MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rvz | 2025-12-17 09:20:03+00:00
The EU can only fine US tech giants because it's good at suffocating its own European companies with some of its members states having one of the highest taxes and subject to the EU's regulations.

It's no wonder AI startups like Mistral (France) are so dependent on US VCs and the same is true with Lovable (Sweden) who were able to grow faster than Europe trying to strangle them.

Since there are rare startup home-runs that are from Europe, the EU instead needs find a way to impose fines on US big tech companies. They (EU) will certainly do the same with the Big AI companies very soon.
by numpad0 | 2025-12-17 09:20:56+00:00
MS-IME or Google Japanese Input. (whatever)-Mozc on Linux. Use "IME On" mode for Japanese, "IME Off" mode for alphanumeric text inbetween.

"shio ha natoriumu[Space][Return][ImeOff](Na)[ImeOn] to enso[Space][Return][ImeOff](Cl)[ImeOn] kara dekite imasu[Return]" -> "しおはなとりうむ(Na)とえんそ(Cl)からできています" -> "塩はナトリウム(Na)と塩素(Cl)からできています" (NOTE: spaces added for legibility)

Most Japanese users use this "romaji" input - which is more vibe heuristics based and not highly consistent with existing romanizations hence the change. Some use "kana" with full 51 Hiragana symbols on JIS keyboard(with ろ/backslash/underscore key to left of RShift, which makes it incompatible with ISO). I think "most people don't do this anymore" remarks refer to the fact that everyone's on the phone, and uses the "flick" input.
by igornotarobot | 2025-12-17 09:21:11+00:00
TLA+ is just a language for writing specifications (syntax + semantics). If you want to prove anything about it, at various degrees of confidence and effort, there are three tools:

- TLAPS is the interactive proof system that can automate some proof steps by delegating to SMT solvers: https://proofs.tlapl.us/doc/web/content/Home.html

- Apalache is the symbolic model checker that delegates verification to Z3. It can prove properties without executing anything, or rather, executing specs symbolically. For instance, it can do proofs via inductive invariants but only for bounded data structures and unbounded integers. https://apalache-mc.org/

- Finally, TLC is an enumerative model checker and simulator. It simply produces states and enumerates them. So it terminates only if the specification produces a finite number of states. It may sound like executing your specification, but it is a bit smarter, e.g., when checking invariants it will never visit the same state twice. This gives TLC the ability to reason about infinite executions. Confusingly, TLC does not have its own page, as it was the first working tool for TLA+. Many people believe that TLA+ is TLC: https://github.com/tlaplus/tlaplus
by MrAlex94 | 2025-12-17 09:22:03+00:00
I disagree that it’s fear mongering. Have we not had numerous articles on HN about data exfiltration in recent memory? Why would an LLM that is in the drivers seat of a browser (not talking about current feature status in Firefox wrt to sanitised data being interacted with) not have the same pitfalls?

Seems as if we’d be 3 for 3 in the “agents rule of 2” in the context of the web and a browser?

> [A] An agent can process untrustworthy inputs

> [B] An agent can have access to sensitive systems or private data

> [C] An agent can change state or communicate externally

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/2/new-prompt-injection-pa...

Even if we weren’t talking about such malicious hypotheticals, hallucinations are a common occurrence as are CLI agents doing things it thinks best, sometimes to the detriment of the data it interacts with. I personally wouldn’t want my history being modified or deleted, same goes with passwords and the like.

It is a bit doomerist, I doubt it’ll have such broad permissions but it just doesn’t sit well which I suppose is the spirit of the article and the stance Waterfox takes.
by concinds | 2025-12-17 09:23:16+00:00
The EU has an extremely fragmented digital internal market, laws that suck for startups in most places, worse capital markets and funding mechanisms (and related laws), and doesn't have a Silicon Valley. It also underinvests in R&D and doesn't have a DARPA.

So yes, just tariffing or restricting US tech wouldn't help much. Europe "lost" that race fair and square. It needs to focus on fixing all those things.
by tmountain | 2025-12-17 09:23:18+00:00
I guess it depends on your objectives when engaging with others on these topics. If you're just trying to foment unhappiness in an echo chamber, then you can use whatever vocabulary feels accurate, but people tend to shutdown when they hear trigger words like fascism. If you actually want to talk to someone that may not have the same viewpoint as you and have a chance of a productive conversation, it's better to use less loaded language.
by input_sh | 2025-12-17 09:23:48+00:00
None of those are products, those are companies that offers 100s of products.

The question is not is there as an alternative to Google-as-a-whole, but is there an alternative to Google Search (yes), to Google Analytics (yes), to Gmail (yes), to Google Ads (yes, but not really), to YouTube (no), and to Android (yes, but not really).

Having a European mega-company that offers 100s of tightly-integrated products shouldn't be the end goal, that's just swapping one monopoly with another. We need a healthly ecosystem where there are hundreds of separate companies each solving 1-5 use cases.
by concats | 2025-12-17 09:24:08+00:00
“I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:

1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.

2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”

― Douglas Adams
by tialaramex | 2025-12-17 09:25:23+00:00
>> It’s not actually true that you need to redesign all the APIs in the stdlib. You just need to document the appropriate restrictions on how they may safely be used [..]

That's exactly the problem. Notice how that C API qsort has basically the same affordance as the Rust sort_unstable (except it is type erased) but it has a lot more restrictions because C was a New Jersey language, what matters is that it's easy to implement. So you need to figure out (for some of the API I expect this may be a many years study) what the requirement are that you're going to document.

Or, which I'm confident will often be faster, reform the API and provide the thing programmers actually wanted anyway, the "Right Thing", which means more work for an implementer of your "Safe C" and also, which was my point, actually does get you a safer result after all.
by PunchyHamster | 2025-12-17 09:25:28+00:00
> I honestly don’t know why these things are so expensive. I’m guessing it’s a premium from the brand name, as well as quality assurance.

Being used mostly by medical (a small market with relatively rich companies) is the reason. It's a lot of testing to make proper one for not too massive market so the price is "eh, they can't be arsed to try to DIY that" basically
by matwood | 2025-12-17 09:26:18+00:00
Possibly. Until recently, anyone who was in tech wanted to move to the US because there was simply more opportunity. Salaries are higher, chances of making it big are higher, failing is often seen as a positive in the US, etc... The adage that the best place to make money is the US and the best place to spend money is the EU still rings true.

The US become less welcoming to immigrants is a great opportunity for the EU, but it remains to be seen if they will be able to take advantage and overcome the structural differences.

https://www.challenge.org/insights/structural-differences-in...
by crazybonkersai | 2025-12-17 09:27:00+00:00
It is shocking how openly US planning a war of aggression against Venezuela and the whole civilized world is just fine with it. EU could grow a pair and show the US that this type of behaviour is not accepted. Sanction the fuck out of the US regime, boot off Swift, kick American companies out of the EU market, barren American citizens from travelling to EU. EU can prevent this war, while it is not too late.
by denys_potapov | 2025-12-17 09:27:04+00:00
As the author of a JS-to-OCaml compiler [1], I must admit that Poe’s Law applies here [2]:

“Without a clear indicator of the author’s intent, any parodic or sarcastic expression of extreme views can be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of those views.”

[1] https://dev.to/denyspotapov/porting-is-odd-npm-to-ocaml-usin...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law
by TheCapeGreek | 2025-12-17 09:27:51+00:00
I haven't tried this myself, but from speaking with peers who are deeper into coding with LLMs, they recommended to try out something like Playwright MCP.

The idea is that you'd use Playwright as a way to automatically give "visual" feedback to the agent, so that it can a) get more accurate with designs it might implement with your chosen frontend styling tech (tailwind, UI kits, etc) and b) be able to iterate on a design without you constantly feeding images into it.
by wkat4242 | 2025-12-17 09:28:42+00:00
On the other hand a lot of these startups and tech companies are a net negative for the world. Externalise problems and pollution, internalise profits. We don't want society to be only decided by those who make the most money. That's why we have those laws.

I personally don't want the EU to become the US. And Investors gambling with other people's money is what gave us the world financial crisis of 2007. No lessons were learned as usual.
by david_allison | 2025-12-17 09:30:07+00:00
The Rust backend code is shared between all platforms (Desktop, Android, iOS and Web). This wasn't feasible with the Python code.

From an Android (AnkiDroid) perspective, it's allowed us to remove most of our code which was manually ported from the Python backend, with guaranteed 1:1 compatibility with upstream.

We've moved from being years behind upstream to being able to release in tandem with the Desktop app.

We also migrated to common screens written in Svelte, to reduce the maintenance burden of UI changes for screens with high churn (Deck Options being the primary example).
by wkat4242 | 2025-12-17 09:30:12+00:00
Same with Holland. The tax office is moving away from their own office package onto m365 right now. They apparently had an alternative all this time, which I find very surprising (the media didn't really elaborate on this).

But Holland, Ireland, UK are the most neoliberal countries in Europe, they worship America and believe that the market solves everything. The rest of europe doesn't share that sentiment to the same extent.
by throwaway13337 | 2025-12-17 09:31:11+00:00
The tariff talk was ostensibly because the EU exported more goods to the US than the US exported to EU.

The US exports far more digital services to the EU, though.

Understanding those things, it would seem a particularly unwise framing for the US government to focus on EU digital services exports.

LLMs are rapidly commoditizing software, and in particular making it far easier to handle the regulatory compliance and regional fragmentation that have traditionally held back software companies in the EU. Combine that with growing concerns about software trust, and the EU looks like an increasingly attractive bet for future software investment.

Ironic, then, that Europe seems slowest to adopt the very tool that could finally solve its fragmentation problem.

Two governments, two very different strategies to cripple themselves. The race is on.
by palata | 2025-12-17 09:32:17+00:00
> My projects are public anyway.

My point was that they profit from accessing your code, which is why they made it free in the first place. Now they make you pay because they believe they will make more profit. But they certainly weren't losing money before.

> If you respect the license and make the AI comply to valid license reuse

I think that the de facto situation is that AI does not have to know about licences or copyright at all. If they hack your computer to train their AI, the illegal part is that they hacked your computer, not that they trained their AI with the stolen data.
by lelanthran | 2025-12-17 09:32:40+00:00
> I don't want to be that contrarian guy, but I find it energizing to go faster. For example, being able to blast through a list of niggling defects that need to be fixed is no longer a stultifying drag.

It depends. No one is running their brain at full-throttle for more than a few hours on end.

If your "niggling" defects is mostly changes that don't require deep thought (refactor this variable name, function parameters/return type changes, classes, filename changes, etc), then I can see how it is energising - you're getting repeated dopamine hits for very little effort.

If, OTOH, you are doing deep review of the patterns and structures the LLM is producing, you aren't going to be doing that for more than a few hours without getting exhausted.

I find, myself, that repeatedly correcting stuff makes me tired faster than simply "LGTM, lets yolo it!" on a filename change, or class refactor, etc.

When the code I get is not what I wanted even though it passes the tests, it's more mental energy to correct the LLM than if I had simply done it myself from the first.

A good example of the exhausting tasks from today - my input has preprocessing directives embedded in it; there's only three now (new project), so the code generated by Claude did a number of `if-then-else-if` statements to process this input.

My expectation was that it would use a jump table of some type (possibly a dictionary holding function pointers, or a match/switch/case statement).

I think a good analogy is self-driving cars: if the SDC requires no human intervention, then sure it's safe. If the SDC requires the human to keep their hand on the wheel at all time because it might disengage with sub-second warnings, then I'm going to be more tired after a long drive than if I simply turned it off.
by spwa4 | 2025-12-17 09:32:58+00:00
No, all parts of Italy (and frankly all of Europe) have a doctor shortage. It just goes from "2 months waitlist for primary care physician if it's not urgent" all the way up to "over a year even for critical care". And yes, richer areas have more doctors though the country is by far the biggest factor.

And this all gets confused by the fact that countries have regulations and make their own situation, making everything complicated. So, for instance, despite bad primary care in Southern Italy, the mental care is actually supposed to be pretty good. By contrast, Eastern Europe, specifically Romania, has terrible mental care but good primary care, including areas that aren't so wealthy.
by bobdvb | 2025-12-17 09:34:25+00:00
We waste so much resources in storing/transiting data in human readable forms. Ultimately it's binary, we already use software to display it, requiring the data be in forms that are human readable just wastes resources.

If the data spends more time being executed than read by humans it doesn't deserve to be human readable.

Use binary packed data and have an AI write you an interpreter for the structure.
by mirzap | 2025-12-17 09:35:05+00:00
Yes, I agree that "source available" is an accurate description. Unlike "Open Source" licenses, which have no restrictions, "O'saasy" does not allow you to do "anything" you want. Adding a clause like "but you can't compete with us" makes it incompatible with OSS licenses.

I am fine with licensing your code as you wish, but I will always oppose attempts to redefine the widely understood and established meaning of "open source" that has been in place for over 30 years. You don't get to change its definition.
by belorn | 2025-12-17 09:36:04+00:00
Ubuntu freeloaded on Debian so its fairly reasonable to consider the ubuntu skin to not be worth having if the result is advertisements being pushed onto users.

Companies that want to freeload on a free software community will always have a hard time. They may be praised in the beginning if they bring fresh and new energy, but trust is only going to work for so long until the "monetization features" starts being pushed. Historically that only works if the company reforms the original in such a way that it essentially is a completely different thing. Ubuntu today is still just a skin over Debian that users can easily replace.

Accidentally the best thing Ubuntu brought to Debian was the release schedule, which the Debian community adapted. Without that advantage there isn't much point to Ubuntu unless Canonical continuously pour a lot of money and developer time for free into the ecosystem. A lot of people commented at the time that such a thing wasn't sustainable.
by graycat | 2025-12-17 09:37:16+00:00
As I read the post by MrAlex94, I noticed a remark that the browser Chrome is good as a user agent. To me, that's terrific! Looks like I'll have to consider Chrome again.`

Here are what I find as reasons to scream about Mozilla:

Popups:

(a) Several times a day, my attention and concentration get interrupted by, for me, the unwelcome announcement that there is a new version I can download. A new version can have changes I don't like and genuine bugs. Sure, I could keep a copy of my favorite version from history, but that is system management mud wrestling and interruption of my work.

(b) Now I get told several times a day that my computer and cell phone can share access to a Web page. In this action Mozilla covers up what that page was showing I wanted it to show. No thanks. When I'm at my computer, AMD 8 core processor, all my files and software tools, and 1 Gbps optical fiber connection to the Internet and looking at a Web page, I want nothing to do with a cell phone's presentation of a, that, Web page.

(c) Some URLs are a dozen lines long and Mozilla finds ways to present such URLs with all their lines and pursue clearly their main objective -- cover up the desired content.

Mozilla needs to make their covering up, changing, the screen optional or just eliminated.

Want me to donate? You've mentioned as little as $10. Deal: Raise the $10 by a factor of 5 AND quit covering up my content and interrupting my work, and we've got a deal.
by thinkingemote | 2025-12-17 09:37:44+00:00
ANPR have been widely used in the UK for at least 25 years. It was first used 32 years ago in 1993 around the City of London.

They were initially deployed without discussion as it would have tipped their hand. The coverage back then was on the main roads around major cities, criminals with enough knowledge could have used minor roads, or used fake plates.

Discussions in the UK in meetings would be about the benefits of them, what arrests the use of ANPR have enabled. Councils have regular scheduled meetings about crime. There would be no real in depth discussion about new ones; that either never happened or happened before many of us (and many of the politicians discussing them!) were born.
by ang_cire | 2025-12-17 09:39:30+00:00
> I think you think there isn't a difference between prejudice and knowledge

I'm having trouble following this. Of course there's a difference between prejudice and knowledge.

Being aware that studies show pickup trucks are statistically more dangerous than other classes of vehicles (SUVs included, which is nuts!), and thus wanting to avoid them, is knowledge.

Thinking that pickup truck drivers are wannabe macho chuds, and thus wanting to avoid them, is prejudice.

From the outside, you have no clue whether avoidant behavior stems from knowledge-based-bias, or prejudice. I'm not sure how you came to the conclusion I'd conflated the two.

> What I really care about is guilty-until-proven-innocent masquerading as civilized

What?

> or false-until-proven-true masquerading as scientific

I have no clue what this has to do with our discussion.

> The starting position should be I don't know. I may have seen cases that look like this, I might know where to look first, but I don't know what I'll find. Until I do, not before.

Ah, I see where you're going. You're wrong.

If you truly believe that you don't use lived experience to make prefactual assessments throughout life, you haven't thought about it enough:

When you walk up to a new computer, you don't assume that you have no idea how the mouse will work, just because this is a new mouse you haven't individually encountered before. You assume (and act on the assumption) that it will work the same as other mice. You don't swab it just in case it's a bomb, or covered in poison.

You just act on your expectations of how it will behave -UNTIL- you see evidence to the contrary.

The problem is you're trying to (as I said) equate bias with prejudice. The comment from pepperghost93 was about the belief in corporations' willingness to do bad things.

You and Permit1 clearly assumed they were merely prejudiced against corporations, and not basing their wariness of corporate malfeasance on factual data showing corporations being willing to, in fact, do immoral and illegal things.

tl;dr Ironically, you, in the process of decrying bias, used your own biased perception of prefactual judgements to assume they were coming from a place of prejudice rather than knowledge.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-12-17 09:40:34+00:00
And I hope ours does too. We're on Gitlab with runners on AWS at the moment, and the overhead is huge. Thousands of working hours spent on setting up and maintaining the infrastructure (even if it's code and probably a fraction of what our own datacenter would involve), millions in costs, hundreds of jobs spinning up to do jobs.

But also, many hours spent building jobs and the like that are off-the-shelf on Github Actions.

This is the main issue though, it feels like doing anything but what the largest companies offer just costs more time and money. It reminds me of the decades long push to move away from Microsoft, only for e.g. the office 365 offering to show up and make everyone's (software, account management) work easier and cheaper, forever.
by ruszki | 2025-12-17 09:41:03+00:00
Even if you know about and act against mis- and disinformation, it affects you, and you voluntarily increase your exposure to it. And the situation is already terrible.

I gave the example of wars, because it’s obvious, even for you, and you won’t relativize away the same way how you just did with AI misinformation, which affects you the exact same way.
by igornotarobot | 2025-12-17 09:41:28+00:00
> TLA+ is not a silver bullet, and like all temporal logic, has constraints. > > You really have to be able to reduce your models to: “at some point in the future, this will happen," or "it will always be true from now on”

I think people get confused by the word "temporal" in the name of TLA+. Yes, it has temporal operators. If you throw them away, TLA+ (minus the temporal operators) would be still extremely useful for specifying the behavior of concurrent and distributed systems. I have been using TLA+ for writing specifications of distributed algorithms (e.g., distributed consensus) and checking them for about 6 years now. The question of liveness comes the last, and even then, the standard temporal logics are barely suitable for expressing liveness under partial synchrony. The value of temporal properties in TLA+ is overrated.
by baq | 2025-12-17 09:41:50+00:00
> Most of the data I deal with are strings with their own validation and formatting rules that are complicated and at the same time usually need to be permissive

this is exactly where a good type system helps: you have an unvalidated string and a validated string which you make incompatible at the type level, thus eliminating a whole class of possible mistakes. same with object ids, etc.

don't need haskell for this, either: https://brightinventions.pl/blog/branding-flavoring/