MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by benmxrt | 2025-12-17 12:27:39+00:00
That is a valid point. Currently, the backend keeps them in RAM mainly to support multi-device syncing (like the QR handoff feature) during an active session. If a user scans the QR code to open the same inbox on mobile, the backend needs to serve those existing messages to the new client.

However, I'm exploring a 'Transfer & Purge' logic where, once a message is successfully delivered and acknowledged by the primary client, it could be encrypted or removed from the server-side RAM entirely, leaving the responsibility of persistence to the client-side IndexedDB. It’s a delicate balance between UX and the absolute 'zero-trace' goal.
by hu3 | 2025-12-17 12:27:40+00:00
Bun can generate single file executables even from TypeScript:

bun build ./cli.ts --compile --outfile mycli

So the value proposition here is debatable.

https://bun.com/docs/bundler/executables

Also stating that Bun has no hot reload is just wrong:

https://bun.com/docs/guides/http/hot

A lot of the claims in the comparison table are highly debatable to put it gently.

"Pure JavaScript developer experience" with yes for Titan and node but no for Bun? If anything Titan's JS support is lagging behind for using Boa.

"Rust-level performance" with yes for Titan and no for all others. But it uses a slow JS engine called Boa. Slower than node and much slower than Bun.
by palata | 2025-12-17 12:28:08+00:00
> All seemingly low-hanging fruit with brand alignment.

Genuinely interested: are you a developer? Doesn't sound like low-hanging fruit to me.

There are already many alternatives to Gmail, I don't think Mozilla would make a lot of money there. And I don't know if they are making a lot of money with their Mozilla VPN (which I understand is a wrapper around Mullvad): why would I pay Mozilla instead of Mullvad?

There are alternative search engines, like Kagi in the US and Qwant/Ecosia in Europe (though only Qwant seems to keep the servers in Europe).

What I want from Mozilla, really, is a browser. And I would love to donate to that specifically, but I don't think I can.
by quitit | 2025-12-17 12:28:13+00:00
It's easy to overlook the importance in outlining a process for evaluating each rung in the ladder.

Adding this nuance to the question serves to invite deeper thought and avoid assigning a motivation-based rating (like when you give the Uber driver 5 stars when what you felt was actually just "satisfactory").

A more basic rating question can invite other kinds of influence, such as a motivation in how they'd like their life to be perceived rather than how they genuinely feel it to be.

In surveys with less nuance the data tends to correlate around the extremes.
by simiones | 2025-12-17 12:28:44+00:00
While that would be miles better, there's still plenty wrong with it. Most advertising is designed to trick people into either buying something that they don't need at all (e.g. consuming more soda instead of drinking water, or getting some gadget, or more clothes than they need), or into buying the an objectively worse option (e.g. buying a more expensive fridge that will actually last less time). This is the goal of B2C advertising: tricking people to behave less rationally in their consumption behavior.

The only way to avoid this is to just block ads - even unobtrusive content-relevant ads. You may think ads can't trick you, but that has been shown time and time again to be false.
by roryirvine | 2025-12-17 12:29:13+00:00
The article mostly talks about VA's workstations, but I got the impression that their server line was just as important.

As I recall, they were one of the earliest vendors to produce a 1u server, which was a big potential selling point for them (Cobalt's RaQ was first, but initially used a MIPS R5000 variant with a crippled cache so gained a reputation for being a bit "weird").

Unfortunately, the bursting of the telecoms/networking bubble shortly after their IPO (and a year before the dotcom bubble imploded) flooded the market with 4u servers at fire-sale prices. Rack density wasn't nearly so important back then, so VA's neater kit suddenly appeared a whole lot less competitive.
by silexia | 2025-12-17 12:29:25+00:00
I founded and continue to run one of the largest digital agencies in the world, Coalition Technologies. I also am a self taught programmer.

I learned marketing when I started my first business, mowing lawns. I went door to door knocking and asking to mow people's lawns. Door to door sales is very hard, but you learn a lot about your customers fast.

I majored in business and my marketing classes there were a waste of time, taught by people who had never actually successfully marketed anything.

I learned a ton working at my first agency, doing web development and SEO and PPC.

I probably learned the most launching my own little e-commerce websites, including one selling digital auto gauges and another gathering mortgage leads for a buddy I partnered with.
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-17 12:29:54+00:00
> I wasn't there and don't know all the facts, so I'm not going to attempt to assign blame in this specific instance.

Didn't you already though? You said "pilots [..] are supposed to be keeping a constant visual watch for traffic", and considering one of the parties has a filed flight plan and had their transponder turned on, I can't really read it any way except "the pilots of the military aircraft didn't do what they were supposed to" which is implicitly blaming them, or am I missing some angle/interpretation of what you said?

I don't believe that would be incorrect, because of the context, but I'm curious why'd you suddenly hesitate to say it seems to be the fault of the military here, yet previous comment made that hint implicitly.
by apawloski | 2025-12-17 12:30:41+00:00
I guess I just fundamentally disagree that Trump’s the lesser of two evils, if you truly care about American values and culture. How could you want our children behaving like the example he sets? Can you justify his Rob Reiner tweet (for an immediately recent example) to me in a way that persuades me it’s how Americans should behave culturally?

I would love for you to answer the question about whether you’d let us in today, but I suspect you won’t because you’d have to also admit that your stance is hypocritical.
by oriettaxx | 2025-12-17 12:31:12+00:00
well, if one love to travel and love to party I don't see in it anything wrong, actually for both I would be surprised if it's the opposite.

As for the "free" I imagine you mean: at no costs so I would just add this to the obvious:

* changing country, language, house, friends, food, etc can be fun but it requires a LOT of energy and efforts: it is an investment for yourself but with great returns for society that is (partially) covering your costs

* a student with erasmus experience is a different human being: more conscious, more able to face bureaucracy, more able to get information, more autonomous, less prone to need public funds for his professional and personal life

* any student who experience erasmus have to face being accepted as a foreigner, as somebody different, with many many prejudices ... it is not an easy experience, but it makes you more empathic on all foreigners or different humans you will meet in your life.

Traveling and living abroad is the best defense against people being used as cannon meat in wars

"politicians love to subsidies because students will be forever grateful"

what is wrong with this? what is wrong with politicians doing to citizens what makes them "to be forever grateful" ? I don't get it, do you prefer the opposite?

you correctly used "forever", and if it is a "forever" it means you have not been fooled by a politician, for a short term benefit (like receiving money).... so isn't good?

Once again your answer takes me to the concept of consciousness, meaning to know who is the cause of your problems: don't take it too personal (it applies to me, too, soooo often), but if you feel somebody else is having fun traveling and partying at EU costs, instead of asking to stop it, why don't you pretend to be in it?

I mean, even if we are not young anymore to join student parties in a cool EU dorm, can't EU money being invested in helping adults traveling and working in Europe? and having fun? and enjoy life? why not?
by squarefoot | 2025-12-17 12:32:12+00:00
When someone working for A is doing something that would clearly harm A to the benefit of B, I usually start wondering if that someone really works for A or there's something fishy going on. Mozilla is wasting a huge load of money coming from the Google agreement (another conflict of interests) to pay huge salaries to their CEO over the years. If there's something they lack it's openness about goals, not money.
by arnaudsm | 2025-12-17 12:32:36+00:00
There's an elephant in the room: why is maintaining a web browser costing $400M/y?

The web standards are growing faster than non-profit engines can implement them. Google & Apple are bloating the web specs in what looks like regulatory capture.

If Blink/Webkit dominate for long enough, they will lock everything down with DRMs & WEI. Maybe it's time to work on lighter protocols like Gopher & Gemini that don't need 20GB of RAM to open 20 tabs ?
by ErroneousBosh | 2025-12-17 12:32:42+00:00
> it would be a few more years before Git would become a major VCS itself

People forget that in the olden days we used Subversion and Bazaar (well, the latter if you were Canonical-adjacent), and before that CVS.

And before that, SCCS.

Going back decades, it's all people going "this sucks, I'm writing my own VCS", and for whatever reason Git was the one that gained traction in that particularly sticky and slippery swamp.
by lm28469 | 2025-12-17 12:32:44+00:00
The problem isn't knowledge workers, we have plenty. The problem is that given the choice between being paid $55k for a EU based company and spend half your salary in rent vs making $200k+ working for a US based company most people chose money. Even without relocating, working for a US based company in Europe makes more sense...

Working for Dassault or Rheinmetall on high tech military equipment will net you less than half what you'd get helping Facebook come up with the most effective way to cram as many ads as physically possible in your fellow citizens' lives... it's like we got our priorities backward and reward things than shouldn't even exist
Show HN: A Chrome extension to navigate long Claude/ChatGPT threads with ease
by piyushgupta53 | 2025-12-17 12:33:58+00:00
I built this because I kept losing track of important parts in my long conversations with Claude/ChatGPT.

Threadline adds a sidebar that shows all your messages as a clickable table of contents. Click any entry, jump straight there. Hover to preview the full message before navigating.

Works on both Claude and ChatGPT. Auto-updates as you chat, matches dark/light themes, and stays out of your way when you don't need it.
by gchamonlive | 2025-12-17 12:34:01+00:00
> it's been proven that it doesn't summarize, but rather abridges and abbreviates data

Do you have more resources on that? I'd love to read about the methodology.

> And therefore it's impossible to test the accuracy if it's consuming your own data.

Isn't it only if it's hard to verify the result? If it's a result that's hard to produce but easy to verify, a class which many problems fall into, you'd just need to look at the synthetized results.

If you ask it "given these arbitrary metrics, what is the best business plan for my company?" It'd be really hard to verify the result. I'd be hard to verify the result from anyone for that matter, even specialists.

So I think it's less about expecting the LLM to do autonomous work and more about using LLMs to more efficiently help you search the latent space for interesting correlations, so that you and not the LLM come up with the insights.
by bookofjoe | 2025-12-17 12:34:36+00:00
>People will now drive their vehicles into either the Market Street or Water Street parking garage without taking a receipt. Someone from the car must scan a QR code with a phone and then enter the license plate number, a phone number, and a method of payment. Metropolis will then debit an account on record when the vehicle leaves.

The first hour of parking remains free and the rate of $1 every half hour has not increased. According to the city website, downtown businesses can still validate parking by offering another QR code for people to scan.

There is no information on the city’s website about how the data Metropolis collects is used, but there is a phone number and an email address for those who are curious.

The Metropolis website clearly states that anyone using its service has provided consent to the company to gather information, including vehicle types, what kind of devices scan the QR codes, biometric information of passengers, and many other categories that might be sold to advertisers. Metropolis will not delete the data.

“We may keep personal information for as long as necessary to achieve the purpose for which it was collected, our business needs, and any other purpose permitted under law,” reads the privacy page.

There is no alternative or backup system to anyone who doesn’t want to give their information to Metropolis.

“We offer [around] 1,000 free parking spots in the city,” says Schneider. “No one is required to use our parking garages.”
by simiones | 2025-12-17 12:34:38+00:00
Of course, I don't know the actual percent of FF users that use ad block. But I think it's far more likely that it is a majority of current FF users, rather than it being a negligible minority. I think 2-3% of web users is not an implausible approximation of how many people use ad block overall on the web. It's not an obscure technology, it's quite well known, even if few people bother with it.

Edit: actually I'm way off - it seems estimates are typically around 30-40% of overall users on the web having some kind of ad blocker. So, the Firefox percentage being 60-80+% seems almost a given to me.
by theshrike79 | 2025-12-17 12:35:04+00:00
Either you're a true 100x coder who can get a full understanding of every single project and every effect it will have through the full end to end stack.

Or you were never under time pressure and always had enough time to do it.

Either way, I'm jealous for you. For me it's "here's code that Bob wrote 10 years ago, it's not working. Customers are complaining and this needs to be fixed yesterday".

"Sorry I need to understand what it will do and how it will interact with the rest of the project, that'll take a few days and I can't fix it before that" wasn't an option. You fix the immediate issue, run whatever tests it may have and throw it to QA for release approval.

Most likely the fix will work and nobody has to touch that bit in a few years. Should we spend time to understand it fully and document it, add proper and comprehensive tests? Yep. But the bosses will never approve the expense.

If I had an AI agent at point, it could "understand" the codebase in minutes and give me clues as to what's the blast radius for the possible fix.
by nephihaha | 2025-12-17 12:35:13+00:00
We didn't do it willingly. We were deliberately misled and deceived and now we are going to be forced to use these things (Digital ID etc).

Most people don't have phones to be tracked, they have them for their other features. Even door cameras are sold on the basis of personal security not public surveillance.

It doesn't help that so many people invoke "conspiracy theories" when you mention this.
by palata | 2025-12-17 12:36:38+00:00
> That's like saying, "Nobody wants Adwords; people want Chrome."

Bad comparison, but I understand your point.

> Salaries have to be paid somehow.

I would be interested in knowing how much of what Mozilla does brings money. Isn't it almost exclusively the Google contract with Firefox?

As a non-profit, Mozilla does not seem to be succeeding with Firefox. Mozilla does a lot of other things (I think?) but I can't name one off the top of my head. Is Google paying for all of that, or are the non-Firefox projects succeeding? Like would they survive if Firefox was branched off of Mozilla?

And then would enough people ever contribute to Firefox if it stopped getting life support from Google? Not clear either.

It's a difficult situation: I use Firefox but I regularly have to visit a website on Chrom(ium) because it only works there. It doesn't sound right that Google owns the web and Firefox runs behind, but if Chrome was split from Google, would it be profitable?
by bArray | 2025-12-17 12:38:32+00:00
> Having seen a lot of AI-generated ads, I'm so skeptical that AI is actually improving marketing metrics.

I'm sure that firing tonnes of marketing people for prompt engineers will be a good return on investment... Perhaps it reveals something deeper - which is that a 30 second Youtube ad doesn't generate that much revenue at all.

> With that said, I'm long-term bullish on AI

In the long run, yes. But a lot of people will end up losing their shirts over this.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-12-17 12:38:37+00:00
No, not really. I don't even know how to really respond to this but maybe

1. I don't read "terrible articles". I can skim an article and figure if something I'm interested in.

2. I actually do read terrible articles and I have terrible taste

3. Any "summarization" I do that isn't from my direct reading is evaluated by the discussion around it. Though nowadays that's more and more spotty.
by mrweasel | 2025-12-17 12:38:43+00:00
Part of the "problem" is that people don't care about any of those products, except Firefox.

Mozilla needs to figure out how much they need to maintain Firefox, nothing else. I suspect that's not the entirety of the $200 million they currently spend on "development costs". Everything else they receive in donations and partnership fees should go directly into an investment portfolio which will be used to keep Firefox development active in the future.

If they didn't care about anything else, the Google money could fund Firefox for at least two years per yearly fee.
by refurb | 2025-12-17 12:38:44+00:00
Even if the question was perfectly unbiased and captured happiness, comparing scores from country to country are impossible because the scale differs from country to country.

A 10 in Afghanistan is not the same as a 10 in Canada. Societies have different perception of “the best” based on each individuals experience, what society values and what they think is possible.

So while helpful in tracking happiness over time within the same country, it can’t be used to compare countries.
by rdm_blackhole | 2025-12-17 12:40:25+00:00
The EU countries had decades to build and foster alternative companies yet they did not manage to do so. China did though.

Was it a lack of political will or short-termed-ness? Maybe both but the end result is the same.

You can't undo 20 years of inaction in a few years. It will take decades before viable EU competitors emerge and begin to rival US giants and that's if they even are allowed to do so in the first place.
by shaky-carrousel | 2025-12-17 12:40:26+00:00
That's not correct. Linux is free, almost all open source is, many projects, websites are done out of passion.

I contribute to open source projects and nobody "gave me something", as I did it because I wanted to make it better. Like me, there are many others. Nobody is "the product" there.

What the saying you are misrepresenting means is "carefully check free things as you may be the product". Not "free things cannot exist, you either are the product or you pay".
by eesmith | 2025-12-17 12:40:35+00:00
What they could do is get funding from sovereign tech funds.

I don't think the rest of the world likes their dependencies on US companies and their love for surveillance.

Of course, to do it right means ensuring there's enough non-US organizational structure with the know-how to take over the project should things go pear-shaped, and oversight to spot of the pear is taking shape.

But that's what governments can do, assuming they don't want to be under the thumb of the US. ("Oh, you think tariffs are bad? We'll do to you like we did those ICC judges and shut off all your accounts.")
by shiomiru | 2025-12-17 12:40:54+00:00
"ou" is fine too, actually. See the proposal p. 14 (=16 in the PDF): https://www.bunka.go.jp/seisaku/bunkashingikai/sokai/pdf/942...

(To differentiate between the case where it's actually two vowels, you have to put an apostrophe inbetween; their example is 小唄 -> ko'uta.)
by Havoc | 2025-12-17 12:40:57+00:00
Was struggling yesterday with porting something (python->rust). LLM couldn't figure out what was wrong with rust one no matter how I came at it (even gave it wireshark traces). And being vibecoded I had no idea either. Eventually copied in python source into rust project asked it to compare...immediate success

Turns out they're quite good at that sort of pattern matching cross languages. Makes sense from a latent space perspective I guess
by nazgul17 | 2025-12-17 12:41:10+00:00
Thinking aloud, but couldn't someone create a website with some malicious text that, when quoted in a prompt, convinces the LLM to expose certain private data to the web page, and couldn't the webpage send that data to a third party, without the need for the LLM to do so?

This is probably possible to mitigate, but I fear what people more creative, motivated and technically adept could come up with.
by skydhash | 2025-12-17 12:41:47+00:00
The rant is fine. I'll just provide some explanation.

First: Vim comes from vi, which is a visual mode for ex, which is a supercharged version of ed, which is (the standard editor) a line editor. With ed, you don't really write, you issue commands that does things to the file. Think of the file as a long roll of paper and the program as an assistant. So a command could be "replace your on line 14 with you're" or "delete line 34 to 45". Ex added more commands, Vi made it interactive, and Vim added even more features (syntax highlighting, scripting, location list,...). But still the same mode of interaction remains. The cursor is what you control. It's not just an indicator where the next character will appear or be deleted. It's the starting point of more powerful interactions.

Second. You're not supposed to move the cursor that much in insert mode. For 3 characters to the left, I just backspace and rewrite. For more, I go to normal mode and use F, f, T, or t which will land me to the character I want. Then I can use something like x (delete character) or r (replace character) without having to enter insert mode. There's a lot of movement beside hjkl, and I rarely uses h or l for things that further away than two characters.

Third. There's not a lot of key on the keyboard. $ is end of line in most regex dialect, ^ is beginning of line which would be actually the first character, but most people would assume it's the first non-whitespace character, so that's how they went. In C, curly braces mark blocks of code, so it's a small leap to use it for blocks of text, aka paragraphs.

Fourth. My mnemonics are f (find) and t (to). The latter does not include the character.

Firth. A lot of people remaps the caps lock to either Ctrl or ESC.

Sixth. They're different computers so there's no shared clipboard. Sharing information between the clipboard can be done using escape sequences, but I've never bother to. I just maximize the current buffer so I can use the terminal selection. And if I wanted more than a screen (dmesg), I'd pipe the command to a file and then download that file with sftp.

Seventh. Jetbrains only have debuggers for a handful of programming languages while `printf` is universal. And there's no law forbidding installing an IDE alongside your editor.