rust eliminates the whole class of memory safety bugs." Of course, not everybody made such claims, but some did.

Whether it is "significantly easier" to manage these types of problems and at what cost remains to be seen.

I do not understand you comment about "confirmation bias" as did not make a quantitative prediction that could have bias.
by lodovic | 2025-12-19 10:16:35+00:00
So you buy a new TV, unpack and install it, and then when the whole family is gathered around, you suddenly get this confirmation on the TV if you agree with their T&C. Are you supposed to reject them and return the TV at this point? T&C should be part of the purchase agreement, instead of being forced upon the user while using the product after purchase. Any one-sided change of T&C after purchase should be invalid and punishable.
by physicsguy | 2025-12-19 10:16:35+00:00
> It’s as if every researcher in this field is getting high on the small amount of power they have from denying others access to their results. I’ve never been as unimpressed by scientists as I have been in the past five years or so.

This is absolutely nothing new. With experimental things, it's non uncommon for a lab to develop a new technique and omit slight but important details to give them a competitive advantage. Similarly in the simulation/modelling space it's been common for years for researchers to not publish their research software. There's been a lot of lobbying on that side by groups such as the Software Sustainability Institute and Research Software Engineer organisations like RSE UK and RSE US, but there's a lot of researchers that just think that they shouldn't have to do it, even when publicly funded.
by tliltocatl | 2025-12-19 10:17:41+00:00
> Didn't they say they will continue with Manifest v2?

Yes and that's a good thing

> Wasn't NPAPI mostly replaced with HTML5?

It's true that what NPAPI was used for 99% of the time is better served by HTML5. But it's not like NPAPI was limited to Flash and applets. Afair NPAPI plugins can access all native resources (which is the reason why the security sucked so much), HTML5 obviously can't. E. g. runtime code generation isn't particularly usable in WASM, so no JIT other than browser JIT for you. Then there are stuff like WebUSB/WebNFC/WebSerial that Mozilla killed. Not that they didn't have good reasons to do so, but having a native-exposing plugin system (with some friction, don't just install anything with a click) would have covered most of the use cases without being that much of a privacy problem.
by godelski | 2025-12-19 10:19:01+00:00
> the cost of having a full LLM integrated into every browser install

What's this even mean?

There's no fucking way there's going to be a "full LLM integrated into every browser." You really think they're going to drop in a 20GB-200GB model with every browser? Mind you, Llama-8B is over 15GB.

Nah. So far they are doing about 50MB per language translation that you ask for[0]. You have to explicitly install languages to translate.

There's neither "a full blown LLM" (whatever that means) nor forcing AI onto you. You still have to download the language packs, they are just offering an extension that more seamlessly integrates with the browser.

And we know what they're building too! Go look in the "Labs" tab and you'll see an opt-in for testing a semantic search of your history. That doesn't take an LLM to do, that takes a vector embedding model. What next? Semantic search in page? How terrible of a feature! (But seriously, can we get regex search?)

[0] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2022/06/neural-machine-translation...
by thinkingemote | 2025-12-19 10:19:06+00:00
Active and passive voice can also be a pattern among others but obviously not a disorder on it's own - more like an insight into viewpoint or thinking

"I was kicked out of the conference by the organizers"

"The organizers kicked me out of the conference"

and

"He was kicked out of the conference by me"

"I kicked him out of the conference"
by diputsmonro | 2025-12-19 10:19:48+00:00
I wonder why nobody wants to use my pretty theft machine? I mean, it steals all their work and spits out copies that are almost as good, and almost for free! Why aren't these artists stoked about not having to do art anymore?

Well, I guess it does use more energy than every existing data center, driving up costs for basic electronic components and thereby making every electronic device more expensive.

And I guess the results aren't quite as good, but if you squint and don't really care about art on a human level and just want to clap like a seal at the pretty pictures then it's enough.

And I guess economic forces will mean that some of them will lose their jobs when their bosses realize that they can get away with only needing half as many prompt artists.

But hey, at least we don't have to pay humans to make art anymore. How glorious that our Silicon Valley gods have delivered us from the hell of creating economic incentives for humans to express themselves to other humans.

Yeah, those screaming, "indoctrinated" artists are so impolite and crazy, aren't they? Don't they realize what we've done for them? We made the automatic art machine! They'll never get to make art again!
by Captaindiallo | 2025-12-19 10:20:21+00:00
Hi, Amadou here, Co-founder of PROTEGEY.

PROTEGEY is a fraud, risk, and compliance platform built specifically for high-risk, cross-border African markets, starting with Francophone & Northern Africa.

We’re launching our 150-day Freemium Beta to support fintechs, banks, and digital lenders looking to operate leaner while scaling safely.

I’d love your feedback on: - Our positioning – Our API & workflows – What you think is missing in fraud tools for emerging markets

Thanks for checking us out — happy to answer questions!

diallo@protegey.com

protegey.com
by jeroenhd | 2025-12-19 10:20:40+00:00
That depends on how terrible the middleboxes those corporate environments use are. If they only block actual malicious pages, it shouldn't be a problem unless the user un-hides the links and clicks on them.

There's a good chance corporate firewalls will end up blocking your domain if you do this but that sounds like a problem for the customers of those corporate firewalls to me.
by exceptione | 2025-12-19 10:20:53+00:00
I am talking about the economy in the Western model, it works well if there is competition. And it usually needs the state to do moonshots, like the literal moon shot or Silicon Valley. But the American economy was the most impressive during the Roosevelt years. The war production was insane, with 75% state planned, state built and state owned factories. The private sector was dominated by oligarchy owned monopolies, which means it wasn't impressive¹. The government had no time for conservative fairy tales and needed to take initiative.

What helped was the public outrage over the insane profits the American oligarchs reaped during WOI. This enabled Roosevelt during WOII to set a maximum profit margin for the oligarchy owned factories and fined those who evaded the law. It was a shock for the conservatives to see how the bureaucracy turned America's mediocre output around with a fast, efficient and lean production monster. The monopolists had to resort to propaganda, claiming the government's success as theirs, injecting the falsehoods we now all take for granted.

___

1. As an exercise, think what would be possible if all the cash piles didn't sit at big tech, but instead enabled competition. Meta isn't still more than a useless addiction factory.
by pjc50 | 2025-12-19 10:20:55+00:00
> The buttons offered to you are "FUCK OFF AND NEVER, EVER BOTHER ME AGAIN"

I've already hit that option before reading the other ones.

> "On search engine result pages and social media sites, use a local LLM to identify headlines, classify them as clickbait-or-not, and for clickbait headlines, automatically fetch the article in an incognito session, and add a small overlay with a non-clickbait version of the title"

Why would you bother fetching the clickbait at all? It's spam.

The main transformation I want out of a browser, the absolutely critical one, is the removal of advertising. I concede that AI might be decent at removing ads and all the overlay clutter that makes news sites unreadable; does anyone have the demo of "AI readability mode"? Crucially I do not want it changing any non-ad text found on the page.
by ulrikrasmussen | 2025-12-19 10:22:06+00:00
It's not clearly labeled, it is a very small label with white text on a pale blue background in an already very busy UI. It is clearly made to look like a real search result and not an ad. On top of this, the screenshots are clearly made to mislead the user into thinking that this is the officiel Microsoft authenticator app by having a large text saying "Authenticator for Microsoft" and a second screenshot with a "Microsoft" TOTP entry.

This is an example of a company whose financial incentives are in direct conflict with the interests of their users, and so they choose to be complicit in borderline fraudulent auctivities.
by globular-toast | 2025-12-19 10:22:34+00:00
Some things like semiconductor fabrication will have huge barriers to entry for the foreseeable future due to being massively capital intensive and involving lots of trade secrets etc. We can't really do much about this.

What we (ie. the government) can do is ensure no entities own the entire supply chain, so you can't run a fab and also market finished consumer goods. That way, manufacture of consumer goods (including the software) from the raw fabricated parts gets a much lower barrier to entry.

We can also force consumer manufacturers to advertise all "features" that we deem to be important. We already do things like energy ratings, why not privacy ratings too? The more information consumers have the better.

Make no mistake, any capital intensive industry like electronics will degenerate into an oligopoly without government, or you can dream of a day where everyone can print semiconductor wafers at home.
by dajt | 2025-12-19 10:23:22+00:00
I assume uploading to arXiv doesn't count as having published a peer reviewed journal article, which is a problem for professionals.

For example, for me to progress in my current job I either need a doctorate or to have published a number of peer-reviewed articles in recognised journals as first author. I have written two IETF RFCs and these count for nothing.

I am not a scientist, I am a software developer. I am not employed as a scientist, I am employed as a software developer. But the rules of the organisation are thus.
Show HN: CodexPad – a Notion-style workspace with Vim-native editing
by Animesh0764 | 2025-12-19 10:23:37+00:00
This is an early validation landing page for CodexPad. The idea: a knowledge-base / editor like Notion, but made for devs who prefer Vim-style text manipulation and command-driven workflows.

At this stage I’m validating interest before building out the backend. Would love feedback, including why this may or may not be useful.
by kaycey2022 | 2025-12-19 10:24:14+00:00
I don't see why copying is unnatural or even bad. Maybe within a single economy or a group of economies which share a common understanding and laws, chosing to discourage copying to incentivise other citizen innovators makes sense.

But in the global context, between adversarial nations, or even countries that don't see each other as equal, it is absolutely foolish not to copy. Since everything is framed in terms of game theories, what is even the benefit of not copying and being a "good boy" country?

In fact in this situation a country's IP is almost its liability and not its asset. Because it should cost the holding country money and resources so their citizens' IP is protected. And these resources are better off preserved for more crucial knowledge.

None of this even makes the copier's actions bad or immoral. They have a moral imperative to succeed.
by _the_inflator | 2025-12-19 10:24:43+00:00
I agree partly.

Skills are essentially boiling down to distributed parts of a Main Prompt. If you consider a state model you can see this pattern: Task is the state and combining the task's specifics skills defines the current prompt augmentation. When the task changes, another prompt emerges.

In the end, it is the clear guidance of the Agent that is the deciding factor.
by godelski | 2025-12-19 10:24:55+00:00
> most people interpret that as "LLM integration", not the page-translation feature that's been around for ages.

Which seems to be the problem. People don't even realize they're being irrational, despite Mozilla being quite transparent about what they're doing. It's pretty clear.

I mean a Firefox download is 150MB, not 16GB...

Plus, we know what Firefox is looking to do. In their labs tab they let you opt into trying out semantic search of your history. So that's a vector embedding model, not an LLM.

Edit:

Okay, they have "Shake to summarize". But that's a shortcut to Apple Intelligence. Nothing shipped with the browser. Similarly I don't understand how the chatbot window is so controversial. I̶'̶m̶ ̶n̶o̶t̶ ̶s̶u̶r̶e̶ ̶w̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶s̶h̶o̶r̶t̶c̶u̶t̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶o̶n̶ ̶l̶i̶n̶u̶x̶ ̶o̶r̶ ̶w̶i̶n̶d̶o̶w̶s̶,̶ ̶but are people really pressing <C-x> on a mac or ctrl+alt+x on linux/windows? It's not a LLM shipped with the browser, it is just a window split ("shortcut") to literally one of the most popular websites on the internet right now (ChatGPT is literally the #5 most visited website and you all think AI is unpopular?!). Adding shortcuts isn't shoving AI down your throat. Are they shoving Wikipedia down your throat because you can do "!w hacker news"? Give me a break guys
by fractallyte | 2025-12-19 10:25:32+00:00
Totally agree.

On the rare occasions when I'm forced to use Word, I find it an incomprehensible mess. I don't understand why users continue to tolerate it.

There is other software: LibreOffice and SoftMaker Office are close enough to be familiar to any casual user, and WordPerfect was always an excellent word processor!
by willis936 | 2025-12-19 10:26:14+00:00
Where do profits fall? In several quarters when users vote with their wallet and let you know about your decisions to disrespect them and reduce their trust in you. It isn't about maximizing profits, otherwise they wouldn't make shortsighted choices. It's cashing in on goodwill that took decades to build. We are a far cry from "only the paranoid survive".
by arrrg | 2025-12-19 10:26:50+00:00
How do you think public discourse spaces are created? By approaching and talking to people when you write about them! That doesn’t just magically happen …

I merely would have expected some humility when you characterize the work of other scholars from the outside without even talking to them. (Outside here is relative. Whenever you talk about scientific of scholarly work without talking to the people who do the work you are on the outside.)

If those scholars don’t want to talk to you, fair enough, probably no humility needed. If you don’t want to talk to them (which, fair enough, not everyone is cut out or wants to do journalistic work) you better be humble and maximally charitable, though.
by rldjbpin | 2025-12-19 10:27:01+00:00
i don't think this is as much as an AI issue as it is about path of least resistance in a velocity-driven environment.

call me the worst junior dev in the industry, but pre-coding agents, closing tickets was more important than upholding absolute quality. not everybody is dealing with a billion concurrent users with multi-geo deployments. most of the time, a few screenshots or test output for manual validation is enough to go ahead. when pressed with time and without the prerequisites in the infra side, doing the absolute best development and testing is a luxury only for daydreamers.

automated testing can be a double-edged sword. pre-LLM, even test coverage was a number that somehow needed to go up after each PR. this only resulted in shady tactics of pointless test cases that slowly bring up the metric. today it can be very dangerous if both code and its test suite are vibe coded. especially when it can give the appearance of that 90%+ code coverage.

on the other hand, some manual testing to make sure the core functionality works is the bare minimum one does before pushing out code. at least i would like to believe it is.
by Tepix | 2025-12-19 10:27:05+00:00
Linux already has RDMA support but it cannot yet use Thunderbolt. It's probably quite a bit of work to add everything that's required. Is anyone working on it?

It would be great to have this for those cheap Strix Halo boxes with 128GB quad channel DDR5-8000 for using two or three of them with their 2 USB4 ports (which are Thunderbolt capable) to fit larger models.
by alexnewman | 2025-12-19 10:28:11+00:00
All of the US military is a waste including 6th generation fighters. We hope china copies our disinformation campaign. In fact as the usa has been taken apart almost all of our big secrets are just disinformation

- stealth (not really) - aliens (sure....) - 6th gen jets (where are the jets?)

The reality is that everything that you do in peacetime is just to scare the enemy and will have very little effect in war. Since the US doesn't have as much industrial capacity the only winning war is nuke from space first or learn to get along
by dns_snek | 2025-12-19 10:28:28+00:00
What I was getting at is that running LLMs in a loop doesn't really address those concerns at all. You simply get more information, it doesn't do anything for the correctness of that information.

Any patterns it identifies could be imaginary, and you don't have any indication of confidence that all relevant trends have been identified. The most valuable patterns are likely going to be the most hidden and easily missed - those are the ones people are paid to find, not just the low hanging fruit that can be identified with basic statistics.

In the same way that asking an LLM to review some code might produce a hundred superficial comments and miss the things that actually matter.
by cess11 | 2025-12-19 10:28:44+00:00
They are very popular and make quite good products, but as you noticed it can be tricky to find them in stock.

Besides stuff like this switch they've also produced pretty cool little micro-switches you can PoE and run as WLAN hotspots, e.g. to distance your mobile user device from some network you don't really trust, or more or less maliciously bridge a cable network through a wall because your access to the building is limited.
by Certhas | 2025-12-19 10:29:15+00:00
Maybe you haven't been paying much attention in this space. Google found empirically that error density in _unsafe_ Rust is still much lower than in C/C++. And only a small portion of code is unsafe. So per LOC Rust has orders of magnitudes fewer errors than C/C++ in real world Android development. And these are not small sample sizes. By now more code is being written in Rust than C++ at Google:

https://security.googleblog.com/2025/11/rust-in-android-move...

But don't take my word for it, you can hear about the benefits of Rust directly from GKH:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=HX0GH-YJbGw

There really isn't a good faith argument here. You can make mistakes in Rust? No one denies that. There is more C code so of course there are more mistakes in C code than in Rust? Complete red herring.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-12-19 10:29:20+00:00
Mostly inaccurate clickbait. On US iPhone, they're playing games with iOS 18 users to only offer 26 using dark patterns that are escapable by joining the 18 beta program, which is currently offering 18.7.3 with similar security content as 26.2. 18 should be supported until around 2026 or 2027, depending on if/when 27 will be released. On iPad, they're not currently playing games with 18 updates.

tl;dr: Problem solved by joining 18 beta.
by _jsmh | 2025-12-19 10:29:26+00:00
A different way to not require journals to be the arbiters of quality is to let the truth itself be the arbiter of quality instead of designate gatekeepers.

1. Open peer-review to anyone interested instead of only select few. HN is an example of this phenomenon but not for novelty specifically.

2. Permit publication of papers that are shorter for results to spread faster. AI papers are a good example of this phenomenon.