MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by johnnyanmac | 2025-12-18 23:33:47+00:00
>Do you ever need a website you're visiting translated?

Yes, I have an extension for that.

>Have you ever not understood a term or phrase on a website and had to go to wikipedia/urbandictionary/google to explain it?

I have an extension that double clicks and brings up a quick definition. If I need more, I will go to the dictionary.

>Have you ever wanted to do a 'fuzzy search' of a 300 page document (where you don't know the exact string of text to ctrl-f, but want to see where they talk about a particular topic)?

No, not really. Ctrl + F search for a dozen substrings, use table of contents if available, and I can narrow it down. This takes a few minutes.

And if I did, I'd find an extension. You see the pattern here? We solved this issue decades ago.
by pessimizer | 2025-12-18 23:34:03+00:00
I'm only doing the first kind right now - I'm not really letting the thing loose ever, even when I'm not great at the language it's writing in. I'm constantly making it refactor and simplify things.

But I'm optimistic about the second way. I'm starting to think that TDD is going to be the new way we specify problems i.e by writing constraints, LLMs are going to keep hacking at those constraints until they're all satisfied, and periodically the temperature will have to be jiggled to knock the thing out of a loop.

The big back and forth between human and machine would be in the process of writing the constraints, which they will be bad at if you're doing anything interesting, and good at if you're doing something routine.

The big question for me is "Is there a way to write complete enough tests that any LLM would generate nearly the same piece of software?" And to follow up, can the test suite be the spec? Would that be an improvement on the current situation, or just as much work? Would that mean that all capable platforms would be abstracted? Does this mean the software improves on its own when the LLM improves, or when you switch to a better LLM, without any changes to the tests?

If the future is just writing tests, is there a better way to do it than we currently do? Are tests the highest-level language? Is this all just Prolog?
by AstroBen | 2025-12-18 23:34:58+00:00
I really feel this myself.

If I write home-grown organic code then I have no choice but to fully understand the problem. Using an LLM it's very easy to be lazy, at least in the short term

Where does that get me after 3 months? I end up working on a codebase I barely understand. My own skills have degraded. It just gets worse the longer you go

This is also coming from my experience in the best case scenario: I enjoy coding and am working on something I care about the quality of. Lots of people don't have even that
by maxglute | 2025-12-18 23:35:13+00:00
I poorly paraphrased profits converge to zero under perfect competitive market. Yes real world not perfect competitive markets. Oligor/duo/monopolies form, sometimes subsidies other shenanigans pick winner(s), winners extract huge margins/rents to build moats lock out new competition. Sometimes they collude / settle on business model with higher margins, i.e. 10-20% being normal/commodity, 50% for software and semi is top end of luxury goods. New state backed competitor enters and decides they can live on 10% margin, and then incumbants business model falls apart unless state also steps in to match.

E: And state can, but I don't know if state generally willing/able to backstop companies to 50% margin long term. I can't think of any, maybe some major state oil. Nvidia/TSMC with $$$ margins getting some CHIPs injection really meant for bailing out broke ass Intel was already anomalous, and it was basically to bribe them to onshore production.
by jeffjeffbear | 2025-12-18 23:35:33+00:00
> https://huggingface.co/google/t5gemma-2-1b-1b

From here it looks like it still is long context and multimodal though?

>Inputs and outputs Input:

Text string, such as a question, a prompt, or a document to be summarized

Images, normalized to 896 x 896 resolution and encoded to 256 tokens each

Total input context of 128K tokens Output:

Generated text in response to the input, such as an answer to a question, analysis of image content, or a summary of a document

Total output context up to 32K tokens
by grog454 | 2025-12-18 23:36:40+00:00
My question was "What's the value of a secret benchmark to anyone but the secret holder?"

The root of this whole discussion was a post about how Gemini 3 outperformed other models on some presumably informal question benchmark (a"vibe test"?). When asked for the benchmark, the response from the op and and someone else was that secrecy was needed to protect the benchmark from contamination. I'm skeptical of the need in the op's cases and I'm skeptical of the effectiveness of the secrecy in general. In a case where secrecy has actual value, why even discuss the benchmark publicly at all?
by mmooss | 2025-12-18 23:36:57+00:00
I definitely want journals to be arbiters of quality. I have very limited time and want to read the best, and at the same time I don't want to read misinformation or disinformation.

They seem well-positioned to be such arbiters. Who else do you suggest and why are they better?

Nobody can possibly read every article and few have the expertise to decide. There is no reason to think the 'wisdom of the crowds' is reliable - and lots of experience and research showing it is not, and easily manipulated by nonsense. I don't want Reddit or Twitter.
by rolph | 2025-12-18 23:37:02+00:00
get your non AI versions here while they last:

Index of /pub/firefox/releases/

https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/

A LITTLE HELP:

How do I revert Firefox to a previous version and keep my profile intact?

https://superuser.com/questions/1643618/how-do-i-revert-fire...
by ofconsequence | 2025-12-18 23:37:04+00:00
> I dislike the term "vibe coding". It means nothing and it's vague.

It has a clear and specific definition. People just misuse and abuse the term.

Karpathy coined it to describe when you put a prompt into an LLM and then either run it or continue to develop on top of it without ever reviewing the output code.

I am unable to tell from TFA if the author has any knowledge or skills in programming and looked at the code or if they did in fact "vibe code".
by rcoveson | 2025-12-18 23:37:34+00:00
But there's a reason that caches are always sized in powers of two as well, and that same reason is applicable to high-performance ring buffers: Division by powers of two is easy and easy is fast. It's reliably a single cycle, compared to division by arbitrary 32bit integers which can be 8-30 cycles depending on CPU.

Also, there's another benefit downstream of that one: Powers of two work as a schelling point for allocations. Picking powers of two for resizable vectors maximizes "good luck" when you malloc/realloc in most allocators, in part because e.g. a buddy allocator is probably also implemented using power-of-two allocations for the above reason, but also for the plain reason that other users of the same allocator are more likely to have requested power of two allocations. Spontaneous coordination is a benefit all its own. Almost supernatural! :)
by tialaramex | 2025-12-18 23:37:46+00:00
I think that document is no longer very close to Jai's current state, note that it wasn't edited for quite some time and Jon seems happy to just rip stuff out and replace it wholesale, after all there's only a handful of Jai programmers so if not now then when?

In particular I believe the SOA stuff is gone, my impression (I don't have privileged access) is that SOA is one of those ideas where you think "Oh! This changes everything" and for the next week or two every time you do something you realise SOA would make it better. But a year later you find yourself unwinding some of that SOA mania and you realise eh... this isn't such a great idea that it deserves to be a key language differentiator. It's not useless but it's also not fundamental so maybe write a library or something.

There are a few other data structure tricks which can hit people this way, I remember I had a brief period where I wanted to solve everything with Bloom Filters and then I got better.

In terms of languages you can go try yourself today, the closest might be Ginger Bill's Odin. Shared scepticism for both C++ and modern language trends, syntax is reminiscent though far from identical. I'd be surprised if you hate one but love the other.

Edited: Somehow I removed "no longer" from my initial sentence during editing, which inverted the sense, now fixed.
by jmward01 | 2025-12-18 23:37:53+00:00
I've said it before and I will probably say it again, this is digital assault and should be thought of and treated that way. Companies, and their officers, should be treated criminally for things like this. Most people do not know/understand this is happening and that is by design. Is this view a little hyperbolic? Possibly, but the privacy scales are so far tipped against the average person right now that we need more extreme views and actions to start fixing things.
by christophilus | 2025-12-18 23:38:10+00:00
I think there was a time when the other side truly believed globalization and economic progress would turn the CCP into a democratic ally. Maybe both sides believed that for a while. What you see now is just the fragmented and incoherent remains of a failed philosophy that hasn’t yet come up with a coherent replacement, so we’re left adrift with no rational foreign policy from either side (in my opinion).
by notnullorvoid | 2025-12-18 23:38:47+00:00
In general if a script can run, users sessions and more importantly passwords are at risk.

It's true that an HTTP-only session cookie couldn't be directly taken, but it's trivial to present the user with a login screen and collect their password (and OTP), at which point you can easily get a session remotely. It can look entirely like the regular login page right down to the url path (because the script can modify that without causing a page load).
by muzani | 2025-12-18 23:38:52+00:00
Looking into this, this reinforces my predictions? I looked up the Ford F-150 Lightning and a quote catches my eye: "When the electric truck debuted in 2022, Russia had just invaded Ukraine, disrupting supplies of nickel, a key material in EV batteries."

Raw materials and cost is a big part of the Chinese dominance on EVs and it'll continue to be on that side of the political sphere.

Having to tariff China also emphasizes that they're gaining ground too quickly. They process about (over?) 80% of the major parts, so you can't fully tariff them either, only assembled cars or some parts.
by jtrn | 2025-12-18 23:39:17+00:00
I disregarded everything from him after I read two of his books. It’s not perfect, but my rule of thumb is simple: If a scientific story feels sexy, cinematic, and narratively perfect, it’s likely fabrication.

Same reason I have been skeptical towards dark energy, EMDR, and the blue light destroys sleep craze. And many other stupid stuff. If you like a story or a finding, that’s a clue to double the critical sceptisism.
by jeffjeffbear | 2025-12-18 23:39:56+00:00
I just don't like having to send HTML and have the backend deal with what are really frontend problems. Sending JSON is great since you can serialize most reasonable data types into it and then the backend has no responsibility for how it is rendered which helps for having mobile apps use the same backend as the website. Sending HTML just seems nuts since if you change your design you would have to change the backend too.
by tptacek | 2025-12-18 23:40:15+00:00
I can't think of a business process that accepts and monetizes pin-compatible XSS vulnerabilities.

But for RCE, there's lots of them! RCE vulnerabilities slot into CNE implants, botnets, ransomware rigs, and organized identity theft.

The key thing here is that these businesses already exist. There are already people in the market for the vulnerabilities. If you just imagine a new business driven by XSS vulnerabilities, that doesn't create customers, any more than imagining a new kind of cloud service instantly gets you funded for one.
by sfRattan | 2025-12-18 23:40:15+00:00
It was specifically the release of Windows RT (Windows 8 on ARM) in 2012 that had people nervous that Microsoft wanted to lock Windows down long-term in the manner of iOS and Apple. Windows RT only ran code signed by Microsoft and only installed programs from Microsoft's store. It failed, and Microsoft let off the gas locking down Windows, but that moment was probably the specific impetus for Gabe Newell to set Valve on a decade long course of building support for Steam and the games in its storefront on Linux. Windows being locked down to the degree of iOS was an existential risk to Valve as a company and Steam as a platform in 2012. It isn't anymore.

Windows RT also drew ire from people other than Newell at the time IIRC. It was widely perceived as a trial balloon for closing down Windows almost completely. The first Steam Machines a decade ago were Valve's answering trial balloon. Both failed, but Valve learned and Microsoft largely did not... They haven't locked down Windows 11 to the point of Windows RT, but they're abusing their users to the point of potentially sabotaging their own market dominance for consumer PCs.
by baobun | 2025-12-18 23:40:40+00:00
I think it's a good idea to mitm yourself and look at what exactly your browser is up to. We should be careful about just accepting and repeating hearsay when such claims are pretty easy to verify yourself.

https://sizeof.cat/post/web-browser-telemetry-2025-edition/

As for webapps breaking in Librewolf, IME those can be fixed by selectively unblocking canvas (or whatever) for the site in question.
Show HN: Git repo visualization and interactive stars and commits history
by rohitghumare | 2025-12-18 23:40:48+00:00
Visualize any GitHub repository with beautiful interactive graphs and star history charts.

Features: Interactive Force Graph - Explore repository structure with draggable, zoomable nodes Pack View - Circle-packing visualization showing files nested inside folders Star History - Beautiful charts showing repository growth over time Embeddable Charts - Add live star history SVG to your README (dark & light themes) Commit Timeline - Watch commits animate through the codebase Multi-Repo Comparison - Compare star histories of multiple repositories Chrome Extension - View star history directly on GitHub pages
by araes | 2025-12-18 23:40:49+00:00
"Show HN: Title_of_Post" with a URL to the site to post a Show HN article. Should be "something you've made that other people can play with."

"Ask HN: Title_of_Post" with a question written in the "text" section to post a Ask HN article. Should be a text based question for the community (much like this article currently being commented on).

Link to FAQs, Hacker News FAQ[1], Hacker News Guidelines [2], ShowHN Guidelines [3], Y Combinator FAQ / Legal Terms of Use [4], Y Combinator About [5]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

[4] https://www.ycombinator.com/faq

[5] https://www.ycombinator.com/about

Guidelines, FAQ, and Legal are available as links at the bottom of the website.

One feature that's not included in the lists some people have made that I find helpful occasionally is the "by: username" in the Search feature which will find comments and submissions (filterable by Ask, Show, Launch, Job, Poll) by a specific author. These can also be found with quick links using "/threads?id=username" (comments) or "/submitted?id=username" (submissions). Such, as your personal, and obvious relatively limited contributions are:

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=jeffclax

https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=jeffclax
by tomcam | 2025-12-18 23:41:20+00:00
When you turn on a computer, it transfers code to software required to get the machine up and running reliably--the boot process. That used start in a chip called the BIOS. It's a 40-year old holdover from the early days of the IBM PC. UEFI is a more complex and feature-rich protocol. Due to its default memory management Go hasn't been considered the first choice for such purposes but this proof of concept uses Go for the very low level code needed for UEFI.
by stephen_g | 2025-12-18 23:41:26+00:00
As a data point, I had mostly only seen what the author is complaining about in the past, with articles having more of the "you won't believe what ancient statues actually looked like" angle and implying that it's just our taste that changed.

So I definitely feel that I was misled by what I had read and seen about painted statues (though I was always a bit sceptical), even though everything I'd seen was from secondary sources (news sites etc.), and not articles or papers written by the reconstructioninsts themselves, so I don't blame them directly.
by observationist | 2025-12-18 23:42:55+00:00
Prestige, in an honest system, would be a great signal. The problem is with any sort of closed system, the signal immediately gets gamed. Therefore, the open system is the least bad of the available options. A journal could still achieve prestige by curating and selecting the best available studies and research - in the proposed system, nothing is preventing them from licensing material like any other potential platform or individual.

Profit motivated exclusivity under private control resulted in the enshittification vortex of adtech doom we're currently all drowning in. If you want prestige - top ten status in Google search results - you need to play the game they invented. Same goes for all of academia.

People stopped optimizing for good websites and utility and craft and started optimizing for keywords and technicalities and glitches in the matrix that bumped their ranking.

People stopped optimizing for beneficial novel research and started optimizing for topical grants, politically useful subjects, p hacking, and outright making shit up as long as it was valuable to the customers (grant agencies and institutions seeking particular outcomes, etc.)

Google is trash, and scientific publication is a flaming dumpster fire of reproducibility failure, fraud, politically motivated weasel wording nonsense, and profit motivated selective studies on medical topics that benefit pharma and chemical companies and the like.

Scientific publishing is free speech. As such, it shouldn't be under the thumb of institutions or platforms that gatekeep for profit or status or political utility or any of a dozen different incentives that will fatally bias and corrupt the resulting publications.

It's incredibly cheap and easy to host for free. It benefits everyone the most and harms the public the least to do it like that, and if a prestigious platform tries to push narrative bending propaganda, it can be directly and easily contradicted using the same open and public mechanisms. And if it happens in the other direction, with solid, but politically or commercially inconvenient research saying something that isn't appreciated by those with wealth or power, that research can be openly reproduced and replicated, all out in the open.
by theshrike79 | 2025-12-18 23:43:45+00:00
Depends a lot on the type of software you're doing. Startups will have hungry people willing to learn, more traditional companies won't in the same percentages.

Not all people are curious, they go to school, learn to code and work their job like a normal 9-5 blue collar worker. They go to company trainings, but they don't read Hacker News, don't follow the latest language fads or do personal software projects during nights and weekends. It's just a day job for them that pays for their non-programming hobbies.

I've had colleagues who managed the same ASP+Access DB system for almost a decade, with zero curiosity or interest to learn anything that wasn't absolutely necessary.

We had to drag them to the ASP.NET age, one just wouldn't and stayed back managing the legacy version until all clients had moved to the new stack.

...and I just checked LinkedIn, the non-curious ones are still in the same company, managing the same piece of SaaS as a Software Developer. 20-26 years in the same company, straight from school.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-12-18 23:44:11+00:00
You don't use it to summarize pages (or at least I don't), but to help understand content within a page while minimizing distractions.

For example: I was browsing a Reddit thread a few hours ago and came upon a comment to the effect of "Bertrand Russell argued for a preemptive nuclear strike on the Soviets at the end of WWII." That seemed to conflict with my prior understanding of Bertrand Russell, to say the least. I figured the poster had confused Russell with von Neumann or Curtis LeMay or somebody, but I didn't want to blow off the comment entirely in case I'd missed something.

So I highlighted the comment, right-clicked, and selected "Explain this." Instead of having to spend several minutes or more going down various Google/Wikipedia rabbit holes in another tab or window, the sidebar immediately popped up with a more nuanced explanation of Russell's actual position (which was very poorly represented by the Reddit comment but not 100% out of line with it), complete with citations, along with further notes on how his views evolved over the next few years.

It goes without saying how useful this feature is when looking over a math-heavy paper. I sure wish it worked in Acrobat Reader. And I hope a bunch of ludds don't browbeat Mozilla into removing the feature or making it harder to use.
by muzani | 2025-12-18 23:44:13+00:00
I have a project with them, processing auto insurance claims. Mostly extracting details from police reports like license plate numbers, extracting details of the incident.

"Human in the loop doesn't help because the human would just have to read the document themselves to ensure accuracy, defeating the point of the automation."

They're doing it manually without it. Semi-auto beats manual readily. There's still checks like submission of the number to grab the details of the individuals involved, and if the names, vehicle type, etc don't match, that automatically flags that something's off.
by autoexec | 2025-12-18 23:44:39+00:00
> The actual screenshot isn’t sent, some hash is generated from the screenshot and compared against a library of known screenshots of ads/shows/etc for similarity.

this is most likely the case, although there's nothing stopping them from uploading the original 4K screengrab in cases where there's no match to something in their database which would allow them to manually ID the content and add a hash or just scrape it for whatever info they can add to your dossier.
by angoragoats | 2025-12-18 23:44:45+00:00
> Also, as the OP noted, this setup can support up to 4 Mac devices because each Mac must be connected to every other Mac!! All the more reason for Apple to invest in something like QSFP.

This isn’t any different with QSFP unless you’re suggesting that one adds a 200GbE switch to the mix, which:

* Adds thousands of dollars of cost,

* Adds 150W or more of power usage and the accompanying loud fan noise that comes with that,

* And perhaps most importantly adds measurable latency to a networking stack that is already higher latency than the RDMA approach used by the TB5 setup in the OP.
by zozbot234 | 2025-12-18 23:44:47+00:00
> Neural accelerators to get prompt prefill time down.

Apple Neural Engine is a thing already, with support for multiply-accumulate on INT8 and FP16. AI inference frameworks need to add support for it.

> this setup can support up to 4 Mac devices because each Mac must be connected to every other Mac!!

Do you really need a fully connected mesh? Doesn't Thunderbolt just show up as a network connection that RDMA is ran on top of?