MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by newpavlov | 2025-12-17 16:55:48+00:00
For all my skepticism towards using LLM in programming (I think that the current trajectory leads to slow degradation of the IT industry and massive loss of expertise in the following decades), LLM-based advanced proof assistants is the only bright spot for which I have high hopes.

Generation of proofs requires a lot of complex pattern matching, so it's a very good fit for LLMs (assuming sufficiently big datasets are available). And we can automatically verify LLM output, so hallucinations are not the problem. You still need proper engineers to construct and understand specifications (with or without LLM help), but it can significantly reduce development cost of high assurance software. LLMs also could help with explaining why a proof can not be generated.

But I think it would require a Rust-like breakthrough, not in the sense of developing the fundamental technology (after all, Rust is fairly conservative from the PLT point of view), but in the sense of making it accessible for a wider audience of programmers.

I also hope that we will get LLM-guided compilers which generate equivalency proofs as part of the compilation process. Personally, I find it surprising that the industry is able to function as well as it does on top of software like LLVM which feels like a giant with feet of clay with its numerous miscompilation bugs and human-written optimization heuristics which are applied to a somewhat vague abstract machine model. Just look how long it took to fix the god damn noalias atrtibute! If not for Rust, it probably would've still been a bug ridden mess.
by acheong08 | 2025-12-17 16:55:52+00:00
Thinking along the line of speed, I wonder if a model that can reason and use tools at 60fps would be able to control a robot with raw instructions and perform skilled physical work currently limited by the text-only output of LLMs. Also helps that the Gemini series is really good at multimodal processing with images and audio. Maybe they can also encode sensory inputs in a similar way.

Pipe dream right now, but 50 years later? Maybe
by stainablesteel | 2025-12-17 16:55:54+00:00
DEI and ESG don't work anymore, now people are latching onto AI wherever they can

they're all just marketing scams. if these people actually implement AI in ways that isn't needed it just kills the product

the built-in language translation feature of firefox is great, because it's locally ran

i don't want my browser fetching commands from random servers just to implement AI in a browser that was working fine without it
by bearjaws | 2025-12-17 16:56:23+00:00
I've been using the preview flash model exclusively since it came out, the speed and quality of response is all I need at the moment. Although still using Claude Code w/ Opus 4.5 for dev work.

Google keeps their models very "fresh" and I tend to get more correct answers when asking about Azure or O365 issues, ironically copilot will talk about now deleted or deprecated features more often.
by tsunamifury | 2025-12-17 16:57:10+00:00
My guy, the fundamentals of Neoliberalism are like newtonian physics at this point, if it's not my job to explain them for you from first principles. Born out of WW2 and specifically thrived from 'fixing the broken window of Europe and Japan.'

But basically speaking, games of destruction can be obviously extremely economical incentivized regardless of what humans call 'productive.' And economies and markets have never ever promised to be narrowly productive for a specific moral world view. Quite the opposite actually.

Please don't claim insult where basic knowledge is simply lacking.
by CupricTea | 2025-12-17 16:58:17+00:00
>Man, how I wish WebGPU didn't go all-in on legacy Vulkan API model

WebGPU doesn't talk to the GPU directly. It requires Vulkan/D3D/Metal underneath to actually implement itself.

>Even Vulkan stopped doing pointless boilerplate like bindings and pipelines.

Vulkan did no such thing. As of today (Vulkan 1.4) they added VK_KHR_dynamic_rendering to core and added the VK_EXT_shader_object extension, which are not required to be supported and must be queried for before using. The former gets rid of render pass objects and framebuffer objects in favor of vkCmdBeginRendering(), and WebGPU already abstracts those two away so you don't see or deal with them. The latter gets rid of monolithic pipeline objects.

Many mobile GPUs still do not support VK_KHR_dynamic_rendering or VK_EXT_shader_object. Even my very own Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra[1] doesn't support shaderObject.

Vulkan did not get rid of pipeline objects, they added extensions for modern desktop GPUs that didn't need them. Even modern mobile GPUs still need them, and WebGPU isn't going to fragment their API to wall off mobile users.

[1] https://vulkan.gpuinfo.org/displayreport.php?id=44583
by TheRealPomax | 2025-12-17 16:58:21+00:00
...what?

No of course not, that's an absolutely ridiculous thing to say. ∀A -> B does not mean ∀B -> A, it only means ∃B -> A.

tsc, the executable, not only supports TypeScript, the language, but also knows how to read JSDoc when you're not giving it TypeScript. It supports JSDoc for code that isn't TypeScript. I'd repeat that a few more times but hopefully twice is enough to make the point obvious.
by __jl__ | 2025-12-17 16:58:25+00:00
This is awesome. No preview release either, which is great to production.

They are pushing the prices higher with each release though: API pricing is up to $0.5/M for input and $3/M for output

For comparison:

Gemini 3.0 Flash: $0.50/M for input and $3.00/M for output

Gemini 2.5 Flash: $0.30/M for input and $2.50/M for output

Gemini 2.0 Flash: $0.15/M for input and $0.60/M for output

Gemini 1.5 Flash: $0.075/M for input and $0.30/M for output (after price drop)

Gemini 3.0 Pro: $2.00/M for input and $12/M for output

Gemini 2.5 Pro: $1.25/M for input and $10/M for output

Gemini 1.5 Pro: $1.25/M for input and $5/M for output

I think image input pricing went up even more.

Correction: It is a preview model...
by ben_w | 2025-12-17 16:58:46+00:00
"Leaking" is an unauthorised third party getting data; for any cloud data processor, data that is sent to that provider by me (OpenAI, everything stored on Google Docs, all of it), is just a counterparty, not a third party.

And it has to be unauthorised, e.g. the New York Times getting to see my ChatGPT history isn't itself a leak because that's court-ordered and hence authorised, all the >1200 "trusted partners" in GDPR popups if you give consent that's authorised, etc.
Show HN: The Tournament – Free bracket and league table generator
by ryo_numoto | 2025-12-17 16:59:20+00:00
Hi HN! I run The Tournament, a web app for creating tournament brackets and league tables.

It's been widely used in Japan for years by sports leagues, schools, esports events, and TV stations. We recently added full multi-language support and are now expanding globally. What makes it different: - Intuitive editing – click directly on brackets/tables to enter results, winners auto-advance - Works instantly – no signup required to try, sign up to save and manage your tables - Both formats – single-elimination brackets AND round-robin league tables with auto-calculated standings - Clean output – PDF export, embed via iframe, share on social media - International-ready – country flags, 9 languages supported Free tier: 16 players for brackets, 6 for leagues Premium ($5/mo): up to 128 players, unlimited saves, API access, no ads I'd love to hear what features you'd want. Happy to answer any questions!
by kentonv | 2025-12-17 16:59:27+00:00
> - There's actual standard logic for remotely-existing objects vs. just RPC

Cap'n Proto is an object-capability system that very much has a uniform representation of remote objects. Object references are first-class types. You can send someone a remote object reference, embedded in some other message (e.g. params or return value of another RPC). When they release that reference, you get notified that the object can now be cleaned up.

Is there something else you were looking for here that Cap'n Proto doesn't do?

Not meaning to argue, just curious to understand. (I'm the author of Cap'n Proto.)

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

FWIW Cap'n Proto objects can implement multiple interfaces. That said, identity of remote objects is a surprisingly complicated subject, and at present it's not necessarily possible to tell whether two references point to the same object.

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

This is definitely a limitation of Cap'n Proto right now.

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

There is definitely a lot CORBA does here that Cap'n Proto doesn't. Cap'n Proto itself only defines object lifetimes within the context of an RPC session. Persistence and long-term object identity are left to a higher layer.
by jargus | 2025-12-17 16:59:28+00:00
A few months ago, I purchased one of HP's laserjets on Amazon. It was cheaper than all the other laserjets.

The trick they play here is that while I was able to get it to print without signing up for the apps or registering, the printer will refuse to print anymore once you have printed ~50 pages. I only hit this because I was printing out a large number of forms (100+ pages) almost immediately after getting the printer.

My suspicion is that they assume the average user won't hit this limit until after the return period is up, so they'll be stuck with a printer that demands registration/app usage/etc. Very sneaky. And if they're willing to trick you like this, what else do they have up their sleeve?
by primaprashant | 2025-12-17 16:59:58+00:00
Pricing is $0.5 / $3 per million input / output tokens. 2.5 Flash was $0.3 / $2.5. That's 66% increase in input tokens and 20% increase in output token pricing.

For comparison, from 2.5 Pro ($1.25 / $10) to 3 Pro ($2 / $12), there was 60% increase in input tokens and 20% increase in output tokens pricing.
by kenjackson | 2025-12-17 17:00:14+00:00
That word "somewhat" in "somewhat informed" is doing a lot of lifting here. That said, I do think that having a little curation in the training data probably would help. Get rid of the worst content farms and misinformation sites. But it'll never be perfect, in the same way that getting any content in the world today isn't perfect (and never has been).
Show HN: Built Valmi to bill AI Agents(Open Alternative to Paid.ai, Legacy Zuora
by rajvarkala | 2025-12-17 17:00:27+00:00
Hi HN,

I am Raj, founder of Valmi.

We were building AI agents and quickly hit a pricing problem.

Tokens, API calls, and seats made no sense for agents. One agent run might be cheap and useless; another might be expensive and replace hours of human work. Billing on usage felt disconnected from real value.

What customers actually asked was: “Did it finish the task?” “Did it resolve the ticket?”

That pushed us toward outcome-based billing - charge only when the agent delivers something meaningful.

But existing billing systems don’t handle this well:

outcomes aren’t first-class concepts costs vary per run (LLMs, tools, retries) it’s hard to see margins per agent or customer

So we built Valmi:

1. outcomes as billable units 2. cost + margin tracked per agent run 3. outcome, usage, or hybrid pricing 4. open-source SDKs, self-hostable stack

Outcome billing also builds trust: customers pay for results, not experiments.

Available on GitHub (https://github.com/valmi-io/value).

I also wrote my hypothesis here: https://www.valmi.io/blog/an-imperative-for-ai-agents-outcom...

Would love your feedback! Also hosted at https://value.valmi.io

-Raj
by ghaff | 2025-12-17 17:00:29+00:00
I'm not sure offline certificates mean a whole lot when layoffs matter either.

But MOOCs and other purely online options just didn't result in any meaningful certification especially outside of a connection to established universities. And, given that, people/companies weren't interested in paying significant bucks for them.

It was probably a useful experiment. Just not a very successful one. And once the experiment faltered, schools/professors became less interested in putting money and energy into it.

All the evidence is that most of the students/potential students who weren't already motivated to pursuing independent learning didn't really connect to all this online material.
by ModernMech | 2025-12-17 17:00:57+00:00
AI is allowing a lot of "non SWEs" to speedrun the failed project lifecycle.

The exuberance of rapid early-stage development is mirrored by the despair of late-stage realizations that you've painted yourself into a corner, you don't understand enough about the code or the problem domain to move forward at all, and your AI coding assistant can't help either because the program is too large for it to reason about fully.

AI lets you make all the classic engineering project mistakes faster.
by azangru | 2025-12-17 17:01:13+00:00
> Those courses that were basically “we’re a top university and we let someone record the class from the back” were a literal life changer. Honestly, that was all I wanted.

Does anyone remember what happened to UC Berkeley? They had a lot of their courses recorded and uploaded to youtube; an absolute joy. Then, some [beep] sued them for not making the recording accessible enough, i.e. not providing captions alongside the recordings. And they had to take down all their published courses! Because if someone cannot make use of those courses, then no-one can! Such a shame! Especially considering how these days, captions can be generated automatically for anyone who really needs them.
by jajuuka | 2025-12-17 17:01:29+00:00
This is just tone policing.

"we won't do this" But you didn't say you'd never do this. "okay we'll never do this" But you didn't say you'd never ever do this. "fine we'll never ever do this" But you didn't say that it's never entered your mind once.

They said they won't do it and your interpretation is to demand they said it with more words? Come on, let's stop this nonsense. Can Firefox users ever be happy?
by II2II | 2025-12-17 17:01:44+00:00
I agree with the untrue and revisionism bit, but I disagree with it being the opposite of what happened.

People were trying to figure out how to make money off of the Internet from the early days of the Internet being publicly accessible (rather than a tool used by academic and military institutions). It can be attributed to the downfall of Gopher. It can be attributed to the rise of Netscape and Internet Explorer. While the early web was nowhere near as commercial as it is today, we quickly saw the development of search engines and (ad supported) hosting services that were. By the time 2000's hit, VC money was very much starting to drive the game. In the minds of most people, the Internet was only 5 to 10 years old at that point. (The actual Internet may be much older, but few people took notice of it until the mid-1990's.)
by ryandrake | 2025-12-17 17:02:07+00:00
> People don’t like paying for software, demand constant updates and hate subscriptions.

Yes, No, Yes?

I don't demand constant updates. I don't want constant updates. Usually when a company updates software it becomes worse. I am happy with the initial version of 90% of the software I use, and all I want is bug fixes and security updates.
by manquer | 2025-12-17 17:02:09+00:00
His workload is close to the more typical one i mentioned as scenario b. It will cost them $84/month.

For me, we do about 800,000 build minutes/month, for orchestration alone it is going to be $1600/month. In contrast the runner host we use (Namespace labs) cost $0.0015 / minute[1] which is less than orchestration cost for GH, that is just ridiculous.

---

[1] It is even worse, the first 250,000 minutes is fixed at $250, so the base is $0.001 /minute for the runner.
by jleyank | 2025-12-17 17:02:14+00:00
Academics must get and maintain grants to survive. With money, they can attract students and researchers. Without money, they'll fail to get tenure or (usually) become irrelevant to the field. Take the money source away, and they have to find it elsewhere.

This is separate from politics that might impact the researchers themselves, their ability to get and keep a group, ... Problems in this area merely make things worse.
by echelon | 2025-12-17 17:02:20+00:00
This is hilarious. The personalized pie charts and XKCD-style comics are great, and the roast-style humor is perfect.

I do feel like it's not an entirely accurate caricature (recency bias? limited context?), but it's close enough.

Good work!

You should do a "show HN" if you're not worried about it costing you too much.
by nxobject | 2025-12-17 17:02:23+00:00
Apropos to that: I wish the author had said more about critically evaluating tweaks in methodology and definition.

(For example, he cites Blanchflower and Bryson because he prefers positive affect as a measurement of happiness – but doesn't note that Blanchflower and Bryson pool data for 2008-2017, so in terms of rankings they may be measuring something meaningful but different.)
by otterley | 2025-12-17 17:02:27+00:00
A monopoly right and a property right are the same thing with different names. As a landowner, for example, you have the right to kick people off (evict from) your property. You have both a de facto and de jure monopoly to exploit your land.

The US constitution confers to Congress the power to grant copyrights and patents in Article I, Section 8:

"The Congress shall have Power ... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries"

The operating word here is "exclusive" which, yes, is a monopoly right. But again, it's not different in essence from a property right, which is also a monopoly right.
by notepad0x90 | 2025-12-17 17:02:36+00:00
I think people are wildly overreacting. There is a new CEO and he wants to make a splash so the throws around "AI" that's it. Of course there will be AI related features in firefox, there already are! Wait and see what the actual specifics are before reacting?

Also, a small minor detail here: We're not paying for firefox! why are so many people feeling entitled? Mozilla has to do something other than beg Google to survive. Perhaps we need a fork of firefox that is sustained by donations and is backed by a non-profit explicilty chartered to make decisions based on community feedback? I don't see a problem with that wikipedia-like approach, I don't think any of the forks today have a good/viable org structure that is fully non-profit (as in it won't seek profit at all). Mozilla has bade some bad decisions recently, but they're a far cry from the world-ended outcry they're getting.

If we don't donate to Mozilla and we don't pay them money, then we have to be the product at some point. Even if they don't it to be that way, they have to placate to some other business interests.

I hope the EU also pays attention, perhaps some of their OSS funding can help setup an alternate org.
by stainablesteel | 2025-12-17 17:02:55+00:00
> Many fMRI studies on psychiatric or neurological diseases – from depression to Alzheimer’s – interpret changes in blood flow as a reliable signal of neuronal under- or over-activation. Given the limited validity of such measurements, this must now be reassessed

idk about that, the brain is complicated, blood flow itself may as well be a factor to interpret
by languagehacker | 2025-12-17 17:03:13+00:00
Interesting development. I had assumed a private equity company was behind this, but it seems like a deal brokered between two public companies, maybe struggling to show growth.

Something tells me the outcome will likely be the same -- years of trying to get competing systems to get aligned or absorbed, attrition of all the most important people who are ready to move on and do more interesting work, and ultimately a poorer experience for the customer.

But what do I know.
by agentultra | 2025-12-17 17:03:24+00:00
I really like TLA+ and am glad it exists.

But every time I suggest to a team I’m working on that we should try modelling the problem with it… people are less than enthusiastic.

These are all great tips. Especially starting with the most simple, abstract model and extending it with refinement if you need to.

That basically means that you write your first spec as abstractly and simply as possible with as little detail about the actual implementation as you can.

If details matter, you use the first spec as a module and write a new spec with the added details. The new spec will use implication that if this spec holds then the first one holds too.

Anyway, I was kind of mad when I learned TLA+ that it and systems like it aren’t part of the standard curriculum and common practices.

“We built this distributed database that guarantees quorum if you have at least 3 nodes!” someone will excitedly claim. And when you ask how you get an informal paper and 100k lines of C++ code. Wouldn’t it be nicer if you just had 1k lines of plain old pure maths?

And pure maths that can be exhaustively checked by the computer? It’s not as perfect as a proof but it’s great for a lot of practical applications.

For me it’s nicer I guess.
by TimTheTinker | 2025-12-17 17:03:24+00:00
> it skips over the one step the industry still refuses to do: decide what the software is supposed to do in the first place.

Not only that, but it's been well-established that a significant challenge with formally verified software is to create the right spec -- i.e. one that actually satisfies the intended requirements. A formally verified program can still have bugs, because the spec (which requires specialized skills to read and understand) may not satisfy the intent of the requirements in some way.

So the fundamental issue/bottleneck that emerges is the requirements <=> spec gap, which closing the spec <=> executable gap does nothing to address. Translating people's needs to an empirical, maintainable spec of one type or another will always require skilled humans in the loop, regardless of how easy everything else gets -- at minimum as a responsibility sink, but even more as a skilled technical communicator. I don't think we realize how valuable it is to PMs/executives and especially customers to be understood by a skilled, trustworthy technical person.
by al_borland | 2025-12-17 17:03:32+00:00
Is this still a valid account for HN status? It says it’s the official one, but with the changes at Twitter to no longer show chronological feeds (at least for users that aren’t logged in), it’s rather useless. The top 5 listed post (for me) are seemingly random from 2014 - 2022.

https://x.com/HNStatus

Is there a better place to check, beyond a basic down detector that may provide more insight or signal that the outage is acknowledged?
by danans | 2025-12-17 17:03:39+00:00
> Are these highly qualified people or do you just need to install some parts?

They're not software engineers or data scientists if that's what you mean by "highly qualified".

Datacenters techs do the physical parts of the job we once called "system administrator". That definitely requires skill and attention to detail, not just the ability to "install some parts".

When the tech industry transitioned from on site systems to datacenters and big compute / big data, "system administrator" got split into "site reliability engineer" and "datacenter technician" as they scaled independently, with datacenter tech being focused on manufacturing and physical troubleshooting.

They have always been the "blue collar" workers of tech, both in terms of pay and prestige. Like tech support, the job is considered more of a stepping stone into the operations (not R&D) side of big data companies.

That all said, the qualifications of applicants for a job depend a lot on the labor market, in particular, the desperation of applicants. During the dotcom bust, a lot of CS grads (including me) were applying for technician jobs.