MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 1313ed01 | 2025-12-17 12:08:50+00:00
My guess is the vast majority of those were/are cheap, generic, Army Men types, usually clones of clones of some 1960's Airfix sculpts. You could buy those in large bags in toy stores in the 1980's and these days you can get literal buckets with hundreds of them online. Much cheaper than the hobby boxes.

I remember as a child I managed to convince my parents to buy a box or two of real Airfix figures in some hobby store, but the bulk of my old collection are generic no-name clones.
by rswail | 2025-12-17 12:09:06+00:00
Yeah, we've gone down the private CA PKI route, trouble is that you need to start managing your roots and your CA/RA properly, it needs to be auditable etc etc.

Cost of a Private CA on AWS is $400/month for a CA that issues certs more than 7 days in duration. That's for one signing CA. If you want PKI with a root, intermediates, and leaves, then the root has to issue intermediates every 7 days as well, or you have your root signing the leaves.

On top of that is the infrastructure of the RA, because if you want to automatically issue certs (eg to devices in the field), you need to implement ACME, but you can't necessarily use DNS methods for verification.

So you have to roll your own, from a Secure Element that contains a base key that gets diversified by the device's own ID, so it can sign a CSR or an internal DNS server that adds an TXT record for the dns-01 challenge.

Then you need the human processes of building the RA, authorizations, ceremonies, etc etc.

Or you cut corners.
by quelle-surprise | 2025-12-17 12:09:30+00:00
I built TuneClash, a real-time multiplayer music quiz game where players guess songs from Spotify playlists.

*Key Features:* - Real-time synchronization using Socket.io - Two game modes: Classic (text input) and Relaxed (multiple choice) - Solo mode for practice - Works with any Spotify playlist - No authentication required - just create a room and share the code

*Tech Stack:* - Frontend: React 19, Vite, TypeScript - Backend: Node.js, Express, Socket.io - Infrastructure: Cloudflare Pages (frontend), Railway (backend) - State: In-memory (no database for current scope)

*Architecture Highlights:* - Server is source of truth with periodic state snapshots - WebSocket-based real-time communication - Progressive hint reveals - Speed-based scoring system

*Live:* https://tuneclash.io *Issues/Docs:* https://github.com/quelle-surprise/tuneclash-issues

Would appreciate feedback on the architecture and any suggestions for improvements!
by vinshoo | 2025-12-17 12:10:18+00:00
Looks great! It seems that sqlit still relies on arrow keys for getting around. Would it be possible to add options for more vim style on these places?

- Browse explorer tree with jk

- Next/Prev autocomplete suggestion with ^+j,^+k

- Browse Results with hjkl

Some other suggestions:

- Filter tables (f.e. press / and start typing to filter down tables)

- Ability to edit cell value

Otherwise it feels great, thanks for it :) UI looks much nicer than on lazysql and toggleable sidebar is great.
by benmxrt | 2025-12-17 12:11:58+00:00
Great question. The emails are stored in volatile RAM on the backend only for the duration of the active session.

To ensure a smooth experience if you accidentally navigate away or refresh, I’ve recently implemented IndexedDB local caching on the client side. This keeps your messages accessible in your browser's local storage without them ever being written to our server's hard drive.

However, Mephisto follows a strict 'Zero-Persistence' policy: the moment you explicitly clear your session or the session naturally expires, a wipe sequence is triggered, and all data is cryptographically purged from both the server's RAM and your browser's local cache. If you navigate away without a cache, the signal is lost—just like a true burner phone.
by lifthrasiir | 2025-12-17 12:12:39+00:00
That doesn't explain the apparent market share of 2--3%, which is still quite large if you think about.

I believe most non-techie users are just lingering, using Firefox just because they used to. Since Firefox doesn't have a built-in ad blocking and the knowledge about adblocking is not universal (see my other comment), it is possible that there are a large portion of Firefox users who don't use adblockers and conversely adblocking users are in a minority. If this is indeed the case, Mozilla can (technically) take such a bet as such policy will affect a smaller portion of users. But that would work only once; Mozilla doesn't have any more option like that after all. That's why I see $150M is plausible, but only once.
by NathanOsullivan | 2025-12-17 12:13:19+00:00
I am off similar vintage to the author.

I have no idea when Apache first supported SSI , but personally I never knew it existed until years after PHP became popular.

I would guess , assuming that `Options +Includes` cannot be done by unprincipled users, that this being a disabled-by-default feature it was inaccessible to majority of us.
by silexia | 2025-12-17 12:13:55+00:00
The USD will devalue 5-10% further.

Flock and other government tools for watching and controlling you will expand.

Big companies will expand their regulatory capture, especially in medical care. Fingers will continue to be pointed at health insurance as the problem while the real problem of an artificially limited supply of doctors goes unaddressed.

Government agencies will continue their slow bloat as no mechanism exists for government like bankruptcy in the private sector.

Patent trolls will expand their lawsuits and extort more legitimate businesses.

The far left will assassinate more Republican leaders.
by MindDraft | 2025-12-17 12:13:58+00:00
while i may agree with the first line, rest are little skewed perspective.

> People don’t like paying for software, demand constant updates and hate subscriptions.

hate subscription?? may be. if it's anything like Adobe then yes, people will hate.

that constant update, is something planted by these corporates, and their behavior manipulation tactics. People were happily paying for perpetual software, which they can "own" in a cd//dvd.
by lm28469 | 2025-12-17 12:14:26+00:00
In most countries sim cards are already tied to your identity. Your identity is also known by your ISP.

Do you really think a state actor needs anything else to track you already? We gave up privacy when we all accepted to carry a telescreen in our pockets. Now with palantir, flock, amazon door cameras, &c. there is nowhere to hide, don't blame the government when we sold our souls willingly. The truth is that 99% of people don't give a shit
by 1313ed01 | 2025-12-17 12:14:28+00:00
Army men came in various sizes, and one of the most common one was always close to 1:72, or at least that has been the case since the 1980's.

I remember one of my friends had larger, maybe 40mm army men, but my collection was only the smaller size ~1:72/22mm. Same sculpts and colors. Various random no name toy brands.
by piva00 | 2025-12-17 12:14:58+00:00
> In Latin America, many people take on masters and PhD while living with their parents. You are often seen as smarter than the idiot who's working.

In Latin America a very small minority of young people even get to go to a proper academic institution and not just a quasi-degree mill college. For those going to somewhat reputable institutions with post-tertiary programs it's another small minority that gets to a masters degree, with even fewer getting into a doctorate track...

Quantify "many people" because it's absolute bullshit it's any kind of representative cohort of the population with the means to achieve this.
by einr | 2025-12-17 12:15:37+00:00
Yes, you get a perceived gain in privacy, but is that worth potentially exposing yourself to additional vulnerabilities?

Speaking only for myself, and regardless of whether this is actually true (see sibling comment): yes. Absolutely. A non-privacy focused browser like Firefox has vulnerabilities/data leaks by design that are worse than hypothetical ones that I probably will not be subject to browsing my usual benign set of websites.

(Posted from Waterfox)
by cm2187 | 2025-12-17 12:16:06+00:00
History has also shown dictators engaging is mass genocide like in Russia, Germany, China, Cambodia, RDC, etc. I am not sure that the idea that leaving dictators alone does less harm to their people is a lesson from history.

Read my comment back as well! I am saying this is neither a moral nor legal matter. So I am not using a moralistic argument.
by bruce511 | 2025-12-17 12:16:51+00:00
Mozilla/ Firefox is irrelevant and ultimately doomed to ever smaller numbers.

That's because their users are driven by opinions and principles, and those are the worst, most disloyal kind of users. They're always threatening to leave, and will take the slightest offense to do so.

Chrome wins because its user base doesn't care. The browser is just a tool, not a religion. It's installed, they use it, they're barely aware it exists and most of Joe Public doesn't even know Google makes it.

So sure. For you it's ad blockers. For someone else it's their donation plan. Or Google funding. Or their corporate structure. Or their management.

When your marketing is about something else, other than the product itself, you always end up with edge-case-customers.

People use Chrome because it's the best browser. Less than 3% use Firefox. And all I read from Firefox users is how bad everything is (or will be).

No, Firefox's market share isn't a foil to monopoly (Safari has 5 times more users. Crumbs Edge has twice the users.)

I care about Firefox, but I really just wish all the whiners would just do what they threaten and use something else. But they won't because everything else is worse (for some or other principles reason.)

Now I fully expect to be downvoted because the only people reading this article in the first place are Firefox whiners. Which is kinda my point.

It's pretty hard to recommend Firefox to others when everything written by existing users is so negative.
by mrtksn | 2025-12-17 12:17:47+00:00
People weren't happily paying, there was huge pirate business that was run on porn, gambling ads and spyware revenue. Then there were organizations with lots of lawyers paid by the "pay once use forever" companies to enforce the pay part because people didn't want to pay.

One time fee software ment that once your growth slows down you no longer make money and have plenty of customers to support for free. That's why this model was destroyed by the subscription and ad based "free" software.

The last example is Affinity which was the champion of pay once use forever model, very recently they end up getting acquired and their software turned into "free" + subscription.
by IntelliAvatar | 2025-12-17 12:18:41+00:00
I'm experimenting with a local-first autonomous agent system on Windows.

The interesting part for me hasn't been the UI or demos, but the engineering problems: how planning compares to step-by-step tool-calling, how state drifts over long tasks, and how fragile things get once you add retries and recovery logic.

Mostly learning by breaking things and trying to make the system more predictable.
by tim333 | 2025-12-17 12:18:51+00:00
That's not really like for like. You are comparing "level 4" where the car is supposed to do everything to driver assist where the driver is supposed to take over if things go off track.

I'm not sure what the guys in the taxis with their hands on the arm rest do. I guess they have a button that either stops the car or connects it to a remote control operator?
by exDM69 | 2025-12-17 12:19:15+00:00
> tons of drivers that dont implement the extensions that really improve things.

This isn't really the case, at least on desktop side.

All three desktop GPU vendors support Vulkan 1.4 (or most of the features via extensions) on all major platforms even on really old hardware (e.g. Intel Skylake is 10+ years old and has all the latest Vulkan features). Even Apple + MoltenVK is pretty good.

Even mobile GPU vendors have pretty good support in their latest drivers.

The biggest issue is that Android consumer devices don't get GPU driver updates so they're not available to the general public.
by PurpleRamen | 2025-12-17 12:20:08+00:00
> Amazing how they continue not to cater to their core audience.

Who is Mozilla's core audience? From what I remember, it's not addon-users, as most users never have used even just a single addon.

> They literally have lost 90% of their market share from their peak,

To be fair, it's not entirely their own fault. Competition is strong, especially from Google and Apple. Even with perfect decisions, they likely would still have lost big since their peak. The market for alternative Browsers isn't as big any more as it used to be.
by skeletal88 | 2025-12-17 12:20:54+00:00
wtf, this is totally insane.

Here the upgrades for meters are paid for by the grid operators. No changes to the cabinets are required, old analog meters were replaced by them for smart meters, at no extra cost to the consumer, and now they will replace them with new meters capable of metering by 15 minute interval.

This cost in germany is really only created by overregulation and insane bureaucrats creating work for them.

I first heard that in Germany there is much resistance to smart meters and I thought they were just silly people, but if it costs so much..
by sipofwater | 2025-12-17 12:21:05+00:00
"I wish the Davis decision hadn't happened, but we must move forward with a plebiscite" by William Parkinson: https://www.postguam.com/forum/letter_to_the_editor/i-wish-t... (www.postguam.com/forum/letter_to_the_editor/i-wish-the-davis-decision-hadnt-happened-but-we-must-move-forward-with-a-plebiscite/article_e294a108-c80b-49f1-8fa4-25f828b06432.html) ... Mirror: https://archive.ph/NSZpB
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-17 12:21:38+00:00
No one said you cannot run LLMs with the same task more than once. For my local tooling, I usually use the process of "Do X with previously accumulated results, add new results if they come up, otherwise reply with just Y" and then you put that into a loop until LLM signals it's done. Software-wise, you could add so it continues beyond that too, for extra assurance.

In general for chat platforms you're right though, uploading/copy-pasting long documents and asking the LLM to find not one, but multiple needles in a haystack tend to give you really poor results. You need a workflow/process for getting accuracy for those sort of tasks.
by baq | 2025-12-17 12:21:49+00:00
The reason is obvious - LLMs got good at writing them, initial cost to write went down 99%, toil to keep them up to date with code went down 99% and some people noticed. Value proposition went from ‘you must be joking unless we’re AWS and you’re proposing an IAM code change’ to ‘plan mode may also emit TLA+ spec as an intermediate implementation artifact’.
by pards | 2025-12-17 12:22:13+00:00
> The third, Build, will teach you about how to reliably build your software with Make.

Make? In 25 years as a professional developer I have never encountered make in the enterprise.

At least cover the various generic _models_ behind a few of the modern build tools so students can understand both the commonality and the differences between say NX, NPM, Maven, Gradle, go build etc.

Maybe a class on CI/CD pipelines, too.
by Macha | 2025-12-17 12:22:52+00:00
You’ll notice that it uses spaces between kana words which is non standard and basically only exists in books for very small children, video games with a large child audience (most notably pokemon) and in retro video games which didn’t have the resolution to render readable kanji.

In modern content designed for people over the age of 10, spaces are uncommon as kanji does a lot of the word division duty. It’s also a little unstandardised: is 遅くなって初めて (when I first became late) one modified word or three words? Since regular Japanese writing doesn’t care as much about word partition, there is no standard so you could so anything from おそくなってはじめて to おそく なって はじめて when spaced.

I reckon a lot of these full kana games would be harder even for natives if they used a more standard space free style.
by IntelliAvatar | 2025-12-17 12:23:40+00:00
For me, one signal has been whether the problems remain interesting even when progress is slow.

When working on complex systems (like anything involving long-running automation or agents), most of the real work happens in areas that don’t show up in demos: defining “done”, handling partial failures, and keeping behavior predictable.

If those problems are still worth thinking about after repeated failures, I take that as a sign the work itself is worth continuing.
by bdbdbdb | 2025-12-17 12:23:54+00:00
> No human could read all of this in a lifetime. AI consumes it in seconds.

And therefore it's impossible to test the accuracy if it's consuming your own data. AI can hallucinate on any data you feed it, and it's been proven that it doesn't summarize, but rather abridges and abbreviates data.

In the authors example

> "What patterns emerge from my last 50 one-on-ones?" AI found that performance issues always preceded tool complaints by 2-3 weeks. I'd never connected those dots.

Maybe that's a pattern from 50 one-on-ones. Or maybe it's only in the first two and the last one.

I'd be wary of using AI to summarize like this and expecting accurate insights
by derbOac | 2025-12-17 12:24:07+00:00
What happened in the last 6 months or so to affect those numbers? According to them, Chrome increased in percentage quite a but recently and the others all got "compressed" towards 0.

Looking at the last 10 years gives a different perspective (not great for Firefox but maybe underscores something is different recently in general):

https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl...
by StrataCreator | 2025-12-17 12:24:36+00:00
That's a tough one! I've considered creating a non-gamified learning app based on spaced repetition and active recall - think Anki flash cards but on steroids :D

The reason why I haven't done it yet is because I never have the time, but if you do then I for one would love an app like that.

There's a lot of talk about today's market, but I think doing something and sticking at it will attract the right attention
by countWSS | 2025-12-17 12:24:39+00:00
The problem with this is integration: no one would complain if it was an official plugin/extension, but integrating this plugin into Firefox is forced and unexpected decision. Firefox telemetry,labs/experiments and server-dependent features will lose it marketshare slowly in favor of local-only browsers that don't have online dependencies or forced bloatware. Like many i've switched long ago to LibreWolf.
by ErroneousBosh | 2025-12-17 12:25:01+00:00
I feel the problem they're trying to solve with that is "EB isn't sufficiently pissed off with the gradually deteriorating user experience yet so instead of actually displaying the page we'll have a big modal popup telling him how great the AI tools are and how he should try them!"

I do not want to try your AI tools, Mozilla, yours or anyone else's.
by probably_wrong | 2025-12-17 12:25:53+00:00
How would I make Firefox better?

First, I would stop breaking up the stuff that works. Firefox was ahead of the game with extensions, then deprecated the long tail for a rewrite that took three years [1] (during which Firefox mobile had a grand total of 9 extensions) and even then it's hard for me today to know which extensions work on mobile. They were similarly ahead of the game with containers, and yet they still don't work on private mode [2] and probably never will. That's two out of three hits where they tripped over their own two feet[3].

Second, do the one thing that users have been requesting for decades: let me donate to the browser development. Not to the Mozilla Foundation, not to internet freedom causes, to Firefox. The Mozilla foundation explicitly says that they don't want to be "the Firefox company", and yet I'd argue they should.

Third, go on the offensive. I get the impression that, with the exception of ad-blocking, Firefox is simply playing catch-up to any idea coming from Chrome regardless of whether it makes sense or not. Would Firefox had removed FTP support had Chrome not done it before?

And fourth, make all these weird experiments extensions.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/14/three-years-after-its-reva...

[2] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1330109

[3] I always associated tabs with Opera, though.

[4] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2024/a...
by ozlikethewizard | 2025-12-17 12:26:05+00:00
You're pretending like the fines target US companies. GDPR fines target malpractice and mishandling of data. The DMC seeks to break up artificial digital market monopolies. These apply to corporations operating in the EU, with no basis on where they operate from. Don't want to get punished for creating an uncompetitive monopoly? Don't create an uncompetitive monopoly.
Show HN: ApplyFirst – AI job search alerts that get you more interviews
by mmazurovsky | 2025-12-17 12:26:22+00:00
Data shows that early applicants get more interviews. ApplyFirst helps you reach new jobs before they get crowded with 100 plus applicants.

ApplyFirst is an AI job search system. It focuses on sending alerts as soon as matching jobs are published. Users get instant LinkedIn alerts based on their specific needs. These include tech stack, salary, travel, and other requirements.

Users receive only relevant roles filtered by AI models. We extract key job keywords to help improve your resume and cover letter. Automate your job search and stay ahead of the competition. ___

Now let me tell you about the background of the product. I'm Misha, the developer of ApplyFirst. Earlier this year, I found myself navigating one of the most competitive job markets I had ever seen. Many roles already had over 100 applicants within hours of being posted. Despite being highly motivated and consistently applying, I often received rejections or no response at all.

While digging into recruiter insights, one key pattern stood out: timing matters immensely. Early applicants have a significant advantage. So I decided to put this insight to the test and built a small program that monitors job boards and surfaces new jobs within minutes of being published.

The results were immediate. I started receiving far more responses and landed a great new role in less than a month.

When friends began using the tool and saw the same success, I knew this could help many more people. After several months of refining and expanding it, ApplyFirst was born to give others the same competitive edge.

I hope it helps you too, adventurer.
by benmxrt | 2025-12-17 12:26:38+00:00
Absolutely agree with both of you. I just deployed an update that includes a domain picker directly in the address bar. Users can now manually choose from 8 different domains (including .net, .org, .la, and .info) to bypass blanket filters that often target the default TLDs.

Rotating less common TLDs automatically is the next logical step to keep the service resilient. Appreciate the support!
Ask HN: Is there still space for innovation in B2B?
by _el1s7 | 2025-12-17 12:27:33+00:00
As a B2B SaaS founder, I've been thinking recently whether there is still space for doing new, innovative things in this space.

Feels like for most things, there's already an existing solution, and all you can do is build something a bit better, but even the room for improvement on existing solutions seems small.

I mean, yes, I know that there are still some business sectors that rely on old crap corporate technology with more potential for improvement, but those sectors seem boring.

It feels like it resembles the late phase of the industrial revolution.