MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by noitpmeder | 2025-12-17 11:29:09+00:00
This is absolutely FUD.

Most engineers don't work at FAANG. Most _good_ engineers DONT work at FAANG. FAANG is still composed of almost all good engineers. Most software engineers are NOT _good_.

All of these things are simultaneously true.

Most of your junior engineering hires will never develop to FAANG levels, and as such are never in positions to seriously only hypercompete for those FAANG salaries. There vast majority of devs, even in the US, that are perfectly adequate (note, not great, adequate) to act as developers for non-FAANG companies for non-FAANG wages. This is the kind of developer universities are churning out at insane rates.
by mosquitobiten | 2025-12-17 11:29:23+00:00
that 3% is of total users including mobile which chrome is king because it's basically force fed to users. this is important because there is no choice with browsers for the common mobile user, most of them don't know what is a browser even if they used it every day. also in the 2000s IE was king because guess what? that was what came preinstalled with winxp
by dspillett | 2025-12-17 11:29:42+00:00
I think it is him. Chrome making blocking harder is one of the issues that has been pushing some users away (and a good portion of those in the direction of FF). If FF is not better is that regard then those moving away for that reason will go elsewhere, and those who are there already at least in part for that reason will move away.

If this happened it would be the final straw for me, if I wasn't already looking to change because of them confirming the plan to further descend into the great “AI” cult.
by b112 | 2025-12-17 11:29:47+00:00
Not sure what your point is? It doesn't matter the number of users, because the GP's point is that those users are going to immediately bail, for a browser thsy supports ad block.

So that extra money will never materialize. And usage numbers will again crater. This is the point.

(You can disagree with that assessment, but that has nothing to do with telemetry, which cannot gauge users hanging around with blocked .. adblockers)
by Brian_K_White | 2025-12-17 11:29:53+00:00
"feels off mission" exposes how little conviction there is behind this position.

That is a flimsy tissue paper statement about a concept that should be a bedrock principle.

It's irrationally charitable to give it any credit at all. Especially in context where anyone who's awake should understand they need to be delivering an unquestionably clear message about unquestionably clear goals and core values, because this ain't that.

Or rather, it is a clear message, just a different message to a different audience.
by skydhash | 2025-12-17 11:30:04+00:00
The article is more about offloading your thinking to the machine than a real usage of what notes is. You may as well make every decision rely on a coin toss.

I take notes for remembrance and relevance (what is interesting for me). But linking concepts is all my thinking. Doing whatever rhe article is prescribing is like sending someone on a tourist trip to take pictures and then bragging that you visited the country. While knowing that some pictures are photoshopped.
by M95D | 2025-12-17 11:30:17+00:00
I don't have dbus installed on my linux due to security and privacy concerns. How is this new bus any better?

- Does it allow applications to enumerate what other apps are installed in the system (connected to the bus), without being explicitly allowed by the admin to do that?

- Does it allow apps to talk to each other without being explicitly allowed by the admin?

- Does it allow apps to "publish" data that anyone can read?

- Does it allow apps to "request" actions from other apps running with other privileges than themselves (elevation of privilege)?
by the_biot | 2025-12-17 11:30:29+00:00
> They invest the vast majority of their resources in Firefox.

Says who? I have never seen figures that show this. It also doesn't excuse the gigantic amounts of money wasted on irrelevant things, or executive salaries.

> And they have had some incredible successes: Rust, Let's Encrypt ...

That's pretty charitable. LE was a wider industry initiative, and while Rust was incubated in Mozilla AFAIK, they also let it slip through their fingers.

> Maybe there was no realistic way to do better. Maybe thanks to Baker, Mozilla still exists.

How on earth are you defending her behavior? It was utterly shameless and indefensible. Do you work for Mozilla?

> Mozilla needed and needs to find other products

No, it doesn't. It needs to bank its giant wad of cash and learn to live off the interest plus whatever it can get in donations. Mozilla does not need to be a for-profit company, it needs to be a non-profit making a browser. That was always supposed to be the mission, from day one.

> Do you really think they could make Firefox so good that the non-technical public would go through the effort of dropping Chrome

They did when IE was shoved down people's throats, and Firefox was the better browser. They did when Chrome came around and started taking over. Most people even now get pushed to Edge or Safari, yet still end up using Chrome. People switching browsers is a thing.
by compressedgas | 2025-12-17 11:30:45+00:00
Another is the use of "singleTop", "singleTask", "singleInstance", and "singleInstancePerTask" activity launch modes, instead of properly implementing an interface that supports multiple task instances and allows its activities to properly stack on other's tasks that is allowing other applications to call upon your application to do a task and then properly allow the user to return the application from which where the call was made.
by bullen | 2025-12-17 11:30:48+00:00
Personally I'm staying with OpenGL (ES) 3 for eternity.

VAO is the last feature I was missing prior.

Also the other cores will do useful gameplay work so one CPU core for the GPU is ok.

4 CPU cores is also enough for eternity. 1GB shared RAM/VRAM too.

Let's build something good on top of the hardware/OSes/APIs/languages we have now? 3588/linux/OpenGL/C+Java specifically!

Hardware has permanently peaked in many ways, only soft internal protocols can now evolve, I write mine inside TCP/HTTP.
Show HN: TubeDL – Open-source YouTube downloader CLI (playlists, Shorts, auth)
by ricky_trujillot | 2025-12-17 11:31:27+00:00
Last week I posted TubeDL, a native macOS video downloader. Got some interest, so I'm open-sourcing the CLI it's built on.

It's a Python wrapper around yt-dlp with a cleaner interface:

- Single videos, playlists, Shorts - MP4/MP3 output with FFmpeg - Cookie auth for age-restricted/private videos - Thumbnail extraction - Rich terminal UI

Install: pip install -e . (or clone and run)

The macOS app adds a native GUI on top, but the CLI works standalone on macOS/Linux/Windows.

GitHub: https://github.com/RichardTrujilloTorres/tubedl

Looking for feedback on the CLI design and what features would be most useful. PRs welcome.
by lazide | 2025-12-17 11:31:31+00:00
The issue is even deeper - the 1 thing in 5 minutes was probably already surface knowledge. We don’t usually really ‘know’ the thing that quickly. But we might have a chance.

The 3 things in 5 minutes is even worse - it’s like taking Google Maps everywhere without even thinking about how to get from point A to point B - the odds of knowing anything at all from that are near zero.

And since it summarizes the original content, it’s an even bigger issue - we never even have contact with the thing we’re putatively learning from, so it’s even harder to tell bullshit from reality.

It’s like we never even drove the directions Google Maps was giving us.

We’re going to end up with a huge number of extremely disconnected and useless people, who all absolutely insist they know things and can do stuff. :s
by adrian_b | 2025-12-17 11:33:29+00:00
You have to figure the correct options only once, then you should use forever the same alias or script for copying.

For instance, I always use this:

ALIAS='/usr/bin/rsync --archive --xattrs --acls --hard-links --progress --rsh="ssh -p PORT -l USER"'

The default options of scp, like also those of cp or of any other UNIX copying program are bad, as they do not make exact copies.

In decades of working with computers, I have never wanted to make any other kind of copies except exact copies, so I never use the default options of cp, scp, rsync etc., but I always use the same aliases for them, with the options needed for exact copies.
by csin | 2025-12-17 11:33:53+00:00
Please enlighten me. How does one make a browser "better" these days?

- They were ahead of the game with extensions. Then everyone copied them.

- They were ahead of the game with tabs. Then everyone copied them.

- They were ahead of the game with containers. Then everyone copied them.

- They are still the best browser to use for an ad free internet experience.

- The only flaw I can think of, is they are not leaders in performance. Chrome loads faster. But that's because Chrome cheats by stealing your memory on startup.

How would you make FireFox better? When you say they should be making FireFox better, what should they be doing? Maybe they should hire you for ideas.

Because to me, they seem to be constantly trying to make FireFox better. It's just hit or miss.

Extensions was a hit. Tabs was a hit. Containers was a hit. They had a shit tonne of misses over the decades. We just don't remember them.

The crypto and ai stuff just happens to be a miss.
by oersted | 2025-12-17 11:33:55+00:00
No, that's not at all what I said, read it back please.

My point is that history has shown that such action is extremely counterproductive if you actually care about doing good for people under such regimes, particularly when the decision is made impulsively by a single country with a biased perspective and no consistent system or criteria to make sure it's a smart thing to do.

Anyone that supports such action is using inconsistent moralistic arguments to justify blatant power grabs. It may be well intentioned, but you are just making yourself feel good by fighting the bad guys, while doing even more harm to innocent people and making it all worse in the long-run. Very American indeed.

And frankly, right now, the US is not exactly in a position to be a judge of what is moral in the first place.
by orwin | 2025-12-17 11:36:04+00:00
Counting consumption and estate taxes, i'm pretty sure you're just above 40%, so i guess you're on benefits?

In the US, unless you or your family own a holding with a lot of companies, the country taxes you between 50 and 40% (well, 30 and 50%, but food stamps are a bit weird so i will exclude them here). If you manage to get rich enough to be able to optimize your taxation, you are only taxed on company profits (so 21% to federal, 27-29% depending on your state) and sometime use taxe (sales taxe doesn't really apply anymore).

I have benefited from VAT-free school furniture most of my life because my uncle owned a company that bought office furniture regularly, and VAT-free sport clothing/tools because of a similar scheme by his wife and her companies.

I assure you you pay more taxes overall than people holding a few companies, and the more you own, the easier it get to avoid VAT and taxes in general (the owner of the Yacht my sister used to cook for was hired by the Yachting company as the captain or something for his vacations: avoided VAT on buying the Yacht, avoid VAT on a personal cook, avoid VAT on food. And if this specific company loose a small amount of money every year, tax write-off baby!).

Zucman wrote The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay. It's an interesting read, and
Show HN: Signed lockfiles for MCP servers (MCPTrust)
by Dtang19 | 2025-12-17 11:37:17+00:00
Hello HN! I’m shipping MCPTrust, an open-source CLI for signed lockfiles for MCP servers.

It snapshots a server’s tool surface into a deterministic mcp-lock.json, then lets you sign/verify (Ed25519 locally or Sigstore keyless in CI) and diff live servers against the approved lockfile to catch capability drift before agents run it.

Would love feedback on what should count as critical drift vs benign changes.
by igornotarobot | 2025-12-17 11:37:26+00:00
It probably will, but not the way we all imagine. What we see now is an attempt to recycle the interactive provers that took decades to develop. Writing code, experimenting with new ideas and getting feedback has always been a very slow process in academia. Getting accepted at a top peer-reviewed conference takes months and even years. The essential knowledge is hidden inside big corps that only promote their "products" and rarely give the knowledge back.

LLMs enable code bootstrapping and experimentation faster not only for the vibe coders, but also for the researchers, many of them are not really good coders, btw. It may well be that we will see new wild verification tools soon that come as a result of quick iteration with LLMs.

For example, I recently wrote an experimental distributed bug finder for TLA+ with Claude in about three weeks. A couple of years ago that effort would require three months and a team of three people.
by zimpenfish | 2025-12-17 11:37:39+00:00
Language Log[0] (where Mr Pullum often writes[2]) has a whole bunch of "prescriptive passive is nonsense" posts[1].

[0] https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/

[1] https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/index.php?s=passive+vo... (this does include praise for correct use of passive voice, etc., but there's a good amount of criticism.)

[2] https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?author=3 (except this search appears broken, at least on Safari)
by northerndev | 2025-12-17 11:37:54+00:00
I built this because I kept hitting a wall with standard RAG implementations. My agents could retrieve text chunks based on similarity, but they failed completely at understanding relationships between concepts that weren't explicitly stated in the same paragraph.

I didn't want to maintain a separate Neo4j instance, so I built a hybrid solution on top of Postgres (using pgvector).

The Architecture: It separates ingestion from processing. I call it "Sleep Cycles".

Ingest: Data is pushed and vectorized immediately for fast retrieval.

Consolidate: An async worker (Redis/BullMQ) processes the new data to extract entities and build a graph structure, linking new info to existing nodes.

This allows the system to answer multi-hop questions that pure vector search misses.

I just released a GitHub Action to automate syncing repository documentation, as manual context loading was a friction point.
by bzmrgonz | 2025-12-17 11:40:56+00:00
I disagree, what ai brings to thr table is instant and total recall of our thoughts/notes/experiences. Deep analysis of that vast data storage is only possible via ai, which should trigger the aha!!! Moment, or the "you're crazy ai" moment. Either way, it's very useful. And we haven't even talked about the knowl she we have collecting digital dust in emails, and notes and reports of past employees.
by vhodges | 2025-12-17 11:41:09+00:00
Is that per person or for the 5 people? No if per person if the minimum commit is 30 days (300/Night is not too bad, but for a week to 10 days at a time, not the month). If for all 5 then yes, it might make sense for retreats.

I DO wish there a business focused resort with meeting rooms, workspaces, good connectivity and AV, etc. Suites with meeting space for smaller groups/after hours meetings and some amenities for after hours (eg pool, golf, gym, etc).

EDIT: My house is paid for, so I am not really the target demographic :)
by ramigb | 2025-12-17 11:41:11+00:00
I found that out while working with music models like Suno! I love creating music for my own listening experience as a hobbyist and when I give suno a prompt no matter how well crafted it is the outcome varies from "meh" to "that's good" ... while when I upload semi finished beat I made and prompt it to cover it the results consistently leave me speechless! Could be a bias since the music has a lot of elements I created but this workflow is similar across other generative models for me.
by shaky-carrousel | 2025-12-17 11:41:19+00:00
I don't like how he assumes that a free internet must be ad-supported. The ad-supported web is hideous, even with their ads removed. A long, convoluted, inane mess of content.

On the other hand, the clean web feels more direct, to the point, and passionate. I prefer to read content written by passion, not by money seeking purposes.
by 9rx | 2025-12-17 11:41:39+00:00
The intent isn't to find good hires per se, but to whittle down the list of applicants to a manageable number in a way that doesn't invite discrimination lawsuits.

Same as why companies in the past used to reject anyone without a degree. But then everyone got a degree, leaving it to no longer be an effective filter, hence things like algorithm tests showing up to fill the void.

Once you've narrowed the list, then you can worry about figuring out who is "good" through giving the remaining individuals additional attention.
by ojosilva | 2025-12-17 11:42:07+00:00
3% market share is 150 million active users give or take. That's no death by any count in the software world.

Gosh, I really wish Mozilla would just dig into their user-base and find a way to adequately become sustainable... or find a way to make it work better as a foundation that is NOT maintained by Google, ie like the Wiki Foundation. I do spend a LOT of time in FF, can't anyone see there's a value beyond selling ads and personal info that could make Mozilla more sustainable, dependable and resilient?
by saaaaaam | 2025-12-17 11:44:13+00:00
Esquire writing is so weird. It’s genuinely like a relic from another age.

“ They drank tumblers of Irish whiskey filled to the brim, illicit pours they secured with ten-dollar tips to a curvy Dominican bartender.”

“ For the price of three beers, he told me his story.”

“ In the two decades since the show aired, a hundred thousand American Spirits had yellowed Bob’s fingers and turned his voice to gravel.”

When I read things like this I find it very hard to take the wider message seriously, because it feels like writing-as-cosplay, the writer inhabiting a caricature of “hard bitten” and inserting that at the forefront of the piece.

Very odd.
by csin | 2025-12-17 11:44:41+00:00
This 3% number is deceptive.

The whole desktop market is cratering.

I was talking to a reddit mod a few months ago. He was looking at the subreddit stats. 95% of his users were on mobile.

Think about that. We desktop users are dinosaurs.

So FireFox having a 3% market share might actually mean more than half of desktop users are on FireFox.
by n4r9 | 2025-12-17 11:45:00+00:00
Hard to address evidence that's behind the paywall of an organisation where there's concerns over editorial independence. I found an archived copy of the article you linked [0] only to find a nested link [1] for the meeting with Pence & Pompeo, which I could not find an archived copy of. As far as I can tell, the claim of admitting to lobbying could be massively overblown.

[0] https://archive.ph/Dc7U7

[1] https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/politics/article/3017868...
Show HN: HN++
by 7moritz7 | 2025-12-17 11:45:47+00:00
I know many are happy with the HN frontend. I wrote this for fun and it turned out really useful so I published it. Here are the most important features:

- Rainbow indentation: This is inspired by the Rainbow CSV extension - comments of the same "depth" have the same colored stripe on the left.

- Native filters: Filter the various frontpages (Top, Show...) by upvote count or comment count. There is a "Controversial" (comment count > upvote count) filter too, if you want drama.

- Read later: Save comments and posts and revisit them through a bookmark menu. Saved to local storage.

- Collapsible sticky header: No need to scroll back up to see thread details and navigate to submitted link

- Infinite scroll: No pagination, you just continue scrolling.

- Styled quotes: Paragraphs starting with ">" are styled as a blockquote

- Reply as usual: You can click on Write reply and it takes you to the same page that would open in the regular HN UI

- Favicons: Helps my brain focus. Uses the DuckDuckGo favicon service + caching.

- Dark mode!

- "Open links in new tab": Especially useful on mobile. Can be toggled in the settings.

- Slightly more intuitive navigation? Atleast to me it makes more sense. Clicking a submission title, c2a button or comment count directs you to the thread. Clicking a submission link takes you to the link.

If you have any good ideas or see a bug, feel free to tell me
by rsynnott | 2025-12-17 11:45:55+00:00
Ye olde non-condensing boiler is usually about 70% efficient (that is, 70% of the heat from burning the gas goes into your house vs out the exhaust), sometimes worse (60% wouldn't be that out there for old ones). A condensing boiler, _if set up correctly_, will do 90% (95% for the newest models, allegedly). Now, the catch is that it'll only hit 90% if the return water is within a fairly narrow temperature range, so some system balancing is required, and in practice a lot of them end up more like 80%. But given how expensive gas is these days (at least in Europe) that 10-20% saving will handily pay for the cost of the boiler.
by skydhash | 2025-12-17 11:46:13+00:00
IMO, it’s still the wwrong approach. Vim and Emacs are just editors. Very much like Notepad. You don’t have to learn the extra stuff.

Once you are comfortable with basic notepad-like usage, you can then learn more advanced features. But emacs and vim are different from VSCode because those advanced things are supposed to be tweaked to personal preferences, not be handed down from high. When you start with something like Lazyvim, you’re missing on everything that makes vim, vim. You just have a walmart version of VSCode.
by Mountain_Skies | 2025-12-17 11:47:19+00:00
Lots of things work out of the box, but yes, it's still far from being the default. Kensington is releasing an update to its Expert Mouse trackball. The MSRP looks to be USD$150, so not an inexpensive accessory. It supports Windows and Mac but has no Linux support. No doubt in time there will be community supported projects to give it functionality on Linux close to, but not entirely like, what it has on the other two OSes.
by lioeters | 2025-12-17 11:47:34+00:00
> Firefox is trying to diversify their revenue

Nobody wants a browser that's focused on diversifying its revenue, especially from Mozilla which pretends to be a non-profit "free software community".

Chrome is paid for by ads and privacy violations, and now Firefox is paid for by "AI" companies? That is a sad state of affairs.

Ungoogled Chromium and Waterfox are at best a temporary measure. Perhaps the EU or one of the U.S. billionaires would be willing to fund a truly free (as in libre) browser engine that serves the public interest.
by prmoustache | 2025-12-17 11:48:12+00:00
jami doesn't store message on a server, at least not in 1:1 connection. It is one of the Achille heel in the sense that if you send a message, your recipient is offline, then you go offline before your recipient goes online the message will not have been delivered and will wait until both are online at the same time. It is particularly annoying because most android firmware + iphone kill the app when it is in the background so that people tend to think it is the app that is not working well whereas it is really the operating system that aggressively kill it and prevent it from working well.

A workaround for the messages not being received is to have an opened session on the desktop version running 24/7 at home.

I read that group chats (swarm) are implemented using git and I think the changes are pushed between clients directly. Again it is nice if you have a permanent group to have at least one client running 24/7