MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by anyfoo | 2025-12-17 00:18:10+00:00
This is actually pretty common. It's less obvious with Chinese or Japanese, as the input method there usually matches the transliteration based on how the word is spoken (romaji in Japanese, pinyin in Chinese), which of course does not look unusual.

For example, you wouldn't think twice about it if for the Japanese word for washing machine, you not only saw "洗濯機" (which is how it's written in Kanji), but also "sentakuki" or "sentakki" in the search results, because even to non-Japanese speakers it's pretty clear that that's probably the Japanese word for washing machine written with latin character transliteration, and pretty much exactly what you'd say.

With Korean, it looks more jarring, as the input method is apparently very different, and seems to map the keys for unrelated latin letters to Hangul letters? (I have no idea, I don't know anything about Hangul other than it's based on syllables, kind of like Hiragana/Katakana, and apparently very logical.)
by didgetmaster | 2025-12-17 00:18:45+00:00
It is very much like crime in general. The vast majority of crimes committed each year are by a tiny minority of people. Criminals often have a rap sheet as long as your arm; while a huge percentage of the population has never had a run-in with the law except for a few traffic or parking tickets.

While crime is definitely a major problem, especially in big cities; it only takes a few news stories to convince some people that almost everyone is out to get them.
by atrettel | 2025-12-17 00:18:48+00:00
There is actually a lot of debate as to whether scientific discovery is driven by "heroes and geniuses" (as you argue) or by multiple people simultaneously and independently coming up with the same idea [1], often called "multiple discovery". Certainly both have occurred many times over.

That said, multiple discovery seems to be more common nowadays due to the rapid diffusion of information, which means that most people are operating in roughly the same information environment (initial conditions) when they start their research. It is interesting how often multiple discovery happens when you start to look closely at this.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery
by Pannoniae | 2025-12-17 00:18:55+00:00
Most of it has been said by the other replies and they're really good, adding a few things onto it:

- Would lead to reduced memory usage on the driver side due to eliminating all the statetracking for "legacy" APIs and all the PSO/shader duplication for the "modern" APIs (who doesn't like using less memory? won't show up on a microbenchmark but a reduced working set leads to globally increased performance in most cases, due to >cache hit%)

- A much reduced cost per API operation. I don't just mean drawcalls but everything else too. And allowing more asynchrony without the "here's 5 types of fences and barriers" kind of mess. As the article says, you can either choose between mostly implicit sync (OpenGL, DX11) and tracking all your resources yourself (Vulkan) then feeding all that data into the API which mostly ignores it. This one wouldn't really have an impact on speeding up existing applications but more like unlock new possibilities. For example massively improving scene variety with cheap drawcalls and doing more procedural objects/materials instead of the standard PBR pipeline. Yes, drawindirect and friends exist but they aren't exactly straightforward to use and require you to structure your problem in a specific way.
by freefrog334433 | 2025-12-17 00:18:58+00:00
I tried this, and got a reply with a link, that redirected me to the age verification again. I replied to this asking them to manually delete my account, and they manually verified that I was an adult without asking for bio-metric verification. I just my calm, but critical emails convinced them, along with my paid subscription history that I was an adult :).
by zdragnar | 2025-12-17 00:19:12+00:00
You can't really dig into a model you don't control. At least by running locally, you could in theory if it is exposed enough.

The focused purpose, I think, gives it more of a "purpose built tool" feel over "a chatbot that might be better at some tasks than others" generic entity. There's no fake persona to interact with, just an algorithm with data in and out.

The latter portion is less a technical and more an emotional nuance, to be sure, but it's closer to how I prefer to interact with computers, so I guess it kinda works on me... If that were the limit of how they added AI to the browser.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-12-17 00:19:32+00:00
To rephrase it slightly. It's not a perfect vacuum, but compared to terrestrial conditions it's much closer to the former than the latter. The physics naturally reflects that fact.

To illustrate the point with a concrete example. You can heat something with the thermal transfer rate of aerogel to an absurdly high temperature and it will still be safe to pick up with your bare hand. Physics says it has a temperature but our intuition says something is wrong with the physics.
by codingdave | 2025-12-17 00:19:42+00:00
Putting the version number in the domain is a fairly strong "I'm just going for quick cash grab from a wrapper app" signal, if I've ever seen one. As is the blog link with no entries. The utter lack of any information on who is behind this, what they are actually running, or anything at all about what this really is that is different than using any existing platform.
by kgeist | 2025-12-17 00:19:59+00:00
>the GPT-OSS models are also quite good

I recently pitted gpt-oss 120b against Qwen3-Next 80b on a lot of internal benchmarks (for production use), and for me, gpt-oss was slightly slower (vLLM, both fit in VRAM), much worse at multilingual tasks (33 languages evaluated), and had worse instruction following (e.g., Qwen3-Next was able to reuse the same prompts I used for Gemma3 perfectly, while gpt-oss struggled and RAG benchmarks suddenly went from 90% to 60% without additional prompt engineering).

And that's with Qwen3-Next being a random unofficial 4-bit quant (compared to gpt-oss having native support) + I had to disable multi-token prediction in Qwen3-Next because vLLM crashed with it.

Has someone here tried both gpt-oss 120b and Qwen3-Next 80b? Maybe I was doing something wrong because I've seen a lot of people praise gpt-oss.
by crvdgc | 2025-12-17 00:20:02+00:00
> how do you verify the verification program?

The program used to check the validity of a proof is called a kernel. It just need to check one step at a time and the possible steps can be taken are just basic logic rules. People can gain more confidence on its validity by:

- Reading it very carefully (doable since it's very small)

- Having multiple independent implementations and compare the results

- Proving it in some meta-theory. Here the result is not correctness per se, but relative consistency. (Although it can be argued all other points are about relative consistency as well.)
by jasperry | 2025-12-17 00:20:48+00:00
I was also impressed and read the whole thing and got a lot of gaps filled in my history-of-the-web knowledge. And I also agree that the uncritical optimism is the weak point; the article seems put together like a just-so story about how things are bound to keep getting more and more wonderful.

But I don't agree that the system is bound to collapse. Rather, as I read the article, I got this mental image of the web of networked software+hardware as some kind of giant, evolving, self-modifying organism, and the creepy thing isn't the possibility of collapse, but that, as humans play with their individual lego bricks and exercise their limited abilities to coordinate, through this evolutionary process a very big "something" is taking shape that isn't a product of conscious human intention. It's not just about the potential for individual superhuman AIs, but about what emerges from the whole ball of mud as people work to make it more structured and interconnected.
by cratermoon | 2025-12-17 00:21:10+00:00
I agree that AI wasn't genuinely replacing junior roles to any important extent, and the larger investment in AI is spot on. Fast Company had exactly this take in November in "AI isn’t replacing jobs. AI spending is". https://www.fastcompany.com/91435192/chatgpt-llm-openai-jobs...

"We’ve seen this act before. When companies are financially stressed, a relatively easy solution is to lay off workers and ask those who are not laid off to work harder and be thankful that they still have jobs. AI is just a convenient excuse for this cost-cutting. "
by pdimitar | 2025-12-17 00:21:14+00:00
Thanks, that's actually helpful (your entire reply).

What's your preference about copyleft about? Is it that you don't want corporations to keep leeching off of open source? But they do that already! And of course will do their best to hide it. What some license somewhere says bears nearly zero significance. Even if you catch them red-handed and can prove it in court (a very unlikely and rare combination) it would still take like 5 years for any conclusion to be reached... and it will likely end with financial settlement and no real negative outcome for the corporation. So that battle has IMO been lost already.

But if you have something else in mind, I am actually interested to hear it. I am rather cynical and not very well informed on licenses. To me they simply have no real teeth and that's why I lost interest in knowing more. Still, not taking an interest in something innately means that one is having a rather big blind spot. I recognize that about myself.

--

RE: Rust / Scala etc., thanks, that puts things into better context. But I still don't get why would you be against a language becoming more pervasive. Are you maybe convinced that the PL is only driven by hype and not merit? Or is it some other reservation / protest / consideration?
by apollo-watson | 2025-12-17 00:21:40+00:00
With the recent release of OpenAI App SDK, our team at Apollo built a stack that lets you use familiar tools (React, Apollo Client, GraphQL) to build conversational apps without thinking about the MCP plumbing.

The architecture here is simple, a React app and Apollo MCP Server(MIT). Today we're talking about OpenAI App SDK, but MCP Apps will soon be in the official spec and we'll see multiple Agent/LLM providers create similar experiences. Our goal is to abstract away all of the provider details from you with a great developer experience, allowing you to focus on building your app instead.

We'll talk through what we've learned so far and where this might be headed tomorrow (Dec 17, 10am PT/1pm ET): https://luma.com/mnl0q7rx

Feel free to try out the repo and let us know what you think! (you will need a paid OpenAI plan to connect it to ChatGPT)
by kevmo314 | 2025-12-17 00:22:04+00:00
Yes I agree with this, but the blog post makes a much more aggressive claim.

> Large language models are something else entirely. They are black boxes. You cannot audit them. You cannot truly understand what they do with your data. You cannot verify their behaviour. And Mozilla wants to put them at the heart of the browser and that doesn’t sit well.

Like I said, I'm all for local models for the exact reasons you mentioned. I also love the auditability. It strikes me as strange that the blog post would write off the architecture as the problem instead of the fact that it's not local.

The part that doesn't sit well to me is that Mozilla wants to egress data. It being an LLM I really don't care.
by Cheer2171 | 2025-12-17 00:22:20+00:00
No, it is disqualifyingly clueless. The author defends one neural network, one bag of effectively-opaque floats that get blended together with WASM to produce non-deterministic outputs which are injected into the DOM (translation), then righteously crusades against other bags of floats (LLMs).

From this point of view, uBlock Origin is also effectively un-auditable.

Or your point about them maybe imagining AI as non-local proprietary models might be the only thing that makes this make sense. I think even technical people are being suckered by the marketing that "AI" === ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini style cloud-hosted proprietary models connected to chat UIs.
by keeda | 2025-12-17 00:22:37+00:00
In isolation that makes sense, but consider that these AIs have been trained on a vast corpus of human creative output without compensating the human creators, and are now being used to undercut those same humans. As such there is some room for moral outrage that did not exist in prior technical revolutions.

Personally, I think training is "fair use", both legally and practically -- in my mind, training LLMs is analogous to what happens when humans learn from examples -- but I can see how those whose livelihood is being threatened can feel doubly wronged.

The other reason I'm juxtaposing Capitalism and morality is the disruption AI will likely cause to society. The scale at which this will displace jobs (basically, almost all knowledge work) and replace them with much higher-skilled jobs (basically, you need to be at the forefront of your field) could be rather drastic. Capitalism, which has already led to such extreme wealth inequality, is unsuited to solve for this, and as others have surmised, we probably need to explore new ways of operating society.
by westurner | 2025-12-17 00:22:46+00:00
> They opted for azobenzene as the photoswitching unit and a barbituric acid-based merocyanine as the core responsible for hydrogen-bond-directed supramolecular polymorphism.

ScholarlyArticle: "Light-intensity-dependent out-of-equilibrium processes toward dimensionally distinct nanopolymorphs" (2025) https://www.cell.com/chem/fulltext/S2451-9294(25)00409-7 :

> ~Abstract: [...] In this study, by integrating supramolecular polymorphism with azobenzene photoisomerization, we constructed a light-driven out-of-equilibrium supramolecular system that exhibits dynamic transitions between three distinct assembly states with clearly different dimensionalities, simply by tuning the light intensity. By employing high-speed atomic force microscopy, we directly visualized and elucidated the underlying mechanisms of these dynamic structural transformations. Our findings provide a new platform for designing artificial materials that approach biological systems in adaptability and function, paving the way toward advanced, highly responsive smart molecular materials.
by SchemaLoad | 2025-12-17 00:23:10+00:00
One of the best things platforms started doing is showing the account country of origin. Telegram started doing this this year using the users phone number country code when they cold DM you. When I see a random DM from my country, I respond. When I see it's from Nigeria, Russia, USA, etc I ignore it.

It's almost 100% effective at highlighting scammers and bots. IMO all social media should show a little flag next to usernames showing where the comment is coming from.
by SubiculumCode | 2025-12-17 00:23:19+00:00
Between-subject heterogeneity is a major challenge in neuroimaging. As a developmental researcher, I've found that in structural volumetrics, even after controlling for total brain size, individual variance remains so large that age-brain associations are often difficult to detect and frequently differ between moderately sized cohorts (n=150-300). However, with longitudinal data where each subject serves as their own control, the power to detect change increases substantially—all that between-subject variance disappears with random intercept/slope mixed models. It's striking.

Task-based fMRI has similar individual variability, but with an added complication: adaptive cognition. Once you've performed a task, your brain responds differently the second time. This happens when studies reuse test questions—which is why psychological research develops parallel forms. But adaptation occurs even with parallel forms (commonly used in fMRI for counterbalancing and repeated assessment) because people learn the task type itself. Adaptation even happens within a single scanning session, where BOLD signal amplitude for the same condition typically decreases over time.

These adaptation effects contaminate ICC test-retest reliability estimates when applied naively, as if the brain weren't an organ designed to dynamically respond to its environment. Therefore, some apparent "unreliability" may not reflect the measurement instrument (fMRI) at all, but rather highlights the failures in how we analyze and conceptualize task responses over time.
by 9rx | 2025-12-17 00:23:24+00:00
> This is the second time you've just stated that the US is the source of "heavy regulation" in the tech sector without any explanation of what that means.

So? I know what I mean.

> because it in no way prevents a German company from producing a product like Instagram, Claude, AWS, or virtually anything else that was launched in the US in the last 20+ years

Aside from all the patents, trademarks, copyright, etc. that would make it impossible to reproduce. You could create something that kind of like sort of the same to a squinting onlooker, but the users are going to know that they are nothing alike.

In theory you can innovate to provide something that is actually better, not just the same, but can you actually when you are up against moat-ed money printers?
by RustSupremacist | 2025-12-17 00:23:45+00:00
The GUI situation in Rust is dreadful: https://www.boringcactus.com/2025/04/13/2025-survey-of-rust-...

Rust is simply not meant for GUI-based data design but I still want Qt in Rust. That's it. Not QML or Slint or egui or Tauri or gpui or Iced. No markup at all. None of the immediate mode things. No double and triple languages like this C++ mess. Definitely not GTK or the other non-imperative subpar things. There is one option. Until there is more than one, Qt is the best. No one else is worried about this missed opportunity.
by RiverCrochet | 2025-12-17 00:24:17+00:00
You have to eliminate this counterpoint for the evidence to fully support your perception: people share stuff on social media because it's easier and actively encouraged.

Here's the counterpoint to that though: people share stuff on social media not just because it's easy, but because of the egocentric idea that "if I like this, I matter to the world." The egocentricism (and your so-called moral decline) started way earlier than that, though-it goes back to the 1990s when talk shows became the dominant morning and afternoon program in the TV days. Modern social media is simply Jerry Springer on sterioids.
by kimixa | 2025-12-17 00:25:11+00:00
Arguably most MP3s are limited lower than 48k, depending on the implementation.

Like LAME uses a low pass filter unless you explicitly disable it, even on the "insane" preset it cuts off about 20khz.

But I can still understand why mp3 is still used, if only because of compatibility and intertia of keeping a collection in a consistent format. I see the worries about file size becoming less important over time, so many people I don't don't really see an advantage to a more modern codec like Opus.

And piracy has always been more about "branding" that people seem to like to admit - many video rips were labelled DivX for years after they had already moved to other mp4 encoders. And over the years the "brand power" of various pirate groups was surprisingly large.

And I suspect that mp3 and flac were the last "big" changes that made a significant difference to many end users, so newer formats just don't have quite the same improvement to promote their own branding.
by echelon | 2025-12-17 00:25:15+00:00
One day later, "Google pulls AI-generated videos of Disney characters from YouTube in response to cease and desist":

https://www.engadget.com/ai/google-pulls-ai-generated-videos...

The next step is to take this beyond AI generations and to license rights to characters and IP on social media directly.

The next salvo will be where YouTube has to take down all major IP-related content if they don't pay a licensing fee. Regardless of how it was created. Movie reviews, fan animations, video game let's plays.

I've got a strong feeling that day is coming soon.
by starkparker | 2025-12-17 00:25:26+00:00
> GPU hardware started to shift towards a generic SIMD design. SIMD units were now executing all the different shader types: vertex, pixel, geometry, hull, domain and compute. Today the framework has 16 different shader entry points. This adds a lot of API surface and makes composition difficult. As a result GLSL and HLSL still don’t have a flourishing library ecosystem ... despite 20 years of existence

A lot of this post went over my head, but I've struggled enough with GLSL for this to be triggering. Learning gets brutal for the lack of middle ground between reinventing every shader every time and using an engine that abstracts shaders from the render pipeline. A lot of open-source projects that use shaders are either allergic to documenting them or are proud of how obtuse the code is. Shadertoy is about as good as it gets, and that's not a compliment.

The only way I learned anything about shaders was from someone who already knew them well. They learned what they knew by spending a solid 7-8 years of their teenage/young adult years doing nearly nothing but GPU programming. There's probably something in between that doesn't involve giving up and using node-based tools, but in a couple decades of trying and failing to grasp it I've never found it.
by kafkaesque | 2025-12-17 00:26:21+00:00
The idiom is, "Do as I say, not as I do."

Yet here you are trying to convince folks why this doesn't lead to poor morals, low self-awareness, and a lack of trust in doctors. We are talking about a doctor, of course, not just an average nobody. And we are talking about a doctor with 6 million subscribers. His influence is wide.

Last I checked, a doctor is not the same as a politician.
by hintymad | 2025-12-17 00:26:22+00:00
Maybe we can define what "mainstream" means? Maybe this is too anecdotal, but my personal experience is that most of the engineers are tweakers. They love building stuff and are good at it, but they simply are not into math-like rigorous thinking. Heck, it's so hard to even motivate them to use basic math like queuing theory and stats to help with their day-to-day work. I highly doubt that they would spend time picking up formal verification despite the help of AI
by JuniperMesos | 2025-12-17 00:26:33+00:00
> When US-Americans go on social media, how many of their fellow citizens do they expect to post harmful content?

Just because an American citizen sees something psoted on social media in English, it doesn't mean that it was a fellow American citizen who posted it. There are many other major and minor Anglophone countries, and English is probably the most widely spoken second language in the history of humanity. Not to mention that even if someone does live in America and speak English and post online, they are not necessarily a US citizen.
by seg_lol | 2025-12-17 00:26:43+00:00
Fun fact, papier mache was used to create bathtubs and can make furniture that holds an amazing amount of weight.

Learn to Build With Cardboard! STRONG, Waterproof and Free. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45JhacvmXV8

Building a Flyable Airplane out of CardBoard! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T46SHLzlV1A

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papier-mâché
by lgas | 2025-12-17 00:27:00+00:00
I was surprised to find that I could not run it with uvx:

% uvx sqlit Built unicodecsv==0.14.1 Built sqlit==0.1.6 Installed 2 packages in 1ms Traceback (most recent call last): File "/Users/john/.cache/uv/archive-v0/AP7XgAQ1v0HpPxXUi-hs4/bin/sqlit", line 7, in <module> from sqlit.main import main File "/Users/john/.cache/uv/archive-v0/AP7XgAQ1v0HpPxXUi-hs4/lib/python3.12/site-packages/sqlit/main.py", line 125 print sql ^^^^^^^^^ SyntaxError: Missing parentheses in call to 'print'. Did you mean print(...)?