MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zamadatix | 2025-12-17 02:59:52+00:00
I'm not saying whether they should/shouldn't get pushback about these things - just that 95% of this pushback in places like this comes from <1% of their userbase and isn't as relevant to Mozilla as those making the feedback would like to believe. Meanwhile, the main portion of the userbase is leaving for completely different reasons and doesn't even know what this kind of stuff like MV3 is, let alone care about it.

Firefox definitely has a general audience much larger than any measure of power users. More than half of the users don't have a single extension installed, and that counts language pack extensions. Half have <= 4 cores, <= 16 GB of RAM, or a 1080p screen. The most common OS is Windows 11 at 44% - with Windows 10 at 34.5% and Windows 7 still above Linux. Over 1/3 of their ~200 million userbase is in the US, and even if every tech-literate power user or privacy fiend in the US used Firefox (they don't) it still wouldn't amount to that many people.

The average Firefox user is nothing like you or I, nor will they find their community in catering to privacy. The community over IE was that IE wa plain awful to use and Firefox just did everything better. It didn't matter if you cared about privacy, performance, standards, community, customizability, compatibility, or whatever - it just mopped the floor with the popular option. That's not going to be the situation with Chrom*, it's actually active and well funded, nor is focusing on a single minority which demands to exclude things other groups care about (even if you and I would prefer not to have them) going to bring them back to the forefront.
by ghaff | 2025-12-17 03:00:48+00:00
I don't need to transport 8 people around and I can always get mulch or gravel delivered. But, yeah, it's not uncommon for me to want to easily stuff a mid-size SUV's worth of stuff into my vehicle for a weekend or longer trip. I could probably do it with a somewhat smaller vehicle but why? The longer drives are probably when I need to do so anyway.

I did also have a smaller car as well when I did more shorter regular local drives but I really don't do those much any longer other than very local drives to the grocery store or nearby hiking trails.
by trinsic2 | 2025-12-17 03:02:30+00:00
We can't blink without involving some corporation into our creative process. I think Tony Gilroy has some interesting things to say about our world with-in the Andor TV series. Its not an easy map. The character arcs, when the are based on the truth of the situation can help people change their way of thinking.

I never got anything out of the original Star Wars films except heroes and villains. Andor is on a completely different level then the original Star wars world IMHO.

Some times you got to use whats available to you. I do think that we are living in an evil time and in order to change that story, we are going to have to envision something different. I think good stories can help us do that, regardless of how they are funded. Corporations will sell you the rope to hang themselves. They don't care what happens, only that they make money, and I think that will be there downfall at some point.
by retsibsi | 2025-12-17 03:02:35+00:00
> Imagine an actor who is playing a character speaking a language that they actor does not speak. Due to a lack of time, the actor decides against actually learning the language and instead opts to just memorise and train how to speak their lines without actually understanding the content.

Now imagine that, during the interval, you approach the actor backstage and initiate a conversation in that language. His responses are always grammatical, always relevant to what you said modulo ambiguity, largely coherent, and accurate more often than not. You'll quickly realise that 'actor who merely memorized lines in a language he doesn't speak' does not describe this person.
by evil-olive | 2025-12-17 03:03:16+00:00
if you read the article instead of just criticizing the headline:

> They listened to Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel criticizing the lack of transparency with DTE, the utility that's associated with the Saline Township proposal, and legislators who protested tax breaks for data center projects.

> ...

> "We're talking about 1.4 gigawatts, which is, of course, enough to provide energy to a city of a million people," Nessel said. "I think we should be taking this extremely seriously, don't you? Do you guys trust DTE? Do you trust Open AI? Do we trust Oracle to look out for our best interests here in Michigan?"

this wasn't just a random group of 100 people, they were organized enough to get the state AG as well as multiple state legislators to speak. seems fairly newsworthy to me.
by 9rx | 2025-12-17 03:03:51+00:00
> No one else who has responded to you does, so you'd think you'd care

For what reason? Not my problem. It makes no difference to me.

> What is it about the regulatory policies in the US that allows US competitors to exist, but not EU ones?

Where do you think these competitors are, even if based in the USA? I'd much rather support my neighbour, but I have no idea how to find the Instagram not owned by Zuckerberg and friends and, quite frankly, despite your insistence, I am quite certain it doesn't exist. There is really no chance of it existing as if anyone tried to complete on a direct basis, the law would see that they be shut down immediately.

I can find photo sharing services with different usage models, but you would be hard-pressed to think of those as being direct competitors. Perhaps that is where things break down here, though? Not noticing the usage of "direct" in the earlier comment?

While a direct competitor can just straight up copy other parties, indirect competition requires innovation. That brings us back to the question of how do you innovate when you don't have revenues to support investing in innovation?
by 3eb7988a1663 | 2025-12-17 03:04:16+00:00
This Kafka nightmare is somewhat funny when it does not impact your life, but with increasing centralization, I worry for the future. What happens when an AppleID/Google account in good standing is required to open a bank account? Go grocery shopping? Hold your drivers license? Apply for a job anywhere?

Big tech has repeatedly shown that they are willing to ignore life destroying account workflows so long as they only impact a minority.
by CuriousRose | 2025-12-17 03:04:39+00:00
> Let people opt-in to using their browsers to help crawl for the search engine index, like Brave does.

This is really cool.

I'd be happy with a re-branded SearX/SearXNG, with a paid cloud hosted instance from Mozilla that uses a shared base index plus your own crawled pages or optionally contribute your crawls back to the shared index.
by apawloski | 2025-12-17 03:05:34+00:00
Ok. So if we really did care about building that industrial capacity, then why are we randomly and capriciously taxing the resources needed to build that capacity? Including the critical resources that we don't have in America? Why are we making it so hard for domestic production companies to make short, medium, and long term plans by repeatedly changing our trade policies on whims?

The globalized supply chains needed to get the natural resources alone should be enough to answer your question about why we should care about America's global relationships.
by esalman | 2025-12-17 03:05:47+00:00
> If both request significant compute allocations, and I see one is planning on MATLAB, and the other on PyTorch Lightning, I know for sure I would want to give the MATLAB users far less funding, or even none at all

I want to say the least offensive way possible that I really do hope you do not ever get to review NSF/NIH grants because of bias like this.

The example that you gave is/was also a solved problem in the HPC systems I used. SLURM/PBS, when properly configured, can ensure that local clusters do not spill over and not use resources that are not supposed to be used.
by retrac | 2025-12-17 03:06:28+00:00
In the phonetic alphabet it's /e:/ vs. /ei/ and /o:/ vs. /ou/.

If you're an English speaker, you can be forgiven for a very stereotypical trait of the English accent. English speakers have a real hard time with the /e/ or /e:/ sounds as well as the /o/ and /o:/ sounds. Most English dialects don't have either a monophthong /e/ or /o/. Both the long and short tend to get heard as /eɪ/ and /oʊ/.

French enchanté /ɑ̃ ʃɑ̃ te/ is heard and borrowed as /ɑn.ʃɑn.teɪ/. German gehen /ge:n/ is heard as "gain" /geɪn/. And Japanese /o:/ and /ou/ both get heard as /oʊ/.

It's arguably a minimal pair in Japanese: 負う /ou/ (to carry), 王 /o:/ (king).
by amluto | 2025-12-17 03:06:37+00:00
Is there any plan for a non-“compatibility layer” way to do anything manual or nontrivial? uv sync and uv run are sort of fine for developing a distribution/package, but they’re not exactly replacements for anything else one might want to do with the pip and venv commands.

As a very basic example I ran into last week, Python tooling, even the nice Astral tooling, seems to be almost completely lacking any good detection of what source changes need to trigger what rebuild steps. Unless I’ve missed something, if I make a change to a source tree that uv sync doesn’t notice, I’m stuck with uv pip install -e ., which is a wee bit disappointing and feels a bit gross. I suppose I could try to put something correct into cache-keys, but this is fundamentally wrong. The list of files in my source tree that need to trigger a refresh is something that my build system determines when it builds. Maybe there should be a way to either plumb that into uv’s cache or to tell uv that at least “uv sync” should run the designated command to (incrementally) rebuild my source tree?

(Not that I can blame uv for failing to magically exfiltrate metadata from the black box that is hatchling plus its plugins.)
by pooyan93 | 2025-12-17 03:07:45+00:00
In addition to rentals, around maybe 1994-1995, some stores (I don’t remember where) would have bargain bins or racks with some older games that were really inexpensive on CD-ROMs, and this continued for years. I remember snapping up some great old games this way.

Much earlier, as a kid I’d sometimes get games on cassette tapes in the bookstore and Radio Shack. Later it was great going to software stores that had games on 5 1/4” floppy diskettes in boxes. That stuff rocked.

I have had little interest in the games since then. Everything seems the same: mostly FPS / 3D crap. I don’t see any escape from this in the world building AI space either; they just added goggles.
by sokoloff | 2025-12-17 03:08:52+00:00
This doesn’t get around the bulk, but at least in the metro Boston area, there are loads of auctions from closing labs or failed biotechs where you can get all sorts of lab equipment for pennies/nickels on the dollar.

If you have space for a commercial lab hood, the cost for used/auction is low, if you’re slightly patient. (This is partly because of the bulk, of course. Lots of people might bid on the small, benchtop equipment, but the giant equipment often goes for the minimum bid.)
by robocat | 2025-12-17 03:09:45+00:00
I think I'd want electrical isolation.

WiFi gives really good isolation. Wired Ethernet can be pretty good ("Most Ethernet transformers are specified for 1500Volts RMS isolation") and I'd presume optical cabling is better.

It doesn't take much fiddling with electronics before you make a good mistake you learn from!

I do like their solution and it is obviously great for standalone GPIO that doesn't need any wired connections to the rest of the world.
by unsungNovelty | 2025-12-17 03:09:52+00:00
Ofcourse it is. But that also doesn't make my above comment wrong though. Not to mention, many were silent for so long against their actions. Now it looks like the entire community has started voicing against it. The ball is now on Mozilla's court.

Not to mention there is more than just technical aspect with Firefox and community. A lot of people have invested a ton of time in it.

Mozilla warrants all the flack they are getting. I am just saying they can't virtue signal their way through this. It wont work.
by irjustin | 2025-12-17 03:10:49+00:00
> They seem smart, but they are not; they are really just good at appearing to be smart

There are too many different ways to measure intelligence.

Speed, matching, discovery, memory, etc.

We can combine those levers infinitely create/justify "smart". Are they dumb? Absolutely, but are they smart? Very much so. You can be both at the same time.

Maybe you meant genius? Because that standard is quite high and there's no way they're genius today.
by zamadatix | 2025-12-17 03:13:33+00:00
I think a big factor (of many probably) is there is a ~150x difference in bytes of source vs number of tests for them. I.e. I wonder what other projects are easy wins, which are hard ones, and which can be accomplished quickly with a certain approach.

It'd be really interesting if Simon gave a crack at the above and wrote about his findings in doing so. Or at least, I'd find it interesting :).
Show HN: macOS local meeting recorder with Whisper transcription/ Claude notes
by damidare | 2025-12-17 03:13:51+00:00
I built Kumbuka because Notion's meeting recording feature requires an Enterprise subscription and as a broke solo funder I don't want to pay for one more subscription. I wanted the same workflow—record, transcribe, generate notes, save to Notion—without the enterprise price tag.

Everything runs locally on your Mac. Whisper handles transcription, Claude Code generates the meeting notes (summary, decisions, action items, speaker-attributed transcript), and optionally exports to Notion via MCP.

It also monitors your macOS Calendar and prompts you when meetings are about to start, so you don't forget to hit record.

Tech: Python, local Whisper server (VoiceMode), Claude Code CLI, Notion MCP.

macOS only. Would love feedback on the workflow and what features would be most useful.
by avazhi | 2025-12-17 03:14:20+00:00
Couldn’t care less about any of that. English is the world’s dominant language and will remain so for the foreseeable future. There’s nothing wrong with that. And subtitles exist already or can be generated by addons. Most people don’t use them. So, once again, maybe don’t inconvenience the vast majority of users for some small subset of the population.
by makeitdouble | 2025-12-17 03:14:29+00:00
When it comes to input "best" is highly subjective, but with that said: Just adding Japanese support in the system language settings is fine.

Standard Qwerty keyboards are well supported, you'll need to either check the key shortcut to switch between inputs or do it with the mouse if it's infrequent enough.

People using it daily will tweak a lot more, have a straight to IME and straight out of IME key instead of the default switching pattern, potentially add more tweaks to always have half-width space and ponctuation whatever the mode they're in etc., but that's a rabbit-hole you'll be free to fall into.

BTW the reverse works well enough: Windows has a specific mode to force US ANSI on JIS layouts and still use the additional japanese keys. Kinda fun they felt the need to leave that mode in.
by gnabgib | 2025-12-17 03:14:49+00:00
At least from 2013, popular:

2024 (484 points, 73 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40177599

2015 (162 points, 57 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10600486

2013 (664 points, 169 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5942757
by theologic | 2025-12-17 03:16:20+00:00
Okay I think I understand what happened. A couple posts ago you listed to an executive summary for CASPEH. I don't believe you've ever read the complete report, which is around 96 pages.

If you dig into the details, you'll actually find out that all of your assumptions are spoken about in terms of coming out with a reasonable amount of hours worth inside a California based upon the survey data from this research. The detailed report includes the following:

Median monthly household income in the six months before homelessness: $960 (all participants), $950 for non‑leaseholders, $1,400 for leaseholders. State the obvious if the weighted average is 960 and you have two groups, you can run the math to show that the non-lease holders were 98% of the sample.

Why we do want to think about Least Holders in reality is the renters where 98% of the problems exist. This is a clear application of the Pareto Principle, and so we should look at renters as the core of the homeless issue.

Median monthly housing cost: $200 for non‑leaseholders (0 for many), $700 for leaseholders. Of non-leaseholders, 43% were not paying any rent; among those who reported paying anything, the median monthly rent was $450.

In essence, if you look at the details you'll see where you're assuming are a lot of assumptions are actually somewhat addressed by the detailed report. Unfortunately, I'm going to suggest the detailed report is pretty shabby in terms of forcing somebody to dig out a lot of information which they should offer in some sort of a downloadable table for analysis.

Computationally, we can therefore figure out the minimal amount of hours these people must have been working based on the fact that they must have made at least minimum wage in the state of California.

There's not a lot of assumptions in this. It's based upon the detailed survey data and utilizing California minimal wage, which is where the survey was taken. The issue is digging into the details and computationally extracting information and assumptions that is not blinded by our own biases walking into something.

Again, there is excellent work out of University of Washington to suggest that higher housing costs lends itself toward greater rates of homelessness. That's not under debate here. The issue is from the survey data, it's very reasonable to do some basic computation to put some parameters around the data. It's not assumption, it's critical thinking.
by tooltalk | 2025-12-17 03:16:32+00:00
1) Sure, no problem with private individual companies sharing their tech with other companies/competitors via licensing or "voluntary" joint-venture; or seeking legal remedy to get compensated or to ban further infringement. This is perfectly fine in a functioning market. In China's case, however, we are talking Chinese gov't forcing compulsory terms in negotiation between private companies and actively restricting market access conditioned on tech transfer from private foreign companies to local companies. And by refusing to enforce IPR of foreigners, preventing any legal remedy. In other word, anti-market.

That's also why Japanese + Korean who hold 80% of all ACTIVE lithium ion battery patents are pursing legal actions OUTSIDE China, in neutral regions such as the EU. For instance, Japan + Korea patent pool, Tulip Innovation, in Hungary started enforcing their IP this year and already won significant legal victories and sales injunctions in Germany. Sunwoda, EV battery suppliers to Dacia, considered a low-hanging fruit of China's battery industry, was the first to go; and there wil be many more to come, such as CATL/BYD protected by China's "corruption," to borrow your word, aren't too safe in functioning markets outside China where IPR is enforced.

You seem very hung up on the fallacy of numbers, as if benefiting 50 companies justifies the means. If any, that sheer number of companies demonstrates that the industry is at infant stage. And, as the industry matures, that number is likely whittle down to a dozen or fewer. Your Chinese gov't certainly does not want all 100+ EV companies still in business today, already down from nearly 500 not too long ago. In the EV battery sector, however, China's alreadu had preordained national champions all along, namely CATL/BYD, everyone else in the business is there for window dressing. Otherwise, this means very little.

Finally, no matter how much China try to fake it, everything you are describing here is called mercantilism, or nationalistic policies of protecting domestic champions from import, or foreign competition, and maximizing exports/profit -- perhaps, the 18th Century British Empire and the East India Company ring a bell for you? This isn't very compatible with the market economies outside China.

2) Not about consequences, but how we get there.

3) Again, that's what China's neo-mercantilism is.

Thank you for playing, but I suspect we are going to make any progress at this point.
by LandenLove | 2025-12-17 03:17:07+00:00
The concept of "injecting" Japanese into text written in a different language is interesting. But I feel the presentation of word definitions are not great. Something similar to https://yomitan.wiki/ or https://jisho.org/search/kotoba would be preferred. E.g. 言葉ーことばーLanguage, word or phraseーKanji definitionsーSample sentence
by smt88 | 2025-12-17 03:17:28+00:00
Far, far more people have protested the positions of power held by (for example) Joe Rogan and Dave Chappelle. They ignored the cancellation attempts, and they're richer and more influential today than they were a few years ago.

"Cancellation" is a state of being famous enough that your controversial beliefs upset a large, loud number of people. In Eich's case, it threatened to have no effect on his career. He chose to change his career because of it.

Eich expressed his First Amendment rights, and other people expressed theirs in return. Why should either of them give up those rights for fear of offending the other?
by jmward01 | 2025-12-17 03:17:31+00:00
I'm all about monitoring privacy related things, but I think the bigger piece here is the monitoring of city counsels for this kind of data. Wow! I just hadn't thought about doing that before. This is a massive trove of information and building a strong, more generic platform around it could yield huge insights to enable fast action as municipalities start implementing things. I have actually built some code to review local city counsel meetings by transcribing them and downloading meeting packets but opening this up at a larger scale could be a massive thing.
by cy1414569 | 2025-12-17 03:18:24+00:00
As the holiday season approaches, many creators and brands look for easy ways to produce Christmas-themed video content without heavy production work. Wan AI Christmas offers a straightforward solution by using AI to transform simple ideas into festive, visually engaging videos.

Instead of dealing with cameras, editing software, or long production timelines, users can start with a short text description and let the AI generate a Christmas-style video complete with seasonal atmosphere, warm lighting, and smooth motion. It’s especially useful for quick holiday campaigns, social media posts, digital greetings, or promotional content.

What makes Wan AI Christmas appealing is its simplicity. The interface is easy to navigate, the results are consistent, and the output quality fits well across different platforms — from short-form social videos to holiday marketing visuals. Even users with no video production experience can create polished Christmas content in just a few minutes.

For anyone looking to add a festive touch to their content without increasing workload or costs, Wan AI Christmas is a practical and efficient option worth exploring.
by sombragris | 2025-12-17 03:19:03+00:00
I concur in your liking of Breeze. It's an amazing teme, really. My only objection is that the default light color scheme is too light. Fortunately there are good color schemes such as Steel or StormClouds that solve that problem, a light theme that isn't too "white".

StormClouds: https://store.kde.org/p/1001459

Steel (no longer shipped by default, but still available at the KDE Store): https://store.kde.org/p/1311274

As for the monitors, I have them because sometimes I have issues with CPU speed (due to a hardware quirk of my laptop) and the network connection is kinda iffy at the time.