MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wtallis | 2025-12-16 23:46:06+00:00
Sure, living with the nuisance of the advertising and UI clutter is an option, as I said. But the fact that they were relatively minor nuisances compared to eg. Windows 11's BS doesn't change the fact that they were still unwelcome and unnecessary and disrespectful.

I don't think there's anything radical about my stance that a new toolbar button showing up—with advertising calling attention to it—integrating a proprietary service into my open-source browser is inappropriate behavior on Mozilla's part.
by vunderba | 2025-12-16 23:46:10+00:00
Yeah that’s a classic problem, and it's why good tests are such closely guarded secrets: to keep them from becoming training fodder for the next generation of models. Regarding the "model date" vs "benchmark date" - that's an interesting point... I'll definitely look into it!

I don't have any captcha systems in place, but I wonder if it might be worth putting up at least a few nominal roadblocks (such as Anubis [1]) to at least slow down the scrapers.

A few weeks ago I actually added some new, more challenging tests to the GenAI Text-to-Image section of the site (the “angelic forge” and “overcrowded flat earth”) just to keep pace with the latest SOTA models.

In the next few weeks, I’ll be adding some new benchmarks to the Image Editing section as well~~

[1] - https://anubis.techaro.lol
by jazzyjackson | 2025-12-16 23:46:20+00:00
It's pretty easy to hit a couple hundred dollars a day filling up Opus's context window with files. This is via Anthropic API and Zed.

Going full speed ahead building a Rails app from scratch it seemed like I was spending $50/hour, but it was worth it because the App was finished in a weekend instead of weeks.

I can't bear to go in circles with Sonnet when Opus can just one shot it.
by Capricorn2481 | 2025-12-16 23:46:21+00:00
> Lots of programmers use DSA knowledge on a daily basis - and if you aren't you're probably writing bad code. I see a lot of O(n^2) code or worse making apps slow for no reason

I don't think one can seriously argue that. This as much a meme as anything. I know it's popular to rag on devs writing inefficient software, but there's plenty of apps with functions where a user couldn't possibly notice the difference between O(n^2) and O(1). You wouldn't take the time to make everything O(1) for no speedup because someone told you that's what good code is, that's just wasting dev time.

In fact, one of the first things you learn is that O(1) can be slower. Constant time is not good if the constant is big and n is small.
by tkgally | 2025-12-16 23:46:24+00:00
One issue holding back the adoption of Hepburn has been that the standard national curriculum (gakushū shidō yōryō) calls for all children to be taught romaji beginning in the third grade (previously fourth grade) of elementary school. It's taught in Kokugo (national language, i.e., Japanese) classes and included in those textbooks, as romaji characters are used in Japanese alongside kana and kanji as well as, increasingly, in daily life (user names, passwords, etc.). At that age, native speakers of Japanese can acquire kunreishiki more easily, as the consonant representation corresponds more closely to the Japanese phonology that they have internalized.
by belorn | 2025-12-16 23:46:42+00:00
I must have seen other sides of the community, since all I seen has been a consistent criticism that Mozilla neglects the two main products Firefox and Thunderbird, while focusing community money and focus on new products that does nothing to improve Firefox and Thunderbird. When new products get released it is indeed met with extreme scorn, and when they eventually fail, they will anew get criticized for wasting money.

There is a market share costs that pocket had on Firefox. Lost developer time, money and community trust mean that product pushed Firefox just that bit further into marginalization. Basically every product Mozilla releases is the same story when they fail to make their core product better.

It is not damned if you do, damned if you don't. Google could abandon Chrome, gmail or any other product like that and they would still be Google (and be profitable). Mozilla would not exist without Firefox, and the trust the community has with Mozilla is directly tied with Firefox.
by TheRealPomax | 2025-12-16 23:46:46+00:00
Welcome to the "a cat [1] has four legs [2], and therefore everything with four legs [3] is a cat [1]" fallacy. That's not how that works.

JSDoc is its own spec, and is not typescript, and is absolutely not at type annotation parity with typescript. Plenty of things that are hard to type in TS that are impossible to annotate use JSDoc.

So: just because tsc, the tool, can read in typing information that was written in JSDoc, does not make JSDoc typescript. tsc simply supports JSDOc. Very handy! Not the same thing in the slightest.

1. "typescript"

2. "can be read by tsc"

3. "anything that tsc can read"
by underlipton | 2025-12-16 23:46:57+00:00
Micronotal instruments get close to hitting that spot for me.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/N19WNiy-T0M

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/o-IMV5OLCsU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjcQyQYhA7g
by featherless | 2025-12-16 23:47:01+00:00
It would be silly to write a new one today. Plenty of open source + indy options to invest into instead.

For scheduled work, cron + a log sink is fine, and for pull request CI there's plenty of alternatives that don't charge by the minute to use your own hardware. The irony here, unfortunately, is that the latter requires I move entirely off of GitHub now.
by akst | 2025-12-16 23:47:18+00:00
Yeah my impression was the Orthography is pretty consistent compared to English.

From what I understand this isn't the first time they've made some kind of change to orthography, I remember reading something about updating offical use of certain kana to reflect more modern pronunciations. It wasn't a dramatic change.

It's interesting to see some countries just have this centralised influence over something like how their language is written as they're the main ones speaking it, as opposed to English.
by hauntsaninja | 2025-12-16 23:47:40+00:00
Mentioned this in another comment, but the spec conformance suite is not representative of the things users care about (nor is it meant to be).

The spec mostly concerns itself with the semantics of annotations, not diagnostics or inference. I don't really recommend using it as the basis for choosing a type checker.

(I was on the Python Typing Council and helped put together the spec, the conformance test suite, etc)
by david_shaw | 2025-12-16 23:47:43+00:00
>"The theoretical physicist and fusion scientist was known for his award-winning research in magnetised plasma dynamics.

Magnetised plasma dynamics is the study of the state of matter in which the motion of charged particles is influenced by the presence of an external magnetic field, according to Nature.

Loureiro joined MIT's faculty in 2016 and was named director of MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center in 2024."

Although it may be a total red herring, it may be worth noting that there are (debatably pseudoscientific) theories -- primarily Plasma cosmology[1] and the Electric Universe theory[2] -- that are related to (and potentially in conflict with) this field of research.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_cosmology

2: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Electric_Universe
by dabockster | 2025-12-16 23:48:03+00:00
> The idea that software is free is completely wrong

> If software is free, there can be no privacy, it's as simple as that.

Strongly agreed. Free software, either $0 or through stronger licenses like the GPL, have their economics completely shifted as an unintended side effect. Those new economics tend to favor clandestine funding sources (eg ads or malicious supply chain code).

But sustainable funding honestly isn't Mozilla's strong suite (or tech's in general, for that matter).
by clueless | 2025-12-16 23:48:06+00:00
yeah, translation, article summarization, asking questions from a long wiki page... and maybe with some agents built-in as well: parallelizing a form filling/ecom task, having the agent transcribe/translate an audio/video in real time, etc

All this would allow for a further breakdown of language barriers, and maybe the communities of various languages around the world could interact with each other much more on the same platforms/posts
by ForHackernews | 2025-12-16 23:48:23+00:00
The chain of causality is about one link long: If libraries become common vectors for privacy, the powers that be will end libraries. https://time.com/6266147/internet-archive-copyright-infringe...

Photocopying an entire book is, in fact, against the law in most cases: https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/academic-and-education...

Selfish people like yourself are why we can't have nice things. Either pay for your books or pirate them outright from bittorrent.
by icedchai | 2025-12-16 23:48:56+00:00
The problem is many users are not experienced. And the more they rely on AI to do their work, the less likely they are to ever become experienced.

An inexperienced junior engineer delegating all their work to an LLM is an absolute recipe for disaster, both for the coworkers and product. Code reviews take at least 3x as long. They cannot justify their decisions because the decisions aren't theirs. I've seen it first hand.
by vessenes | 2025-12-16 23:50:03+00:00
This is actually pretty cool, with some solid engineering - general idea is to tap the wind when you can, use an embedded quadcopter to steer and lift when you can't. They claim tumbleweed has a porosity gradient from top to bottom which allows it to pick up more wind movement than if it were even porosity everywhere, so the little guys are engineered with a similar bias to help get the most out of wind. I imagine it's .. not great .. if you're headed into the wind.
by kapersky11 | 2025-12-16 23:50:09+00:00
My company started this new bootcamp, and I was tasked with updating this announcement across our 16 websites.

I have done this before, so I know the work involved:

- Create the design and code for 16 different websites - Adding different code to the 16 websites' header tag

Thats a lot of repeated work each time we have an announcement, promos, product updates, etc.

So I created TopBanner .app to automate the process next time. Top Banner answers the following questions for me.

- A unified dashboard to manage banners across 16 different websites - Show banners based on rules like checkout page, traffic from Facebook, etc - Advanced analytics to measure each banner's performance and conversions. - A/B Test different messages and designs to find what converts best for your audience.

This simple tool has saved me a ton of time, and I now understand how all my banners perform across 16 websites.

I hope it helps someone save time managing top banners, too.
by autoexec | 2025-12-16 23:50:10+00:00
Paying a company for something doesn't mean that the company isn't going to also sell every scrap of your data they can get their hands on. If the company is unethical you are always going to be the product. Mozilla is either going to be an ethical company or it isn't and how much money you give them won't make any difference. Mozilla has not always been an ethical company, but I don't think it's too late for them to turn that around, even if it will take time for trust to be rebuilt. I still want them to be the hero we need them to be.
by kbelder | 2025-12-16 23:50:19+00:00
Obama opposed gay marriage as well. As did many prominent politicians, left and right.

The swing from opposing it to supporting it was a huge cultural shift, and I'm not sure I've seen anything like that happen so quickly, except maybe during a time of war. It went from being opposed by a strong majority to supported by a strong majority in... maybe 5-8 years? It was pretty impressive, and I think it's a sign that the marketplace of ideas can still function.

It helps a lot that it's really a harmless thing. It's giving people more freedom, not taking any away from anyone, and so as soon as it became clear that it wasn't causing a problem, everybody shrugged and went 'ok'.
by manindahat | 2025-12-16 23:50:20+00:00
At best, not reading generated code results in a world where no humans are able to understand our software, and we regress back to the stone age after some critical piece breaks, and nobody can fix it.

At worst, we eventually create a sentient AI that can use our trust of the generated code to jailbreak and distribute itself like an unstoppable virus, and we become its pets, or are wiped out.

Personally, all my vibe coding includes a prompt to add comments to explain the code, and I review every line.
by aidenn0 | 2025-12-16 23:50:36+00:00
Anyone where the "ou" romanization for long o vowels comes from (e.g. 少年 being rendered as "shounen" rather than "shoonen" or "shōnen")?

[edit]

Wikipedia suggests it might be from Wāpuro rōmaji, where "u" is always used to spell the kana "う"
by kevinsync | 2025-12-16 23:51:06+00:00
I'd argue that there's probably a disproportionate ratio of thin:thick, and that the majority of creators have to consume significantly more than they create to find their perspective, voice, purpose and inspiration for their creations. And those that created that which was consumed, consumed that which was created to feed their fire as well.

It's the whole thing about writers and comedians can't craft anything without having first lived, observed, contemplated and been confounded by orders of magnitude more than their output represents.
by exceptione | 2025-12-16 23:51:16+00:00
> The UK quit Erasmus after Brexit, when Boris Johnson claimed the programme did not offer value for money.

Lol. Informed citizens with a broadened horizon would only pose a challenge to a small-party sized class of people. Conservatives love to create smokescreens and false narratives, but factually the meaning Conservative stems from the wish to conserve the power of the 0.0001%. That's why they never can come up with anything like a real agenda for you know, the res publica. Instead they have to resort to bullshit and falsehoods in order to trick people to vote on all kinds of interesting vibes and hurt feelings, but that have nothing to do with the damn fucking job of governing.
by refulgentis | 2025-12-16 23:51:28+00:00
Are you from Boston / have you lived there? I do, and thank you for your concern. But this is confusing to say the least.

1. No one should be stupid enough to put their name and rep on the line, in a fluid situation, where there’s 0 idea who did the first anyways, for days now.

2. Dunno what you mean by academics, students and professors? Usually academics refers to professors / grad students / has a job at university related to teaching, but Brown victims weren’t professors. Hard to see how that indicates a connection.

3. It’s a real stretch to put Providence to Brookline at a 1 hour drive. In general, it’s two different worlds, so it’s strange to use it as a clear indicator they must be related.

4. If it’s obvious they’re connected, and making any claim of probability re: their connection should require putting your name and reputation on the line, what’s your name?
by AndriyKunitsyn | 2025-12-16 23:51:42+00:00
About 30% of people worldwide use a language that's not written in Roman alphabet.

Additionally, being written in Roman alphabet doesn't neccessarily mean it's clear how to pronounce it. Hungarians calls their country "Magyarország", but unless you know Hungarian, you will be surprised with how it's pronounced. Same as "Chenonceaux", "Tekirdağ" or "Crkvina".
by karakot | 2025-12-16 23:52:15+00:00
There is an MLR (Medical Loss Ratio) rule; essentially, an insurer can keep 20% of premiums they collect. So in order to increase profits, they have to inflate premiums; in the end, 20% of $1,000 is much better than 20% of $100. And that's the reason hospitals charge $50 for an ibuprofen pill. There are other tricks like vertical integration (an insurance company owns a medical provider), quality improvements, etc... But in the end, it's an optimization game — max(users * premium_cost) — and that's why for-profit medicine/insurance sucks. (Now, spend 1% of all collected premiums for lobbing, to make sure the system keeps working lol).
by 8organicbits | 2025-12-16 23:52:22+00:00
If the engineer doesn't understand the proof system then they cannot validate that the proof describes their problem. The golden rule of LLMs is that they make mistakes and you need to check their output.

> writing proof scripts is one of the best applications for LLMs. It doesn’t matter if they hallucinate nonsense, because the proof checker will reject any invalid proof

Nonsense. If the AI hallucinated the proof script then it has no connection to the problem statement.
by recursive | 2025-12-16 23:53:05+00:00
If I have to fill a form for anything that matters, I'm doing it by hand. I don't even use the existing historical auto-complete stuff. It can fill stuff incorrectly. LLMs regularly get factual stuff wrong in mysterious ways when I engage with them as chat bots. It might be less effort to verify correctness than type in all the fields, but IMO there's less risk of missing or forgetting to check one of the fields.
by moron4hire | 2025-12-16 23:53:14+00:00
Not really. Bread, milk, soft drinks, and bagged snacks like potato chips all get delivered and stocked by the individual vendors, but everything else goes through a single warehouse ran by the grocery franchiser. Dairy comes in extra boxes, but most of the stuff is stacked 3D-tetris-style 6 feet high on a pallet and then wrapped in cellophane on the pallet before getting loaded on the truck. It's used just as a convenient way to bind the stack together so it doesn't dump in traffic. When it gets to the store, the pallets sit in the back until they are needed and then the cellophane is cut off and the items go directly on the shelves. Packing them up further would slow things down too much and confuse the stock workers too much (it's mostly teenagers and mentally challenged people, not exactly a life long career). It was not uncommon to find rat and mouse feces and urine on top of cans and boxes.

Almost all of the produce is in nearly the exact form at the warehouse as you would find them in the store. For example, watermelons are in an open-topped, cardboard bin that just gets moved from the warehouse to the grocery floor in exactly its final state. Berries are all in their plastic clamshell boxes, no extra packing, no tape. They rack them up in flat cardboard boxes with no top, just tall enough that a single layer of berry boxes can fit in it and the next layer stacks on top.

This one time, one of the pickers had a pallet full of berry racks, six feet tall. He took a corner with his pallet jack too fast and dumped the entire load on the floor. Berries scattered everywhere. They used a snow shovel to scoop them back up and back into the boxes and back into the racks. Then out to the truck and out to the store, where they would have gotten relabeled "mixed berries."
by scotty79 | 2025-12-16 23:53:24+00:00
How did we end up with this mess of disjoint chat systems each with their own userbase? Doesn't it indicate that this market desperately needs regulation? Would email look the same if it was left to be invented by the corporations?

Either you provide message interchange with any other message system operating in a specific country or you can't advertise or sell anything in this country (also app stores must country wide ban). Bootstrap by taking two largest chats and offering them provisional access to the market for few months. If they can provide interchange between them they can remain and others can follow. If not bigest one is out, let's say for two years and the third one (pre-ban) tries to establish interchange with the remaining of the two biggest.
by jmyeet | 2025-12-16 23:53:44+00:00
Mozilla has been in a dire place for years. Notably someone years ago posted a chart showing how exec salary keeps going up while marketshare keeps going down [1].

In the Microsoft antitrust trial in the 1990s, the court established that having a browser monopoly was anticompetitive. Sadly, we've allowed this situation to repeat on mobile so Chrome and Safari now dominate. Windows has a lot of default Edge installs (and set as the default browser, particularly in corporate settings) but it's really just a Webkit skin at this point.

Now iOS does technically allow third-party browsers but they're just Safari skins and they're not as good (eg at different times they have more limited features like not havintg the latest Javascript engine).

I really think we need to end the bundled exclusive apps on mobile for certain things.

Until then I'm really not sure what Mozilla's path forward is. They've tried to pivot on things like privacy but I don't think any of these make sense or at least won't produce a revenue source to justify the investment. How do you fund something like Mozilla? And how do you create value for users?

[1]: https://itdm.com/mozilla-firefox-usage-down-85-but-why-are-e...
by AgentOrange1234 | 2025-12-16 23:54:00+00:00
Hard disagree. "I'm an expert" in that I have done tons of proofs on many systems with many provers, both academically and professionally for decades.

Also, I am a novice when it comes to programming with sound, and today I have been dorking with a simple limiter. ChatGPT knows way more than me about what I am doing. It has taught me a ton. And as magical and wonderful as it is, it is incredibly tedious to try to work with it to come up with real specifications of interesting properties.

Instead of banging my head against a theorem prover that won't say QED, I get a confident sounding stream of words that I often don't even understand. I often don't even have the language to tell it what I am imagining. When I do understand, it's a lot of typing to explain my understanding. And so often, as a teacher, it just is utterly failing to effectively communicate to me why I am wrong.

At the end of all of this, I think specification is really hard, intellectually creative and challenging work. An LLM cannot do the work for you. Even to be guided down the right path, you will need perseverance and motivation.
by nyrikki | 2025-12-16 23:55:15+00:00
TLA+ is not a silver bullet, and like all temporal logic, has constraints.

You really have to be able to reduce your models to: “at some point in the future, this will happen," or "it will always be true from now on”

Have probabilistic outcomes? Or even floats [0] and it becomes challenging and strings are a mess.

> Note there is not a float type. Floats have complex semantics that are extremely hard to represent. Usually you can abstract them out, but if you absolutely need floats then TLA+ is the wrong tool for the job.

TLA+ works for the problems it is suitable for, try and extend past that and it simply fails.

[0] https://learntla.com/core/operators.html
by tsunamifury | 2025-12-16 23:55:16+00:00
any basic nodal theory will help you understand its not about how many who post, its about their reach and correlations with viewership of overall graph.

A few bad apples, spoil the whole bunch is illustrated to an extreme in any nodal graph or community.

So it's more about how much toxic content is pushed, not how much is produced. At an extreme a node can be connected to 100% of other nodes and be the only toxic node, yet also make the entire system toxic.
by pacjam | 2025-12-16 23:55:59+00:00
Ah gotcha! In that case, I think Terminal-Bench is currently the best proxy for "how good is this harness+agent combo at coding (quantitatively)" question. I think it used to be SWE-Bench, but I think T-Bench is a better proxy for this now. Like you said though, unfortunately Cursor isn't listed (probably their choice to not list it, maybe because it doesn't place highly).