MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zdragnar | 2025-12-17 18:09:30+00:00
It's more like your favorite fancy restaurant has a few dishes that suck. Instead of putting time into improving table service, fixing up the menu, maybe getting some aspects of service up to standards, they decided that every meal now comes with a back massage. That's not their core competency.

Firefox is good, but it could be great. Adding AI features aren't what will move the needle on their core competency.
by altairprime | 2025-12-17 18:10:05+00:00
Most people don’t know that characteristic of industrial robots, so it wouldn’t inspire the wariness necessary to keep the novice robotic vehicles safe from us all assuming predictability of them. And those who do know what it means would assume predictable behaviors, since that’s what industrial robots have, which is doubly problematic since now they’ll be unprepared for SQUIRREL input, RED OCTAGON output neural network misfirings.
by edent | 2025-12-17 18:10:10+00:00
Where's the evidence that users want this?

By users, I mean the people who browse marketing websites. Do they think having their company name / information in your copy is going to be helpful or creepy?

Oh, and did the IP owners give you permission to take Obi-Wan's name in vain?

I tried several different domains and the copy was so generic it gave no indication of being personalised.
by strbean | 2025-12-17 18:10:30+00:00
> decide what the software is supposed to do in the first place.

That's where the job security is (and always has been). This has been my answer to "are you afraid for your job because of AI?"

Writing the code is very rarely the hard part. The hard part is getting a spec from the PM, or gathering requirements stakeholders. And then telling them why the spec / their requirements don't make sense or aren't feasible, and figuring out ones that will actually achieve their goals.
by poad4242 | 2025-12-17 18:10:31+00:00
I understand the frustration with AI-written posts lately, but this was the opposite of that. It took months of hard work and many late nights. While the hardware manual (TRM) is public, it doesn't explain how to handle the strict 4KB memory bank limits. I had to figure out how to shard and tile the model because the hardware won't let you store data across those banks without crashing. It was a long battle with memory constraints to get that 15x speedup.
by glenstein | 2025-12-17 18:10:34+00:00
Or for a similar point, it's been shown over and over that attempting to crowdsource the revenue is a staggeringly unrealistic response with no real world precedent in the history either of browsers or online crowdsourced funding. You would think that would matter to people who point to that as a possible panacea.

Actual attempts to get users to pay for the browser itself, like what Opera did, simply didn't work and led to the insolvency of the browser and having to sell it off to someone harvesting its users as data.
by colechristensen | 2025-12-17 18:10:39+00:00
>700,000 gallons per acre per growing season for Corn, need to look up cover crop water for a per year figure.

You rewrote this comment, again this is very misleading.

My family has grown corn for 140ish years. In that time we have used exactly 0 gallons of water to grow corn. We don't irrigate, we don't have the mechanisms to irrigate, nobody in 100 miles irrigates (they do in far western Iowa and Nebraska and other marginal-to-grow-corn places) 80% of the corn grown in the US is grown with no irrigation.

It rains. That's it.

Even people who irrigate don't use that much water, they supplement the rain.

700,000 gallons per acre per year is the amount of water you'd have to use to grow corn in the desert which nobody does (I'm sure one or two crazies can be found on very small scales)

It is a disingenuous argument made either out of ignorance or manipulation.
by ryandrake | 2025-12-17 18:10:46+00:00
This is a general problem that corporations have trouble with with: The struggle to separate leadership and people management. Why does the person who tells you what to do also need to be the same person who does your annual review, who also has to be the same person who leads the technical design of the project, approves your vacation, assists with your career development, and gives feedback or disciplinary correction when you mess up? Why do we always seem to bundle all these distinct roles together under "Manager"?
by Terr_ | 2025-12-17 18:10:52+00:00
You've lost the plot: The [local|remote]-[open|closed] comment is making a broad claim about LLM usage in general, not limited to the hyper-narrow case of tab-grouping. I'm saying the majority of LLM-dangers are not fixed by that 4-way choice.

Even if it were solely about tab-grouping, my point still stands:

1. You're browsing some funny video site or whatever, and you're naturally expecting "stuff I'm doing now" to be all the tabs on the right.

2. A new tab opens which does not appear there, because the browser chose to move it over into your "Banking" or "Online purchases" groups, which for many users might even be scrolled off-screen.

3. An hour later you switch tasks, and return to your "Banking" or "Online Purchases". These are obviously the same tabs before that you opened from a trusted URL/bookmark, right?

4. Logged out due to inactivity? OK, you enter your username and password into... the fake phishing tab! Oops, game over.

Was the fuzzy LLM instrumental in the failure? Yes. Would having a local model with open weights protect you? No.
by ziml77 | 2025-12-17 18:11:09+00:00
It's so true. Buying them is an easy way to feel good in the moment and it's easy to tell yourself that you'll do the courses later.

I bought a handful before realizing what was happening. I haven't done it since then and I definitely need to consciously override any temptations.

I'm sure some people are disciplined enough to learn from it, but there's no way that's the norm.
by timshell | 2025-12-17 18:11:28+00:00
Yup! It depends on your use case.

Cloudflare is really good at network bot detection. Rate-limiting is super helpful here, for example during DDoS attacks.

Our customers are a little different. They sometimes struggle with high-volume bot attacks (e.g. SMS toll fraud in ticketing marketplaces), but we specifically focus on online platforms that want to verify a human is on the other side of the screen. For example, survey pollsters and labor marketplaces want to stop a slow agent that can complete traditional CAPTCHA even if it's solving it a human speed
by glenstein | 2025-12-17 18:12:06+00:00
Instead of criticizing an actual contract to engage with a third party or a code push or an affirmative statement, you're attempting to parse a random combination of tea leaves and chicken entrails to indict Mozilla for a hypothetical thing that they explicitly said they're not doing. If that's not scraping the bottom of the barrel, it's only because you're able to imagine an even lower bottom than that that you're willing to reach for.
by lapcat | 2025-12-17 18:12:36+00:00
> Seems like vendor lock-in was the goal from the start.

Exactly. The passkey vendors state that the goal was to make phishing not just difficult but impossible. This means plaintext access to your credentials is forbidden forever, regardless of your level of expertise, and regardless of the complexity of the process to export/import them. The purpose of the so-called "secure credential exchange" is once again to prevent you from directly accessing your credentials. You can go from one passkey vendor to another, but you're always locked in to one passkey vendor or another.

Any credential system that makes it impossible to write something down on a piece of paper, take it to a new computer, and login to a website is just a gateway to vendor lock-in. You can manually manage your own ssh keys but for some reason not your passkeys.

As an Apple Mac user, what annoys me the most is that the use of passkeys in Safari requires iCloud Keychain, which of course requires iCloud and an Apple Account. [EDIT: Obviously I'm talking about built-in support. I'm well aware of third-party software, so everyone can stop replying to this now, please!] You can't do local-only passkeys, not even if you take responsibility for backing up your own Mac.

The passkey vendors took some good theoretical ideas, such as site-specific credentials and public-key cryptography, and totally mangled the implementation, making it hostile to everyone except themselves.
by mrguyorama | 2025-12-17 18:12:50+00:00
>"at least 900 W" when sorting through a list of microwave ovens on Walmart.

Newegg has that as a built in filter.

Why do you people keep insisting I "need" an LLM to do things that are standard features?

I find shopping online for clothes to suck, but there's nothing an LLM can do to fix that because it's not a magic machine and I cannot try on clothes at home. So instead, I just sucked it up and went to Old Navy.

Like, these things are still lying to my face every single day. I only use them when there's no alternative, like quickly porting code from python to Java for an emergency project. Was the code correctly ported? Nope, it silently dropped things of course, but "it doesn't need to be perfect" was the spec.

>Or searching for text in images with OCR.

That thing that was a mainline feature of Microsoft OneNote in 2007 and worked just fine and I STILL never used? I thought it was the neatest feature but even my friend who runs everything out of OneNote doesn't use it much. Back in middle school we had a very similar Digital Notebook application that predates OneNote with a similar feature set, including the teachers being able to distribute Master copies of notes for their students, and I also did not use OCR there.

The ONE actual good use case of LLMs that anyone has offered me did not come from techbros who think "Tesla has good software" is not only an accurate statement but an important point for a car, it came from my mom. Turns out, the text generation machine is pretty good at generating text in French to make tests! Her moronic (really rich of course, one of the richest in the state) school district refused to buy her any materials at all for her French classes, so she's been using ChatGPT. It does a great job, because that's what these machines are actually built for, and she only has to fix up the output occasionally, but that task is ACTUALLY easy to verify, unlike most of the things people use these LLMs for.

She STILL wouldn't pay $20 monthly for it. That shouldn't be surprising, because "Test generator" for a high school class is a one time payment of $300 historically, and came with your textbook purchase. If she wasn't planning on retiring she would probably just do it the long way. A course like that is a durable good.
by rajvarkala | 2025-12-17 18:12:59+00:00
Hey ,

As costs vary, I think it becomes even more important to track costs for each task.

Also, if costs also vary a lot without usefulness, it becomes difficult to pass these costs onto the customer.

Hence pricing needs to take care of volatility in cost as well. However, pricing is mostly dependent on the value AI Agents create. That I think, AI builders need to generate somehow, instead of just activity.
by AuthAuth | 2025-12-17 18:13:21+00:00
Mozilla the browser doesnt pretend to be a non profit. Mozilla corporation which runs the browser is a for profit company they do not solict donations and NEED to make money to survive. Its just that Mozilla corporation is owned by Mozilla foundation which is a non profit.

>Nobody wants a browser that's focused on diversifying its revenue I want a browser that has a sustainable business model so it wont collapse some time in the future. That means diversifying its revenue stream away from google's search contract.
by hnburnsy | 2025-12-17 18:13:34+00:00
Volvo has the tech problems...

https://insideevs.com/news/773202/volvo-ex90-software-issues...

-- Volvo is upgrading the central computer on all 2025 EX90s for free. -- The company has spent over a year trying to squash software bugs in the EX90, but owners are still reporting serious issues and glitches. -- One owner told InsideEVs that her EX90 has been a "dumpster fire inside a train wreck."
by oersted | 2025-12-17 18:13:37+00:00
I was quite underwhelmed by the demo, I'll try to be as constructive as I can.

The core functionality I expect for such a service is for it to automatically detect who I am, I've seen other marketing services do this, there are ways to map IPs to companies and other techniques. Of course, it's rather creepy and not super helpful to the user, but it may have its (shock) value for making certain kinds of products stand out.

And the personalisation itself... Anyone can make a call to an AI + Search service and generate a new version of the HTML with some slightly modified text, which was not all that different, appealing or accurate in the tests I made. I would suggest upgrading to a higher quality model, proper AI can do much better than this if given the right context.

I suppose it's nice that you are making this easy, if you built your site with a visual website builder this wouldn't be completely trivial to replicate. But still, not a very defensible business for now. I suppose that with good marketing and a serious roadmap to beef this up it could be a viable idea.
by mancerayder | 2025-12-17 18:14:14+00:00
Is Brave so persona-non-grata? I find that it's a 'don't ask don't tell' because of some ancient politics. If Firefox is becoming suspect, WHAT is left?

I found Chrome+adblockers NOT good enough. I like (and hate) Brave's shield, as I never figured out how to use wildcards to whitelist a whole domain / subdomain, it seems per-host. But that Brave shield WORKS.

Now people are going back to Chrome? Really?
Show HN: Planes.fyi – 3D aircraft and airport visualizations
by ryry | 2025-12-17 18:14:36+00:00
Hey HN!

A long time ago I built a map of trains at trains.fyi, and then realized nobody had bought planes.fyi - so this is my new map project.

It's a bunch of things, but mostly, a 3D map of aircraft around given airports, as well as the weather, ATIS, and other data sources visualized in 3D and unique ways.

Like most of the stuff I build, it's got no real use, but I think it's neat. If you like planes, check out the CYYZ/KJFK map, weather, and runway tabs - I put the most work into that.

Also any feature requests, questions, comments, etc are always appreciated!
by zamalek | 2025-12-17 18:14:37+00:00
> Anybody who thought the simple action of rewriting things in Rust would eliminate all bugs was hopelessly naive

All bugs is typically a strawman typically only used by detractors. The correct claim is: safe Rust eliminates certain classes of bugs. I'd wager the design of std eliminates more (e.g. the different string types), but that doesn't really apply to the kernel.
by avazhi | 2025-12-17 18:15:00+00:00
I mean, sure. I don’t generally give a shit about other people. That’s also not really relevant here. There will always be a dominant language. Currently, it happens to be English and it will remain English into the near future (250+ years). If you attend even a shitty school in a third world country today you are taught English as a second language. Look at the Philippines or sub-Saharan African countries. Everybody speaks English + their native language.

Crying about English’s global penetration is super weird while also being pointless, since it’s a fait accompli at this point.
by Nextgrid | 2025-12-17 18:15:16+00:00
The rules are fine and do prohibit this, it's their enforcement that's (intentionally) flawed.

Social media moderation has to balance "engagement" with the potential for bad PR or liability for the company. It turns out that content that is against the rules is also the one that generates the most engagement, so enforcing the rules as-is is bad for the bottom-line.

Thus for every piece of content that is potentially against the rules, the actual condition for removing it is whether the expected engagement potential outweighs the probability of someone rich/well-connected getting inconvenienced by it and how much inconvenience would it be. Content is only removed when the liability potential exceeds the profit potential.

At the beginning the reports were ignored because the system determined it is more profitable to stay up. I'm not sure what "his pleas to take it down" refers to, it would've likely been just his staff members flagging it with their personal accounts and those flags having very little weight. Eventually either someone managed to talk to a human and/or a letter to their legal department arrived, or the content achieving enough impressions to become a risk which caused the earlier flags to actually get reviewed by a competent human, at which point they realized what their liability was and quickly removed it.

You should expect to see an apology from their PR department soon and a promise they'll do better next time.
by bangaladore | 2025-12-17 18:15:17+00:00
Correct me if I'm wrong, but this comment is atleast partially incorrect right?

> Since it was in an unsafe block, the error for sure was way easier to find within the codebase than in C. Everything that's not unsafe can be ruled out as a reason for race conditions and the usual memory handling mistakes - that's already a huge win.

The benefit of Rust is you can isolate the possible code that causes an XYZ to an unsafe block*. But that doesn't necessarily mean the error shown is directly related to the unsafe block. Like C++, triggering undefined behavior can in theory cause the program to do anything, including fail spectacularly within seemingly unrelated safe code.

* Excluding cases where safe things are actually possibly unsafe (like some incorrectly marked FFI)
by sarreph | 2025-12-17 18:15:25+00:00
In general the case that we’re building for here is the one where we are able to do two things effectively: “streamlining” content, so that instead of 7 different use-cases on a maze of a brochure site, as a visitor you see the top one or two use case you actually care about, in way more detail.

Second, we want to show B2B visitors’ brands in context. I.e. showing you what it would look like if your company was using the service in question with social proof from your industry peers. We don’t have our image tech in the on-demand demo right now, but companies that we have helped pre-render copies of their site with dynamic images (especially e-commerce brands), found higher engagement on their outreach as a result.
by mroche | 2025-12-17 18:16:25+00:00
This is obviously kicking the can down the road, but I "solve" this problem by storing passkeys in a third-party credential manager that supports them. That way I can use them on any device that I've installed the client app or browser extension on. I have this working on Fedora, macOS, Windows, and iOS.

But again, kicking the can down the road.
by pnathan | 2025-12-17 18:16:26+00:00
I - senior - can patch an application in an unknown language and framework with the AI. I know enough to tell it to stop the wildly stupid ideas.

But I don't learn. That's not what I'm trying to do- I'm trying to fix the bug. Hmm.

I'm pretty sure AI is going to lead us to a deskilling crash.

Food for thought.
by salawat | 2025-12-17 18:17:27+00:00
The issue is there is no non-custodial option by definition. You are either doing what a financial institution has to do by law (Full compliance system), or you're outsourcing to someone else who does, in which case you haven't negated the non-cooperative custodian risk that you set out to mitigate in the first place.

The only real choice left is to accept a minimalized compliance system that just squeaks by mister to be accepted by the big guys, (which still leaves the risks of the rest of the system eventually locking you out), and places a significant burden on you, the business owner to learn a lot of financial minutiae that has nada to do with your business other than integrating into the financial system), or just stick with a payment processor who already exists (not solving your problem).

Absolutely sucks, but that's what our system has evolved to.
by taylodl | 2025-12-17 18:17:43+00:00
This resonates with me and identifies my disdain for formal education. Everything I know, actually know, I've learned through self-education and working from first principles. I find it helpful to circle back and approach it through formal education to ensure I didn't miss anything and if I did, I repeat the self-education approach for that item. The upshot is I know what I know very well, but the downside is it can take me a lot longer than most to learn it.

I've often wondered whether there's a "happy medium" that would allow me to learn faster, but I haven't found it after decades of searching.
by sokoloff | 2025-12-17 18:17:55+00:00
For a typical new install, the outdoor unit contains the charge and unless your lineset is unusually long, you just use that, releasing it with the valves after installing and leak-checking the lines.

In the US, you can get your EPA 508 cert online in a couple hours and buy the refrigerant online. (You need the cert to be legal, but it’s not really checked just to buy.) Tightly regulated is not true in practice. You could buy some in 3 minutes online and have it Monday.
by ravenstine | 2025-12-17 18:17:55+00:00
I guess it depends on what you ask an LLM to teach you. For certain subjects, I've found them to be a pain in the ass to get right.

For instance, I was hoping that I could use GPT to help me learn to fly a B737-800. This is actually less challenging than people think... if you just want to get in the air and skip all proper procedure and safety checks! If you want to fly a commercial plane like a real pilot, there is a ton of procedure and instruments to understand. There is actually quite a bit of material on this available online via flight crew operations manuals, as well as an old (but still relevant) manual straight from Boeing. So why rely on GPT? It's a bit hard to explain without rambling, but those manuals are designed for pilots with a lot of prior knowledge, not some goofball with X-Plane and a joystick. It would be nice to distill that information down for someone who just wants an idiot's guide to preflight procedure, setting the flight computer, taxiing, taking off, and performing an ILS landing.

Sadly, it turned out I really had to hold the LLM's hand along the way, even when I provided it two PDFs of everything it needed to know, because it would skip many steps and get them out of order, or not be able to correctly specify where a particular instrument or switch was located. It was almost a waste of time, and I actually still have more to do because it's that inefficient.

That said, I still think LLMs can be unreasonably good for learning about very specific subjects so long as you don't blindly believe it. I kinda hate how I have to say that, but I see people all the time believing anything Grok says. :facepalm: GPT has been a big help in learning things about finance, chemistry, and electronics. Not sure I would assume it could create a full blown course, but who knows. I bet it'd be pretty solid at coming up with exam questions.
by jerf | 2025-12-17 18:17:57+00:00
That linked story is pretty horrifying too: https://hey.paris/posts/appleid/

If he can't get his account back in any reasonable amount of time what chance do I have?

(I see I missed a big HN discussion on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46252114 - 1038 comments)
by dclowd9901 | 2025-12-17 18:17:59+00:00
"Larger issue" is overall technical direction and architecture, making decisions that don't paint you into a corner, establishing maintainability as a practice, designing work around an organization's structure and habit and so on.

But these are the things people learn through experience and exposure, and I still think AI can help by at least condensing the numerous books out there around technology leadership into some useful summaries.