MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by peterbecich | 2025-12-16 21:16:57+00:00
I did not claim it would save from unexpected costs. The full premium is an unexpected cost. I claimed COBRA is more affordable than out-of-pocket healthcare if you are in the middle of an expensive treatment at the moment you lose employer coverage.

Jumping onto ACA via unemployment exemption or Medicaid could require a transfer to a different doctor, etc. in the middle of treatment.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-12-16 21:17:01+00:00
1. We may be at the peak complexity that our population will support. As the population stops growing, and then starts declining, we may not have the number of people to maintain this level of specialization.

2. We may be at the peak complexity that our sources of energy will support. (Though the transition to renewables may help with that.)

3. We may be at the peak complexity that humans can stand without too many of them becoming dehumanized by their work. I could see evidence for this one already appearing in society, though I'm not certain that this is the cause.
by echelon | 2025-12-16 21:17:02+00:00
I've been a filmmaker for 10+ years. I really want more visual tools that let you precisely lay out consistent scenes without prompting. This is important for crafting the keyframes in an image-to-video style workflow, and is especially important for long form narrative content.

One thing that gpt-image-1 does exceptionally well that Nano Banana (Pro) can't is previz-to-render. This is actually an incredibly useful capability.

The Nano Banana models take the low-fidelity previz elements/stand-ins and unfortunately keep the elements in place without attempting to "upscale" them. The model tries to preserve every mistake and detail verbatim.

Gpt-image-1, on the other hand, understands the layout and blocking of the scene, the pose of human characters, and will literally repair and upscale everything.

Here's a few examples:

- 3D + Posing + Blocking: https://youtu.be/QYVgNNJP6Vc

- Again, but with more set re-use: https://youtu.be/QMyueowqfhg

- Gaussian splats: https://youtu.be/iD999naQq9A

- Gaussians again: https://youtu.be/IxmjzRm1xHI

We need models that can do what gpt-image-1 does above, but that have higher quality, better stylistic control, faster speed, and that can take style references (eg. glossy Midjourney images).

Nano Banana team: please grow these capabilities.

Adobe is testing and building some really cool capabilities:

- Relighting scenes: https://youtu.be/YqAAFX1XXY8?si=DG6ODYZXInb0Ckvc&t=211

- Image -> 3D editing: https://youtu.be/BLxFn_BFB5c?si=GJg12gU5gFU9ZpVc&t=185 (payoff is at 3:54)

- Image -> Gaussian -> Gaussian editing: https://youtu.be/z3lHAahgpRk?si=XwSouqEJUFhC44TP&t=285

- 3D -> image with semantic tags: https://youtu.be/z275i_6jDPc?si=2HaatjXOEk3lHeW-&t=443

I'm trying to build the exact same things that they are, except as open source / source available local desktop tools that we can own. Gives me an outlet to write Rust, too.
by gpt-image | 2025-12-16 21:17:28+00:00
Chatgpt releasing a new version of ChatGPT Images (opens in a new window), powered by our new flagship image generation model. Now, whether you’re creating something from scratch or editing a photo, you’ll get the output you’re picturing. It makes precise edits while keeping details intact, and generates images up to 4x faster. Alongside, we’re introducing a new Images feature (opens in a new window) within ChatGPT, designed to make image generation delightful—to spark inspiration and make creative exploration effortless.

https://openai.com/index/new-chatgpt-images-is-here/
by therobots927 | 2025-12-16 21:17:34+00:00
The original parent comment (now flagged) essentially said: only people who reproduce have any right to have any say in how society operates. Especially when it comes to mass surveillance.

Which is patently absurd on its face. Much like saying the moon is made of cheese.

Edit: I’m done pretending like regressive ideas like removing voting rights from entire segments of the population are points for valid discussion.
by voidhorse | 2025-12-16 21:17:37+00:00
Welcome to the 1600s.

If you start studying basically any field that isn't computer science you will in fact discover that the world is rife with randomness, and that the dreams of a Laplace or Bentham are probably unrealizable, even if we can get extremely close (but of course, if you constrain behavior in advance through laws and restraints, you've already made the job significantly easier).

Thinking that reality runs like a clock is literally a centuries outdated view of reality.
by 999900000999 | 2025-12-16 21:17:45+00:00
I can actually imagine actors selling the rights to make fake images with them.

In late stage capitalism you pay for fake photos with someone. You have chat gpt write about how you dated for a summer, and have it end with them leaving for grad school to explain why you aren't together.

Eventually we'll all just pay to live in the matrix. When your credit card is declined you'll be logged out, to awaken in a shared studio apartment. To eat your rations.
by roenxi | 2025-12-16 21:18:34+00:00
That isn't really the best way to think about not-for-profit schemes like Mozilla. Every organisation eventually becomes corrupted (as in fact we see with Mozilla), so creating an eternal pot of money for something is not strategically sensible.

If good people are in charge, they'll just spend everything and rely on ongoing donations. If nobody thinks it is worth donating too then it is time to close up shop. Keep a bit of a buffer for the practical issue of bad years, sure, but the idea shouldn't be to set up an endowment.
by jotaen | 2025-12-16 21:18:46+00:00
This looks like an interesting concept!

> I find that the drag and drop experience can quickly become a nightmare, especially on mobile.

To me, drag and drop is only a nightmare on mobile. On desktop (using a mouse or trackpad), drag and drop actually works quite well.

Your design experiment reminds me of a recent talk of Scott Jenson, where he talked about how we just took over established UX patterns from desktop to mobile as is, and how that created all sorts of nuisances. (https://youtu.be/1fZTOjd_bOQ?t=1565)

If mobile drag&drop was implemented like you are suggesting from the very start, I actually might have preferred that over the situation we now ended up with.

One technical note on your implementation: on certain mobile browsers, there is a glitch where the UI can jump around as the browser dynamically slides top or bottom menu bars in and out.
by inchidi | 2025-12-16 21:18:55+00:00
used to self-host gitlab CI runners around the same year also for our long running CI's due to db migrations + prepared data loading for tests. we rent 7*4$ VPS, install gitlab CI runners on them, saving us from hundreds $$$ per month and 45mins/merge (with test running on main branch only) to 7*4$/month and 7-9mins/commit (yes, we run full test on each commit and let gitlab auto-cancel older one). with bonus: FE team get live version of their changes on each MR.

* its 7 VPS because we separated the tests by modules and we have 7 major modules. * edit: formatting
by keeda | 2025-12-16 21:19:20+00:00
Everyone is reacting negatively to the focus on AI, but does Mozilla really have a choice? This is going to be a rehash of the same dynamic that has happened in all the browser wars: Leading browser introduces new feature, websites and extensions start using that feature, runner-up browsers have no choice but to introduce that feature or further lose marketshare.

Chrome and Edge have already integrated LLM capabilities natively, and webpages and extensions will soon start using them widely:

- https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/built-in

- https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2025/05/19/introducing-t...

Soon you will have pages that are "Best viewed in Chrome / Edge" and eventually these APIs will be standardized. Only a small but passionate minority of users will run a non-AI browser. I don't think that's the niche Firefox wants to be in.

I agree that Mozilla should take the charge on being THE privacy-focused browser, but they can also do so in the AI age. As an example, provide a sandbox and security features that prevent your prompts and any conversations with the AI from being exfiltrated for "analytics." Because you know that is coming.
by Flere-Imsaho | 2025-12-16 21:19:22+00:00
It's too late.

If I want to interact with modern society, I have to use banking apps, the NHS app, WhatsApp, numerous IoT apps... The list is endless. Many of these will refuse to run on rooted phones.

Google and Apple won. We can learn from this and hope the next big thing to come along has some competition from the truly open source side of computing.
by olafmol | 2025-12-16 21:19:25+00:00
This. There are plenty of good/better CICD solutions out there, but it's tricky to compete with "comes for free with our VCS". I guess it's clear now there is no such thing as a free lunch. I feel it's a good thing for the "CICD industry" that people will be looking around to alternatives, and do a honest Total Cost of Ownership analysis.
by helterskelter | 2025-12-16 21:19:39+00:00
The US wielding the sanctions banhammer the way they have been recently will only weaken its power over time and create opportunity for economic rivals like China. Every time they (mis)use it they create incentive for people to create alternatives to the US financial system. You won't see sanctions become completely completely toothless overnight, but I could see in maybe 15-20 years that getting around US sanctions will be a mere inconvenience.
by t23414321 | 2025-12-16 21:19:41+00:00
> I think we should give them a chance.

Leaving XSLT in web standards and in Firefox would let it keep some comfy useful niche ("resilience" ?).

Is that right if Google don't want to keep it - then no one can have it ?!

----------

the truth is static and non-profit, but calculating something can be sold again and again, if you have a hammer (processing) everything looks like a nail, to sell well the word thinking had to be used instead of excuse for every time results being different - then, we can have only things that let someone else keep making profits: JS, LLM, whatever.. (just not.. "XSLT" alike) ? - mind work done already (once is enough) by non-profits or users just outpriced from the market for next few years.
by skeeter2020 | 2025-12-16 21:19:56+00:00
I'm an Engineering Manager. I print out certificates for people on (and beyond) my teams, referencing something they accomplished (big or small), add one of the "boy scout badges" I bought in bulk from AliExpress (and then retroactively created & reference a set of values based on the iconography) and mail out "Engineering Merit Badges" to our remote employees. Maybe a few think it's dumb but the vast majority love it. The collector-types try to earn the entire set (I made one of the badges really hard to get because of this), while physically getting mail really seems to resonate with anyone under 35. A few people more distant from my teams (i.e. different departments) DID seems supsicious at first when I asked for their home address, and my boss wondered how I spent several hundred dollars in postage last year, but I try and send out at least a dozen a month while still keeping them meaningful. It's actually a bit of work (of course I wrote software to help manage and create everything) but I love it too.
by alwillis | 2025-12-16 21:20:30+00:00
FAANG has shedded between 81,000 and 87,000 workers in the past 5 years; I suspect a significant chunk of these jobs aren't coming back.

Seems to me the companies are mostly in a holding pattern: sure, if an important project needs more bodies, it's probably okay to hire. I suspect that lots of teams have to make do until further notice.

Are some teams using AI instead of hiring junior engineers? I don't think there's any doubt about that. It's also a trial period to better understand what the value-add is.

Based on listening to engineers on various podcasts, almost all of them describe the current level of AI agents as being equivalent to a junior engineer: they're eager and think they know a lot but they also have a lot to learn. But we're getting closer to the point where a well-thought out Skill [1] can do a pretty convincing job of replacing a junior engineer.

But—at the rate AI is improving, a company that doesn't adopt AI for software engineering will be at a competitive disadvantage compared to its peers.

[1]: https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/equipping-agents-for-t...

Meta (Facebook) 2022: ~11,000 employees (13% of workforce) 2023: ~10,000 employees plus 5,000 open positions eliminated 2024: Multiple smaller rounds totaling ~100-200 employees 2025: ~3,600 employees (5% of workforce, performance-based cuts) Total: Approximately 24,700-25,000 employees Amazon 2022: ~10,000 employees 2023: ~17,000 employees (split between multiple rounds) 2024: Smaller targeted cuts 2025: ~14,000 employees announced Total: Approximately 41,000+ employees Google (Alphabet) 2023: ~12,000 employees (6% of workforce) 2024: Multiple smaller rounds, hundreds of employees 2025: Several hundred in Cloud division and other areas Total: Approximately 15,000-20,000 employees Apple Apple has been an outlier among FAANG companies: 2022-2023: Minimal layoffs (hiring freeze instead) 2024: ~700+ employees (primarily from canceled Apple Car project and microLED display teams) 2025: Small cuts in sales and other divisions Total: Approximately 800-1,000 employees (significantly less than peers) Netflix 2022: ~450 employees across two rounds (150 + 300) 2023: Smaller targeted cuts in animation and drama divisions 2024-2025: Minimal additional cuts Total: Approximately 500-600 employees Overall FAANG Totals Across all five companies over the past 5 years: approximately 81,000-87,000 workers have been laid off, with the vast majority occurring in 2022-2023 during the post-pandemic correction period.
by mattkrause | 2025-12-16 21:20:33+00:00
I'll co-sign SubiculumCode's comment -- there's a lot of yelling about how bad fMRI is generally, which is not particularly fair to the fMRI research (or at least the better parts of it) or related to the argument.

The BOLD signal, the thing measured by fMRI, is a proxy for actual brain activity. The logic is that neural firing requires a lot of energy and so active neurons will being using more oxygen for their metabolism, and this oxygen comes from the blood. Thus, if you measure local changes in the oxygenation of blood, you'll know something about how active nearby neurons are. However, it's an indirect and complicated relationship. The blood flow to an area can itself change, or cells could extract more or less oxygen from the blood--the system itself is usually not running at its limits.

Direct measurements from animals, where you can measure (and manipulate) brain activity while measuring BOLD, have shown how complicated this is. Nikos Logathetis and Ralph Freeman's groups, among many others did a lot of work on this, especially c. 2000-2010. If you're interested, you could check out this news and views on Logathetis's group's 2001 Nature paper [1]. One of the conclusions of their work is that BOLD is influenced by a lot of things but largely measure the inputs to an area and the synchrony within it, rather than just the average firing rate.

In this paper, the researchers adjust the MRI sequences to compare blood oxygenation, oxygen usage, and blood flow and find that these are not perfectly related. This is a nice demonstration, but not a totally unexpected finding either. The argument in the paper is also not "abandon fMRI" but rather that you need to measure and interpret these things carefully.

In short, the whole area of neurovascular coupling is hard--it includes complicated physics (to make measurements), tricky chemistry, and messy biology, all in a system full of complicated dynamics and feedback.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/35084300
by ActorNightly | 2025-12-16 21:20:52+00:00
Its not subjective that buttons are better for driver interface. Being able to change AC/Volume/whatever without having to look where you are pressing is a big convenience.

If Tesla had a good heads up display on the windshield that you can operate through steering wheel controls, then it would be another story.

Other then that, its also not subjective that materials that are used are sub par. Steering wheels start to peel WAY early.
by jsheard | 2025-12-16 21:20:56+00:00
Things are kind of heading in two opposite directions at the moment. Early GPU rasterization was all done in fixed-function hardware, but then we got programmable shading, and then we started using compute shaders to feed the HW rasterizer, and then we started replacing the HW rasterizer itself with more compute (as in Nanite). The flexibility of doing whatever you want in software has gradually displaced the inflexible hardware units.

Meanwhile GPU raytracing was a purely software affair until quite recently when fixed-function raytracing hardware arrived. It's fast but also opaque and inflexible, only exposed through high-level driver interfaces which hide most of the details, so you have to let Jensen take the wheel. There's nothing stopping someone from going back to software RT of course but the performance of hardware RT is hard to pass up for now, so that's mostly the way things are going even if it does have annoying limitations.
by doctorpangloss | 2025-12-16 21:21:21+00:00
it's a stylistic comment haha. it's not that lamentable that something is being discontinued, and i don't know what it says generally except, "too expensive" maybe.

the market is for people who buy cars, not for people who need cars. most new cars shipping today are a stack of regulations, like road and parking subsidies, safety features, emissions standards, and most of all import quotas, decorated with marketing, financing and post-sale monetization scheme shapes. if you really wanted to innovate in the car "product" for the audience that actually buys cars, imo you should focus on figuring out how to sell parking up front and affordably, whatever that means. if you are only focusing on stuff for people who buy cars - i don't think people who buy cars really care that much about today's USPs and things that hacker news cares about like energy.
by wiether | 2025-12-16 21:21:27+00:00
Same feeling here!

I used to be like: "well, this thing will take me at least half a day, it's already 16:00, so I'll better do something quiet to cooldown to the end of the day and tackle this issue tomorrow". I'll leave the office in an regular mood and take the night to get ready for tomorrow.

Now I'm like: "17:30? 30 minutes? I have time to tackle another issue today!" I'll leave the office exhausted and take the night to try and recover from the day I had.
by kace91 | 2025-12-16 21:21:34+00:00
>that sounds like learning the violin by plucking the strings like a guitar.

I'd compare it more to learning photography without going for manual aperture and developing analog film straight away. You'll have a better experience if you learn stuff like framing with an automated camera that frees you to shoot a hundred pictures daily and focus on a certain skill.

I am increasing the learning period, that much is true. But if I can make use of my daily 8 hours of work as practice, that makes up for the delay, because I can get much more practice.

Maybe a student or a hobbyist can afford to spend 3 minutes nailing the regex while they learn to search and replace, I just can't be fighting that kind of friction regularly at work.
by mmh0000 | 2025-12-16 21:21:42+00:00
You gotta look into the Venezuela thing further. It's more geopolitical, specifically about reducing Chinese influence in South America.

Now, whether that's needed or whether the US is handling it in a "good way" is all up for debate. But there is a deliberateness.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China%E2%80%93Venezuela_relati...

* https://thediplomat.com/2024/08/china-breaks-with-latin-amer...

* https://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/3335116/china-unlike...
by physicsguy | 2025-12-16 21:21:47+00:00
Interested in the Lost World: Jurassic park variants. I was 5 when that came out in 1997 and it was an odd release since barely anyone had a Megadrive anymore but we had one and my parents wouldn’t buy me a PlayStation, so they relented and bought me that as I loved dinosaurs. It is honestly such a great game and was really underappreciated since it was so late in the release cycle for that console.
by QuantumNomad_ | 2025-12-16 21:21:48+00:00
> There's some of this from scammers on Telegram and other social media, but it would be much worse

I get about one scam message per week on Telegram. And the annoying thing with Telegram is that it’s a paid feature to be able to make it so that only your contacts can send you messages.

Additionally, in order to block and report the sender, I first have to open the message, which sends a read receipt to the sender. Which in turn, if the scammers are smart, is something that they make note of automatically.

So one can presume that every time I open a scam message to block and report the sender, as I do, I am also giving the scammers confirmation that this number is actively in use and my number will keep being included in lists of numbers that they and others send scam messages to.
by Natsu | 2025-12-16 21:22:05+00:00
> In that sense the methodological problems here are more serious than the ones they point to in the World Happiness Report.

It's a simple question, sure, but it's not clear that it's a very meaningful one, even if other approaches aren't necessarily any better. When I think of the word happiness, I don't exactly associate it with suicide or rarely smiling.
by lenerdenator | 2025-12-16 21:22:30+00:00
I find the increased speed to be an opportunity to slow down and focus on certain things, particularly the architectural changes of the feature I'm looking to introduce.

If you're able to blaze through feature tickets using GenAI on existing projects of any major complexity, there's almost certainly something which would produce better code that you're skipping.

I have plenty of info and agents for Claude Code to take into account when I use it to make features in our projects, but what it can't know is the cadence of what our business partners expect, the unknown unknowns, conversations that humans have about the projects, and the way end-users feel about the project. My job is to direct it with those factors in mind, and the work to account for those factors takes time.
by dpark | 2025-12-16 21:22:34+00:00
Yeah. I don’t really need or want high ground clearance. But I would like enough that parking at a curb doesn’t risk dragging the front bumper. My van (Odyssey) is low enough that I’ve scraped on a few unexpectedly tall curbs and I would be pretty uncomfortable with anything resembling off-road. I wouldn’t drive my van anywhere I wouldn’t drive a Civic.

> The current Toyota Sienna … gas mileage.

Better mileage and optional all wheel drive were the only things I preferred about the Sienna. But while I don’t like the mileage the Odyssey gets, I also don’t actually drive far very often so it doesn’t matter much. I put less than 10k miles on my car every year.
by switchbak | 2025-12-16 21:22:43+00:00
I don't see governance and politics as being the primary movers in what I seek out.

My experience is more: I find myself spinning my tires watching yet another youtube video instead of calmly deciding on a worthy investment of a deep pursuit.

No government has forced that on me, that's mostly a corporate entity and platform making (automated, ML mediated) decisions on what I should consume. Of course governments are involved when deciding what I shouldn't be exposed to, but that's a different matter.

We all have a limited reserve of energy, of attention and willpower. When you spend it on shallow desires, you have expended it and tacitly made a choice to not invest in a more meaningful path. If I were to summarize the time I've spent sitting on my ass watching YouTube the last N years, it's really quite depressing (even if it does sometimes provide some very real value).