MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by benmxrt | 2025-12-17 13:10:14+00:00
I want to be completely transparent here. Mephisto currently utilizes a few different upstream providers (including Guerrilla Mail and 1secmail) via a custom proxy layer to ensure high availability. The goal of this project isn't to build a new mail protocol from scratch, but to provide a hardened, cookie-free, and zero-persistence 'privacy frontend' that bridges the gap between these APIs and the end-user.

Regarding the AI claim: I've used modern dev tools to speed up the React/TypeScript implementation, but the architecture (RAM-only storage, IndexedDB caching, and PWA focus) is a deliberate design choice I've made to solve specific privacy frustrations I had with existing services. I appreciate the call for better attribution, and I'll be updating the 'About' section to clearly credit all upstream providers.
by CrazyStat | 2025-12-17 13:10:52+00:00
You can grasp for vague conspiracy theories about “the money printer”, or you can sit down and think about the concrete factors that make demand for labor (i.e. capital investments in buildings and equipment) less elastic than supply for labor. Here are a few:

- It’s fundamentally more difficult to raise and organize millions of dollars to build a factory and fill it with automatic weaving machines than it is for someone to train for a few weeks to become an automatic weaving machine operator.

- Various government regulations, from environmental protections and zoning laws that make it harder to build factories to safety regulations for operating factories, make it harder to open new factories and so decrease the elasticity of labor demand. I want to be explicit here that I am not saying these regulations are bad—but we must recognize the side effects they have.

- Long lead times on capital investments greatly increase the risk of market movements or technological advances making the business plan untenable before it gets off the ground.

- Organizational inertia slows staffing changes. Corporations often make decisions at glacial speeds. Want to hire a new team? Who is going to manage them? Who do they report to? Where will they work? These discussions can take up months, at which point the market has changed and ehhhh maybe we don’t want to hire a new team after all.

- High cost and difficulty of firing people makes hiring for a possibly short-term market opening less attractive. Think union contracts, severance pay, etc. Again, I want to be explicit that I’m not saying these are bad things, but we need to understand the effects they have.
by mrtksn | 2025-12-17 13:11:27+00:00
I think they are trying to balance it between making as much as money possible, risking being sued for monopolistic practices and risking exodus. Microsoft once overplayed their hand and the anger and consumer dissatisfaction was so strong that people left Internet Explorer en masse.

So the best situation for google would be to have borderline monopoly where they pay for the existence of their competition and the competition(Firefox) blocks adblockers too by default but leaving Chrome and Firefox is harder than forcing installin adblockers through the unofficial way.

So basically, all the people who swear they never clicked ads manage to block ads, Firefox and Chrome print money by making sure that ads are shown and clocked by the masses.
by arw0n | 2025-12-17 13:11:29+00:00
This whole thread is various people saying "[This] is trash, [that] is awesome", with the next person claiming the opposite. I suspect most people with strong negative opinions here know enough to have felt the pain, and not enough to be able to properly reason about the system.

I've worked with Github Actions, Gitlab-CI and CircleCI in the last 10 years, and they've all been such an improvement over Jenkins, or god forbid, CVS with manual deployments, that I'm generally just counting my blessings.

For me the pain only came when not adhering to KISS. All the mentioned VCS are pretty much feature complete and only really differ on meta-topics (cost, license, lock-in) or niche topics (Actions marketplace, matrix builds, SSH on Runners). I've not yet run into an issue that would have actually blocked me, because there's always sh to fall back to in case of a bug or missing feature.
by Bender | 2025-12-17 13:12:17+00:00
Eventually ran out of things to play with. Actions taken:

- Blackhole routed a few ASN's / data-centers. It's all spoofed packets but good to block data-centers regardless so we are not sending them syn-ack (good hygiene).

- Added a temporary rule when we encounter a syn-flood. [1]

End result: Input 20 packets in 17 seconds, Output syn-ack reply 20 packets in 4 minutes and 44 seconds. That should translate to an acceptable amount of syn-ack if we were actually attacked some day.

Impact: Before, we sent more syn-ack then I would have liked but there was overall no impact to Nginx as we use the "deferred" socket option [2]. Now we send far fewer syn-ack packets for good internet hygiene. Thank-you to the person using the syn flood tool.

[1] - https://mirror.newsdump.org/nftables.txt

[2] - https://mirror.newsdump.org/nginx/http.d/11_bad_sni.conf.txt
by PurpleRamen | 2025-12-17 13:12:28+00:00
Thanks, I think this was what I was searching. Strange that it's not appearing in my search-results.

Relevant part from the site: [..]Add-on usage measured here reflects multiple facets of browser customization, including web extensions, language packs, and themes.[..]

40% is a big minority, but not really what I would call core audience, especially when language packs and themes are also counted here. And 5 of the top 10-addons in that statistic are language packs.

Though, UBlock Origin is #1 with 9.6% user-share, and it's shown to have 10.5 million users on the store-page, which means there are at best only around 100 Million users left with Firefox on desktop? Seems worse than I thought.
by josephg | 2025-12-17 13:12:54+00:00
I've done this in production plenty of times. Under load, nginx is insanely efficient. Practically all the CPU time ends up spent in your nodejs application server.

The worst part of a setup like this is deployment. There's just a lot of little moving pieces - like nginx needs to keep track of which frontend servers are up and which are down. How are you doing load balancing? You want to have websocket connections? That makes it more complex. How do you deploy code? Etc. Its great, but its not at all simple. Configuring nginx feels like its a little puzzle all of its own.
by webdevver | 2025-12-17 13:13:57+00:00
reminds me of this remark made by Carmack on hidden surface removal

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6UKhR0T6cs&t=2315s

> "research from the 70s especially, there was tons of work going on on hidden surface removal, these clever different algorithmic ways - today we just kill it with a depth buffer. We just throw megabytes and megabytes of memory and the problem gets solved much much easier."

ofcourse "megabytes" of memory was unthinkiable in the 70s. but for us, its unthinkable to have real-time frame inferencing. I cant help but draw the parallels between our current-day "clever algorithmic ways" of drawing pixels to the screen.

I definitely agree with the take that in the grand scheme of things, all this pixel rasterizing business will be a transient moment that will be washed away with a much simpler petaflop/exaflop local TPU that runs at 60W under load, and it simply 'dreams' frames and textures for you.
by nickdothutton | 2025-12-17 13:14:02+00:00
Not being able to control the endpoint, like an operator can with a mobile phone, infuriates the police and politicians here. I don't want to go "full Stallman" here but although they do not use exactly these words... the idea of a general purpose computer you own and can program bothers them. Ironically at the same time they want a tech industry and tech jobs and young people entering the workforce with "tech skills". Keep in mind though that until relatively recently they though "tech skills" was being able to us MS Word. Thankfully the RPI helped a bit with that.
by nicoburns | 2025-12-17 13:14:03+00:00
If you don't trust the AI generated code yourself, then you wont benefit from it. And in fact all it does is take resources from the project that you work on, the one that's generating all the value in the first place.

There are strong parallels to the image generation models that generate images in the style of studio ghibli films. Does that benefit studio ghibli? I'd argue not. And if we're not careful, it will to undermine the business model that produced the artwork in the first place (which the AI is not currently capable of doing).
Show HN: 1,400 Yiddish quotes with translations and transliterations
by admtal | 2025-12-17 13:14:18+00:00
Hi everyone,

I helped my dad publish his yiddish quote book.

He was writing and collecting yiddish quotes in a private whatsapp group for 6 years.

I helped him by exporting his chat logs, and GPT APIs to translate and transliterate his quotes.

The quotes are ordered semantically as scored by https://huggingface.co/sentence-transformers/all-MiniLM-L6-v...

Originally, we wanted the quotes to be in categories & chapters, but so many of them transcend categories.

The semantic ordering is strange, but the flow felt right, which was neat.
by HPsquared | 2025-12-17 13:14:18+00:00
LLMs could be a boost to MOOCs because you can use them as a tutor to help with the material. People tend to have trouble finishing MOOCs, and it can be frustrating to get stuck on a particular aspect without much instructor support. Anything that makes it more interactive could help with both of those. I think LLMs are a great complement to MOOCs.
by grayhatter | 2025-12-17 13:15:05+00:00
CEOs are well known for turning down money, and always resisting the urge to squeeze every last drop of good will from an acquired property, right?

I think it's an apt warning, I'd have to read the literal interview transcripts to really draw a conclusion one way or the other. But the simple fact that this is on his mind, and felt like mentioning killing ad block was something Mozilla could do, and is considering doing, was a safe thing to say to a journalist... There's not a chance in hell I'd say anything remotely like that to a journalist.

When someone tells you who they are, believe them.
by iambateman | 2025-12-17 13:15:15+00:00
It’s remarkable to me that a major new competitor in online distributed learning hasn’t already happened, considering the obvious LLM application.

But this press release makes me sad. At one point both of these companies had big visions for how online learning should happen. To read the announcement, it sounds like they’re being held hostage by a management consultant. There is so much gobbledigook and so little clarity about how to help people learn.

These platforms lost because of YouTube…not AI.
by ffuxlpff | 2025-12-17 13:15:29+00:00
I use both uBO and NoScript and wondered if I really needed uBO if I blocked YouTube as I've planned.

However, it leads to Mozilla's earlier weird design choice where you have to install addon if you only want to disable JavaScript on sites - or allow it from only the selected domains.

Years later I haven't found a sensible explanation why they ditched that choice.

I've understood that you can still do it in Chrom(e/ium) and combined with a good updated blocklist in /etc/hosts or like it would provide most of the functionality of an adblock.
by MalikTerm | 2025-12-17 13:15:31+00:00
It's an interesting choice to suggest that the switch to Hepburn romanisation was motivated for a desire to better help English speakers pronounce Japanese words when tsunami is your example. The official Kunrei-shiki romanisation for つなみ is 'tunami', and I can promise you that nobody who visits Japan tells their friends and family that they visited Mount Huzi (ふじ). You would have a point if you had chosen something like Mitutoyo, but even then names are usually the exception when it comes to romanisation/anglicisation as official rules are less applicable, cf. Mitsubishi.

Still, something like 'sooonami' is particularly grating even if we ignore the pretentious BBC accent (I have heard tsu-na-mi on BBC shows to be fair). It could be because as you said the onset gets simplified to better fit English phonotactics like with other words: (ph)thalic acid, (p)terodactyl, kr(w)asan (croissant) in American English with a doubly 'wrong' t at the end, (k)nife, (g)nome, sometimes (g)nu, etc, but I don't think this is it. Su-na-mi sounds fine and this is how it's pronounced in Spanish and some other languages too, every language ends up 'mispronouncing' words if it doesn't fit nicely into the existing phonology. I think what bothers me the most about 'sooonami' is the stress inevitably gets placed on the second syllable which becomes 'nah' in non-rhotic accents which just sounds wrong, and in terms of Japanese phonology it's rare to place the stress on the middle syllable, never mind that the mora is wrong and the pitch accent is wrong, but I by no means speak Japanese.

As for why English even uses tsunami in the first place, maybe 'tidal wave' makes sense if that's what you grew up with or you live in a part of the world at risk of tsunamis, but I don't think I made the connection until I was an adult. Are all tides not waves? Tidal bore, tidal flood, storm wave, etc, sure, unusual events relating to the tide or weather, tidal wave fits if we ignore that they're not caused by the tide, but it doesn't seem comparable to me even if tidal wave isn't wrong and is synonymous.
by skydhash | 2025-12-17 13:16:23+00:00
TCP already provides a model for that one [0] and you can also use logical clocks [1], which is a more generic concept. Now that the whole reliability is out of the way and you're already using a queue for the ordering of the edits, then all you need to care is about the collaborative aspects.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_Control_Protocol#...

[1]: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/359545.359563
by Borg3 | 2025-12-17 13:16:27+00:00
I am more curious why you actually care? Are you doing Ruby coding for living? This seems the only valid reason.

I love Ruby, I write a lot of tools in it. When I need extras, I extend Ruby using C. Its easy to do and very clean. I even write simple GUI stuff in Ruby, because why not?

And I dont really care if Ruby is loved or not. Its Open Source. I made backup of all stuff I care about. Its easy to just rebuild if necessary :)
by yummypaint | 2025-12-17 13:16:42+00:00
If it's the computer of an older family member or something, just put Firefox and ubo on their system for them and be done with it. They will use whatever software is preloaded, and being shown how to use it is a much lower barrier to entry than the cognitive load of finding, vetting, installing, and configuring new software.

I used to try to patiently explain why people should do xyz. Now I explain to people why I'm going to change xyz on their device, and if they don't slam the breaks I just do what needs to be done right then. If someone doesn't know what an adblocker is they are getting one so they can see for themselves and reflect on what companies have been putting them through for years to make some incremental amount of money.
by phantasmish | 2025-12-17 13:16:49+00:00
> [3] I always associated tabs with Opera, though.

Yeah as someone who picked up Firefox when it was Phoenix, it was “free Opera with a less-odd-feeling UI”. That was basically the initial (great!) sales pitch.

What got me installing it on any computer belonging to a person I would have to help support was the auto-pop-blocking and that it performed a ton better than IE/Netscape/Mozilla. Opera also performed better and I think it also blocked pop ups out of the box, but it wasn’t free (well, kinda, but the free edition… had ads).
by Forgeties79 | 2025-12-17 13:17:33+00:00
If somebody is stealing from your bank account every week and you just don’t notice it, are you not being stolen from? Has nobody stolen your credit card and used it until the moment you notice the charges. I don’t really think we can go “if a tree fall in the forest and nobody is around to hear it…” about this.

Stallman has his opinions on software, I have my opinions on my visual work. I don’t get really how that applies here or why that settles this matter.
by heelix | 2025-12-17 13:17:33+00:00
Likely reddit

Many folks left Dig for their primary feed when they did the UI update. I think I switched over to Slashdot around that time. The multi selector for karma, on the comments and them changing usernames so my original no longer worked drove me to reddit as that prime feed for me, for about 10 or so years.

As reddit exploded... that main home switched to here. Not quite that same sense of community and always a grab bag of subject, so much closer to Digg/Slashdot feel. I never ended up doing facebook or some of the other social media sites. As reddit tried/tried to become that sort of space (with monetization!) it became something I was not looking for.
by throwawaysleep | 2025-12-17 13:18:05+00:00
One of the challenges is that few people are genuinely interested in a comprehensive view of a topic. Most of the time, I want just enough to get to the next step and get rid of a problem.

I never wish to learn about Docker. I want to know enough to get my containers running. In a pre-LLM world, I did take a course on Docker. I have learned my last bit of Docker in an LLM world.
by Zigurd | 2025-12-17 13:18:10+00:00
Cars and roads are built for human reaction times. That's why you have low speed limits in urban areas. You can have a pile of latencies attributable to processing a scene and still have superhuman reaction time that contributes to outperforming humans.

It's analogous to communications latency. High latencies are very annoying to humans, but below a threshold they stop mattering.
by benmxrt | 2025-12-17 13:18:20+00:00
You hit the nail on the head. From an SMTP perspective, 'replying' is functionally identical to 'sending,' which is why most disposable mail services are strictly receive-only.

The moment you allow outbound traffic, you risk being weaponized as an open relay for spam. To implement a safe 'Reply-Only' feature, Mephisto would need a sophisticated validation layer that cryptographically links the outbound reply to a specific, recently received message ID. Even then, rate-limiting would have to be extremely aggressive. For now, staying receive-only is a deliberate choice to protect the service's reputation and ensure 100% uptime.
by Aldipower | 2025-12-17 13:18:40+00:00
Yes, they have timestamps. But if you do buffer (or better to say, delay it), you introduce latency, which is even more worse then jitter. The ideal is 0 latency. And another downside with buffering, you would need to manifest the buffer time at all device you trigger to be the same time otherwise you do not stay in sync.

Edit: Actually midi note on events that are being sent to devices do _not_ have a timestamp! Only events that are persisted in a file may have timstamps.
by maccard | 2025-12-17 13:18:46+00:00
I was underwhelmed by uv as a tool when it was announced, and when I started using it. For context, I'm a C++ developer who occasionally has to dip into python-land for scripts and tooling. I set up a new workstation about 6 months ago and decided I'd just use pip + venv again, and honestly I lasted 2 weeks before installing UV again. It's one of those tools that... doesn't really do much except _what you wanted the original tool to do_, and I'm hoping that Ty has the same effect.
Show HN: Recession.fyi A simple dashboard of recession indicators no predictions
by guyl | 2025-12-17 13:19:08+00:00
I built a small tool to track core recession indicators in one place: https://recession.fyi/

The motivation was simple: economic headlines often feel emotional or contradictory, and I wanted a quiet page that lets me look at the underlying signals directly things like employment, manufacturing, consumer sentiment, and credit conditions without commentary.

This doesn’t predict recessions or make claims about the future. It just aggregates the data, updates automatically, and tries to present it as plainly as possible.

I’m mainly interested in whether the indicator selection makes sense, whether anything important is missing, and whether the layout feels clear or confusing at a glance. This is a first version, so blunt feedback is welcome.
by squigz | 2025-12-17 13:19:27+00:00
I wish opponents would realize this more - that there are very legitimate use-cases for stuff like this, to be actually helpful and used to improve society.

What I wish proponents would accept is that it won't just be used for those use-cases.

It's not an easy situation, especially when you consider the myriad other issues that feed into this.

Unfortunately, as much as I empathize with your position, as long as there is so much potential for abuse, and so long as trust in public institutions continues to erode, I cannot support stuff like this.
by ghaff | 2025-12-17 13:19:28+00:00
I'm not sure how much it has to do with LLMs.

It feels more like it was sort of a fad thing and, especially once any certification value essentially fell off the back of the truck (and therefore no one really willing to pay)--much less any real value delivered to people who weren't already autodidacts--it sort of faded away.

From where I was at the time Linkedin Learning (or whatever it was called) was a sometimes vaguely useful company benefit for random stuff but I'm not sure to what degree anyone even tracked who used it.
by p_l | 2025-12-17 13:20:01+00:00
- There's actual standard logic for remotely-existing objects vs. just RPC

- An object implementing multiple interfaces retains the same identity (niche thing but useful in my use cases)

- Somewhat larger scope of supported languages (very important that I don't have to start from scratch in few projects)

- Established patterns for discovery, naming, and few other cases (pretty much DIY on RPC systems)

That's just quick throw from memory.
by rurban | 2025-12-17 13:20:01+00:00
That's what we use when we can limit our loop count and recursion depth somehow. Prove it for small data, and infer from it for big data.

I use C and C++ model checkers, like cbmc and its variants (esbmc) successfully, but you need to adjust your tests and loops a bit. Like #ifdef __VERIFIER__ or #ifdef __CPROVER__ https://diffblue.github.io/cbmc/cprover-manual/index.html
Ask HN: What would you like to work on? (December 2025)
by akhilchaturvedi | 2025-12-17 13:20:02+00:00
You could post about projects you’re planning to start, ideas you wish existed, or even areas where you’re feeling stuck. That way, you can get some advice and suggestions from others.

Thanks to @fiftyacorn for suggesting this kind of post. I hope this becomes a monthly thing.
by jeroenhd | 2025-12-17 13:20:22+00:00
E2EE can work just fine with backup and sync. Signal chose not to do it for a long time and remains cautious, sticking to security over tolerating security-ignorant users.

WhatsApp is end-to-end encrypted, for instance, and it's used by billions. It being closed-source changes nothing about its feature set.

These days, Signal supports (encrypted, even cloud) backups just like WhatsApp or any other messenger.

The problem with UX for many of these apps is that they're designed for people who want to be sure that the government can't read their messages, but that's not something that's possible without compromising on the ease-of-use of SMS and other insecure methods. It's foolish to try to shove a Signal-shaped app into a SMS-shaped hole. I believe Signal's mobile app and (with a better underlying protocol) Telegram's cross-platform UX offer the best mix of secure and safe by default.