MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by observationist | 2025-12-17 17:23:19+00:00
>>> Also, a small minor detail here: We're not paying for firefox! why are so many people feeling entitled? Mozilla has to do something other than beg Google to survive.

Because some of us have supported, donated to, advocated for, and participated in the firefox and mozilla communities over the years, and feel betrayed by the abandonment of principles, kowtowing to adtech surveillance "features", and overall enshittification of a once beloved browser that we hoped would allow for an alternative to the chrome blob, as they once were to the atrocity that was internet explorer.

It's perfectly reasonable to call out foundations and organizations that utterly abandon and fail to live up to principles. Mozilla is just a PR wing for Alphabet and whitewashing the chromification of all browsers, at this point.

Ladybug and some other alternatives will come around. I don't see any future in which Mozilla returns to principles - the people leeching off / running the foundation won't ever be interested in returning to a principled stance, but to change the brand, or pursue profit, or some other outcome that is divergent from the expectations and consideration of the original supporters. They keep trying to commodify and branch out and waste insane amounts of money on nonsense, and hire CEOs that lose the plot before they ever start the job. Mozilla is functionally dead, for whatever vision of it a lot of us might once have had.

By the time they'd have a chance to fix anything, maybe it'll be practical to have an AI whip up a new browser engine and we'll all have bespoke, feature complete privacy respecting browsers built on the fly.
by Zaskoda | 2025-12-17 17:23:25+00:00
I have been not happy about it up until this post. While reading the article, I thought about it differently.

What Firefox provides today isn't drawing in new users. Those of us who use Firefox do so for a number of reasons related to privacy or security or what not.

I simultaneously like being able to use ChatGPT to look stuff up and I hate that I'm feeding the machine a profile of me. I don't use ChatGPT nearly as much anymore mostly because of that sick feeling I get in my stomach knowing whatever I tell it will absolutely be abused in some way some how.

Nobody is building a very good "thing" that lets you use AI services with a solid layer of protection. That is a new market that deserves a product. I'm not saying that I think putting AI in Firefox is a good idea. Just that I can finally see the motivation.

Personally, I think the "solution" should be some kind of stand alone product that maybe has integrations into Firefox if you have both of them installed. Keep it in it's own cage. Make the only possibility of it existing on my system be me choosing to install a specific app. And if I'm going to do that, let me also use it outside of Firefox if I want.

But at least now I see a reason for what seems like such a bone headed decision.
by hakfoo | 2025-12-17 17:23:30+00:00
To me, the big aesthetic of early Qt/KDE1 is "Obvious Motif ripoff". Aside from the Win95/Warp style titlebars, if you don't have the big thick bevels and the distinct scroll bars, it's not quite right.

It really galls me that they removed the Motif style in Qt6, since I target that as my default look and feel. It gives a nice "This is expensive professional software with a codebase tracing back to the Reagan administration" vibe.

There are themes that come close in various attempts-- "Commonality" for Qt6/Kvantum, and some of the assets from NsCDE for GTK, but it feels like a pitched battle against design teams that desperately want to mimick whatever Apple is doing this week.

https://imgur.com/a/MWiFhkH
by sarreph | 2025-12-17 17:23:44+00:00
Fair criticism! We actually got funded for a different idea (this was a pivot) so perhaps you're onto something.... Jokes aside -- and to address your points.... Privacy: Visitors currently opt-in and provide only the company they are from (no other PII). Security: Our current version handles only text (we have images + dynamic content in the works), but we do our best to build a sanitisation pipeline around this, it's the same kind of problem that any arbitrary-code widget builder needs to account for. Accessibility: I'm keen to hear what concerns or ideas you have here since we are interpolating content and copying existing structure (so that a11y is kept as intact as possible). Advertising: Companies choose to integrate this themselves on their own website, so if anything we see it as forming part of their marketing strategy.
by thecupisblue | 2025-12-17 17:23:46+00:00
Oh wow - I recently tried 3 Pro preview and it was too slow for me.

After reading your comment I ran my product benchmark against 2.5 flash, 2.5 pro and 3.0 flash.

The results are better AND the response times have stayed the same. What an insane gain - especially considering the price compared to 2.5 Pro. I'm about to get much better results for 1/3rd of the price. Not sure what magic Google did here, but would love to hear a more technical deep dive comparing what they do different in Pro and Flash models to achieve such a performance.

Also wondering, how did you get early access? I'm using the Gemini API quite a lot and have a quite nice internal benchmark suite for it, so would love to toy with the new ones as they come out.
by tracker1 | 2025-12-17 17:24:03+00:00
The only thing I wish they'd do with SSMS is add scaling support to the app... It's a bit small for my usage most of the time.

I've started using the extensions for VS Code a lot since they killed the separate code based SQL studio app. I also use a SQLite extension, though I wish the SQLite extension worked a bit more like the MS SQL extension does. Overall they're both nice.

Definitely different workflows for Devs vs DBAs though.. and you're right, DBAs don't really close SSMS, that said, I think the VS Code extension(s) are better for most dev usage.
by seec | 2025-12-17 17:24:22+00:00
But that's just a function of their large population size.

Even if you wanted to, you cannot bring the majority of your population to a high-skill level. That's not surprising, but still it is debatable whether China is producing value in line with their large, highly skilled cohort. They seem to be stuck on the hard problem, relying a lot on the import of foreign-invented technologies. That may change over time; we will see…
by raincole | 2025-12-17 17:24:34+00:00
I don't know much about Coursera, but Udemy has always been quite bad since I remember.

Most drawing/painting courses are taught from people who are juniors at best. The quality is laughable compared to what you can get for free from Marco Bucci/Sinix/Proko channels. And honestly, even those high-quality videos won't teach you how to draw anyway.

That being said, I didn't realize how bad Udemy art courses were when I got started. I think that's a life lesson for me especially in the era of LLM.
by pessimizer | 2025-12-17 17:24:41+00:00
> If we don't donate to Mozilla

1. Why would I donate to Mozilla? Mozilla hates me.

2. When Mozilla was 30% of the browser market rather than 3%, they could have easily cleaned up on donations. If they had made whatever extension transition that they thought they needed to do but while protecting all contemporary extension capabilities and not using it as a power grab to limit user control, they'd still have 30% of the market. If they hadn't made the business decision to permanently be a wonky Chrome, people wouldn't think of them as a wonky Chrome.

3. Mozilla has plenty of money. If you can't create a sustainable browser with a billion and a half dollars in the bank and a fully-featured browser, it's because you don't want to. You already have the browser, you can't whine about how complicated it is to create a browser. Pay developers with the interest. Stop paying these useless weirdo executives a fortune.

But enough about Mozilla. If you're some Bitcoin or startup billionaire, I'll ask you the same thing. Firefox is sitting right there and licensed correctly. You want people to respect you and remember you nicely when you're dead? Take it, fork it, put that same billion and a half into a trust, and save an open door to the Internet at a time when it's really needed. You've won in life, it will be easy to make people trust you if your ambition is just to do good. Steal Firefox, put it on the right track, and people will flock back to it. I know Ladybird is interesting, but a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.
by ghaff | 2025-12-17 17:25:02+00:00
You and I may not like it, but the reality is that so much of "education" is about certifications. And MOOC certifications were never worth much. I have taken unrequired training courses over the years and did other self-guided training, but a LOT of online training was never worth much as a formal certification thing and that's where a lot of the money goes. (Look at executive MBA programs vs. online courses.)
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-12-17 17:25:02+00:00
Don't forget guardrails and other tweaks you don't know are being applied. I was exploring energy usage and when I reached solar energy somehow the AI decided it was political and switched to useless mode until I explicitly told it to look back at the conversation and it's context and that I wasn't trying to get it to say solar was good and it was OK if numbers made solar look good. I was really weird.
by cultofmetatron | 2025-12-17 17:25:17+00:00
watching a few good videos is a great way to FEEL like you're learning. just cuz you watch a 15 hour videoo course on c doesn't mean you can write c any more than watching a 2 hour video course on kung foo means you can kick like bruce lee

The best Elearning platform I've found is mathacademy. no videos. just short texts on how to solve a problem and then a bunch of problems with increasing difficulty. much more efficent if you want to actually learn a skill.

TLDR: you learn by DOING
by dwohnitmok | 2025-12-17 17:25:31+00:00
I can imagine a huge number of properties.

1. Eventual consistency: if no new edits are generated, then eventually all connected viewers see the same document.

2. Durability: if the system acknowledges an edit, then that edit is stored permanently in the undo/redo chain of a document.

3. Causal consistency: if the system acknowledges an edit B that depends (for some definition of depend) on edit A, then it must have acknowledged A (instead of e.g. throwing away A due to a conflict and then acknowledging B).

4. Eventual connection: if, after a certain point, the user never fails any part of the handshake process, eventually the user can successfully connect to the document (there are definitely bugs in collaborative tools where users end up never able to connect to a document even with no problems in the connection)

5. Connection is idempotent: Connecting once vs connecting n times has the same result (ensuring e.g. that the process of connecting doesn't corrupt the document)

6. Security properties hold: any user who doesn't have the permissions to view a document is always denied access to the document (because there are sometimes security bugs where an unforeseen set of steps can actually lead to viewing the doc)

6. Order preservation of edits: for any user, even a user with intermittent connection problems, the document they see always has an ordered subset of the edits that user has made (i.e. the user never sees their edits applied out of order)

7. Data structure invariants hold: these documents are ultimately backed by data structures, sometimes complex ones that require certain balancing properties to be true. Make sure that those hold under all edits of the document.

Etc. There's probably dozens of properties at least you could write and check even for an abstract Google Doc-like system (to say nothing of the particulars of a specific implementation). That's not to say you have to write or verify all of these properties! Even just choosing one or two can give a huge boost in reliability confidence.
by wojciii | 2025-12-17 17:26:13+00:00
I develop embedded software. I use make all the time.

I don't want to .. but people keep using it because it's simpler than other build systems.

Many UI tools based on eclipse use make under the hood.

Many recipes used by Yocto just use make to build the software and then install the output somewhere.

It all depends what you're trying to build and where you work.
by simonw | 2025-12-17 17:26:47+00:00
Relevant post by Kent Beck from 12th Dec 2025: The Bet On Juniors Just Got Better https://tidyfirst.substack.com/p/the-bet-on-juniors-just-got...

> The juniors working this way compress their ramp dramatically. Tasks that used to take days take hours. Not because the AI does the work, but because the AI collapses the search space. Instead of spending three hours figuring out which API to use, they spend twenty minutes evaluating options the AI surfaced. The time freed this way isn’t invested in another unprofitable feature, though, it’s invested in learning. [...]

> If you’re an engineering manager thinking about hiring: The junior bet has gotten better. Not because juniors have changed, but because the genie, used well, accelerates learning.
by dredmorbius | 2025-12-17 17:27:17+00:00
1. Being able to specifically curate and manage content, by downloading it, is precisely the user-centric self-sovereignty which counters that serf mentality. And Google (and numerous other algorithmically-driven services) explicitly target and disable such tools where and when they can. See the ongoing war against yt-dlp, extensively discussed on HN: <https://hn.algolia.com/?q=yt%2Ddlp>. Not to mention the earlier youtube-dl: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...>.

Another was mps-youtube, a CLI client which was hands-down the best interface YouTube ever had. Search (videos, channels), list-creation, download, and playback preferences (audio-only, which I largely prefer, full video, specified video resolution and/or audio quality, etc.), all locally managed without any obligation for a YouTube account. Of course Google killed it by way of its API key. See <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36149183> and generally <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...>.

2. Just how much autonomy, wisdom, and ability to counter teams of highly-paid and highly-qualified attention engineers do you expect children and infants to possess? Or even their harried and distracted parents?

Arguments for self-restraint against commercial addiction merchants have played poorly for well over 150 years, going back to the unregulated hawking of morphine- and cocaine-laced products, amongst others.
by sonderotis | 2025-12-17 17:27:20+00:00
What is happening to github is the same thing that is happened w/ twitter in the bluesky drama. people migrated to bluesky but later came back to twitter. Github is used for more than just code, it is some people's whole resume. And job hunting devs might not be so open to migrating to codeberg as corporation might not understand the reason for the switch.

As a student github still serves its purpose i.e to keep my code thats it.

big projects like nixpkgs or kernel should move away first maybe that might make a dent
by cess11 | 2025-12-17 17:27:28+00:00
"As the verification process itself becomes automated, the challenge will move to correctly defining the specification"

OK.

"Reading and writing such formal specifications still requires expertise and careful thought."

So the promise here is that bosses in IT organisations will in the future have expertise and prioritise careful thought, or allow their subordinates to have and practice these characteristics.

Would be great news if that'll be the case.
by LexiMax | 2025-12-17 17:27:30+00:00
> This, coupled with the fact that I will leave the country if abuses start to become more common, gives me a lot of confidence that I indeed have nothing to worry about.

There's a lot about your post that seemed naive, but this one takes the cake.

Given how we treat immigrants in the US, and the wave of anti-immigrant sentiment that seems to be rising throughout the world, what makes you think the world would actually want you in their country?
by OxfordOutlander | 2025-12-17 17:27:58+00:00
Thanks!

I agree - it is surprising how many are looking at doing in house.

I think what they miss (and I say this as someone who spent the early part of his career outside of tech) is an understanding of what goes into maintaining software products - and this ignorance will be short lived. I was honestly shocked how complex it was to build and maintain my first web app. So business types (like I was) who are used to 'maintaining' an excel spreadsheet and powerpoint deck they update every quarter may think of SaaS like a software license they can build once and use forever. They have no appreciation of the depth of challenges that come with maintaining anything in production.

My working model is that of no-code - many non-tech types experimented with bubble etc, but quickly realize that tech products are far deeper than the (heavily curated) surface level experience that the user has. It is not like an excel model where the UI is codebase. I expect vibe-coders will find the same thing.

I have on several occasions built my own versions of tools, only to cave and buy a $99 a year off the shelf version because the maintenance time isn't worth it. Non-tech folks have no idea of the depth of pain of maintaining any system.

They will learn. Will be interesting to see how it plays out.
by Nextgrid | 2025-12-17 17:28:22+00:00
This is performative bullshit pandering to the increased skepticism around AI. He wouldn't be saying that if AI investment was still in full swing.

I do agree with him about AI being a boon to juniors and pragmatic usage of AI is an improvement in productivity, but that's not news, it's been obvious since the very beginnings of LLMs.
by azemetre | 2025-12-17 17:28:33+00:00
Egghead.io is not worth it, the courses there have a shelf life even shorter than frontendmasters. Authors mostly use it to dump their wares then never update the course afterwards while breaking API changes litter their backlog making most content, unless it was released in the last 3 months, worthless.

Absolutely not worth it since the courses are on par with random youtube tutorials IMO.

Also really dislike the pattern of some popular frontend frameworks selling basic documentation in the form of "courses."
by secabeen | 2025-12-17 17:28:42+00:00
The "Vendors Can Lock You Out" part is what makes passkeys entirely a non-starter for me. Especially the additional risk when someone passes away and the heirs are trying to get access to the deceased's accounts. Vendors are well known for saying "we had an agreement with Samantha, and with her death, that agreement has terminated, and no one can be given access that was not pre-designated."
by chrismjelde | 2025-12-17 17:28:44+00:00
Glad to hear you enjoyed the UI/UX and experience! The ‘how’ is a key question - right now the visitor inputs what company they’re from, and with that info we send out a research agent that compiles a) context on that company, and b) combines that with the deeper research its already done on your domain — essentially it marries up what it knows about you, with what it quickly learns about the visitor, to the customise whatever sections of the website you’ve given Kenobi permission to transform

Obviously a lot of companies have vastly different personas, and this is a harder problem to solve which we are working on.
by anonym29 | 2025-12-17 17:28:45+00:00
I never have, do not, and conceivably never will use gemini models, or any other models that require me to perform inference on Alphabet/Google's servers (i.e. gemma models I can run locally or on other providers are fine), but kudos to the team over there for the work here, this does look really impressive. This kind of competition is good for everyone, even people like me who will probably never touch any gemini model.
Show HN: What to Watch AI – Mood-based movie and TV picks in 3 questions
by qafstudio | 2025-12-17 17:28:47+00:00
I built What to Watch AI, a lightweight recommendation app that suggests movies and TV shows based on mood and preferences using just 3 questions.

Why it’s different:

No long onboarding, no accounts

Focused on decision fatigue (couples included)

Fast results, minimal UI

Platforms:

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cine.ai

iOS: https://apps.apple.com/tr/app/what-to-watch-ai-movies-tv/id6...

Looking for honest feedback on recommendation quality and UX.
by sarreph | 2025-12-17 17:28:54+00:00
Felix handles our personalisation pipeline so will let him chime-in. We do some fast-scraping (cached where possible) to understand the host site, and pull in as much extra page data as possible. We also use other (firmographic) sources like Apollo.io.

Neat idea to track the technologies they've bought _recently_ though! I think capturing buying signals (and inferring intent that way) would be a neat addition to the pipeline!
by simonw | 2025-12-17 17:28:55+00:00
Promoting your best engineers to management sometimes gets you a great manager, but often gets you a mediocre or just-about-competent manager at the cost of a great engineer.

I'm a big fan of the "staff engineer" track as a way to avoid this problem. Your 10-15 year engineers who don't vibe with management should be able to continue earning managerial salaries and having the biggest impact possible.

https://staffeng.com/about/

I'm also a fan of leadership without management. Those experienced engineers should absolutely be taking on leadership responsibilities - helping guide the organization, helping coach others, helping build better processes. But they shouldn't be stuck in management tasks like running 1-1s and looking after direct reports and spending a month every year on the annual review process.
by vunderba | 2025-12-17 17:29:05+00:00
My biggest issue with Udemy courses is that it's not easy to vet the instructor. User ratings are unreliable since beginners aren't really in a position to evaluate a teacher's expertise.

If Udemy's pitch were “Learn X as Taught by Notable People in the Field,” I would have signed up in a heartbeat.

- 3D Graphics taught by Michael Abrash

- Card Manipulation taught by Jeff McBride

- Pianistic Ergonomics taught by Edna Golandsky
by stuffn | 2025-12-17 17:29:21+00:00
I go the other way and say this is a vast oversimplication of the job by a tech bro doing what tech bros typically do.

I am not an accountant but for many years I worked adjacent to them as a developer. I got a lot of time to ask questions and I was generally curious. Even at the SMB level accountants don't necessarily always have a "ground truth". There are so many ways to bury financial data that it needs almost constant vigilance. Yes, in theory, there is one ground truth (inputs should balance with whats there) but in practice humans are SHOCKINGLY good at committing accounting fraud. GAAP is another thing.
by citrin_ru | 2025-12-17 17:29:35+00:00
In USSR it was common to use waste heat from a thermal (gas/coal) power stations for district heating. Heat itself in such system is basically free - instead of sending hot water to cooling towers it first used to heat homes. But a pipeline network is not cheap in maintain (pipelines were usually not well maintained and leaks were common but with modern materials corrosion should be less of a problem).
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-12-17 17:29:43+00:00
And all of those things (good at, bad at, the lessons learned on current models current implementation) can change arbitrarily with model changes, nudges, guardrails, etc. Not sure that outsourcing your skillset on the current foundation of sand is long term smart, even if it's great for a couple of months.

It may be those un-learning the previous iteration interactions once something stable arrives that are at a disadvantage?