MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dfxm12 | 2025-12-18 21:19:31+00:00
A separate box allows more consumer choice, which is generally a better experience.

In the life of my last TV (10+ yrs), I've had to switch out that separate box three times. It would have sucked & been way more expensive to have had to replace the TV each time.

Firmware can be updated, sure, but there's the risk of some internal component failing. There's the risk of the services I want to use not being compatible. I'd also prefer to use an operating system I'm familiar with, because, well, I'm familiar with it, rather than some custom firmware from a TV company whose goal is to sell your data, not make a good user experience...

Of course, this ties back to the enshittification of the Internet. Every company is trying to be a data broker now though, because they see it as free passive income.
by burnerRhodov2 | 2025-12-18 21:19:33+00:00
What about blackrock etf's? Tether being a huge buyer and holder of US treasuries for like 8 years straight? How the US and other countries are paving the way for stablecoin legislation. Tether is one of the most profitable companies of all time working with major banks on decreasing settlement times by days into seconds....

El Salvador did not roll back their policies... they have been a continual buyer, they just rolled back their "Required by law to be accepted", they added a bunch of special cases where you don't have to accept it, but alot of tourist destinations like el zonte still accept it (or atleast they did when i was there in late 2024).
by canyon289 | 2025-12-18 21:19:46+00:00
Hi, I'm not on the t5 Gemma team but work on gemma in general.

Encoder Decoder comes from the original transformers implementation way back in 2017. If you look at figure 1 you'll see what the first transformer ever looked like.

Since that time different implementations of transformers use either just the encoder portion, or the decoder portion, or both. Its a deep topic so hard to summarize here, but Gemini explains it really well! Hope this gets you started on some prompting to learn more

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1706.03762
by DanPiponi | 2025-12-18 21:20:05+00:00
Here's a Fermi-ish question: given the fractal nature of typical landscape, should a truck driver budget for 10 times as much time as would be predicted by using the known typical speed of the truck and the distance as the crow flies?

(Aside: the nearest grocery store to my house is 1 mile away but the shortest route by car, as measured by the car odometer, is 10 miles.)
by bink | 2025-12-18 21:20:29+00:00
It's not quite that simple. I don't think most bug bounty participants want a full-time job. But even more-so in my experience they are not security generalists. You can hire one person who is good at finding obscure XSS vulns, another that's good at exploiting cloud privilege escalation in IAM role definitions, another that's good at shell or archive exploits. If you look at profiles on H1 you'll see most good hackers specialize in specific types of findings.
by tptacek | 2025-12-18 21:20:35+00:00
That's not how any of this works. A price for a vulnerability tracking the worst-case outcome of that vulnerability isn't a bounty or a market-clearing price; it's a shakedown fee. Meanwhile: the actual market-clearing price of an XSS vulnerability is very low (in most cases, it doesn't exist at all) because there aren't existing business processes those vulnerabilities drop seamlessly into; they're all situational and time-sensitive.
by maxglute | 2025-12-18 21:20:43+00:00
Well real question is how much would that limit PRC talent from working abroad. PRC will be producing plurality of STEM / high skilled talent for decades. They're going to be the only country with project intergrated circuit talent glut in next 10 years, every other semi power projected to have 100,000s shortage. No PRC talent, and you cap western semi talent pool.

Ultimately a lot western innovation run on brain drained PRC talent. There is bamboo ceiling in western tech for east asians, specifically to restrict reverse knowledge transfer. Side effect is once PRC talent hits this ceiling they know big title and fat paychecks and upward mobility is back home, where frankly QoL is off the charts. Ultimately PRC wealthy enough to reverse brain drain aka brain recirculation and PRC talent aren't retarded enough to limit their career aspirations because west decides to cap their career trajectory and try to lock their future behind noncompetes, especially in cold war vs their birth country. Worse, PRC wealthy enough even if there's no bamboo ceiling they can afford to reverse brain drain top 1%, hence current equilibirum. West needs PRC talent, west cannot afford PRC talent to climb too high, PRC can afford to take them off west's hands.

Until west figures out another source of talent, they're stuck in this talent trap. And IMO India ain't it, they don't have the integrated industrial chains and academic structure to produce same kind industrial ready workers yet.
by jackschultz | 2025-12-18 21:20:44+00:00
Sure, but the end of this post [0] is where I'm at. I don't feel the need or want to write the code when I can spend my time doing the other parts that are much more interesting and valuable.

> Emil concluded his article like this:

> JustHTML is about 3,000 lines of Python with 8,500+ tests passing. I couldn’t have written it this quickly without the agent. > But “quickly” doesn’t mean “without thinking.” I spent a lot of time reviewing code, making design decisions, and steering the agent in the right direction. The agent did the typing; I did the thinking. > That’s probably the right division of labor.

>I couldn’t agree more. Coding agents replace the part of my job that involves typing the code into a computer. I find what’s left to be a much more valuable use of my time.

[0] https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/14/justhtml/
by epolanski | 2025-12-18 21:21:04+00:00
That makes for some nasty debugging and unsafety. Both sides should parse both times, unless you're encountering real (not imaginary) performance issues.

As someone who's been parsing everything entering the system from 2018, I don't believe you can have performance issues by parsing the data entering the system, the only exception I can name in a decade was real time trading app where the data coming in all time was just gargantuan that parsing it all the time was impacting UX and even then there should be an argument for the backend insisting on sending whole data instead of the latest value.
by jimt1234 | 2025-12-18 21:21:15+00:00
My TCL/Roku TV recently started showing popups during streams with services like YouTubeTV and PlutoTV, that basically say, "Click here to watch this same program on the Roku Network". I poked around the settings on the TV, and sure enough, there were some new "smart" settings added and enabled by default. I disabled the settings, and the popups stopped. But it's only a matter of time before something else appears.
by Solance | 2025-12-18 21:21:28+00:00
Some really interesting perspectives here and I agree with you I believe most if not all people will still love to be discovering and sharing music until they die. There really is such a thrill in knowing you got someone onto a certain song or artist that they now love.

You're right we definitely won't eliminate algorithms as they definitely do play a great role in everything nowadays, not just music discovery, but we want to alleviate a lot of that reliance that is currently placed on them, and provide another avenue for discovering music through humans, rather than machines.

Radio is definitely a great one, my only issue is that people of today, specifically younger people, want to consume as much content as they can in the shortest period of time as they can (not all but a large portion), and radio doesn't do well for these types of people, where you can't quickly change songs, and have to sit through lengthy ads. However, I do agree the radio is a powerful thing and for those who still have the patience for it, it's a forgotten gem for most.
by tsoukase | 2025-12-18 21:21:41+00:00
There are 90 year olds with 60 years of diabetes and no complications and 40 year olds with 3 years of diabetes and devastating complications. Same for heart and kidney disease. They cannot be put in the same basket. No matter how much they try to push GLP-1's for everything under the sun, they are not.

If they find the drug of immortality, I am sure they will name every disease "partial death".
by ysreddy591 | 2025-12-18 21:21:45+00:00
Fair feedback. I expect skepticism, especially given the price point and the noise in the interview prep market. Regarding the 'ChatGPT' point: I’d argue the opposite. AI tools are great at generating generic definitions ('What is an inode?'), but they struggle with the specific operational sequencing required for NALS. For example, AI rarely suggests 'draining traffic to a fallback region' as a step before 'grepping logs' unless explicitly prompted. My focus is on that sequencing (The 'OODA Loop' for incidents), which comes from analyzing failure patterns in debriefs, not just scraping docs. As for the GitHub repo: The goal was to open-source the core frameworks (The NALS Flowchart and the Linux Cheat Sheet) so they are useful without buying anything. If it feels too light, that’s on me—I’ll look at adding one of the full scenarios from the workbook to make it more standalone-valuable. Thanks for the honest take.
by mrinterweb | 2025-12-18 21:22:03+00:00
I have often wondered how much a specialized local LLM could benefit an agentic tool like Gemini CLI. I would think there could be a good win for speed and minimizing token use if coding agents used a local model. A local model could handle a lot of the low level system interaction type tasks and then send the prompts that require deeper reasoning to frontier models. It seems wasteful and slow to use frontier models to figure out how to grep a codebase, run tests, git diff, etc.

Might Gemini CLI offload some of its prompts to FunctionGemma?
by khaki54 | 2025-12-18 21:22:22+00:00
It may seem like an attack on queer books, but as far as I can tell none of the straight books seem to be trying to explain how minors should get access to adult dating apps to meet older men, or showing obscene graphical depictions of sodomy involving children.

I think if librarians were buying "straight" books with the same explicit and adult content and putting them in elementary, middle, and high schools, the same parents would be complaining about those too.
by chaosharmonic | 2025-12-18 21:22:25+00:00
Is there a reason such a thing couldn't present a bunch of neutral options, but with affiliate links that provide revenue back to Mozilla?

(I mean, that could still steer it toward places that have affiliate programs, but if you're running a local AI tool to help you search for these things that seems like something you should reasonably be able to toggle on and off/configure in a system prompt/something.)
by Barrin92 | 2025-12-18 21:22:26+00:00
>that they otherwise might not have.

I think this is letting people off the hook. We're talking about adults in their 40s and 50s here. When people like that 'suddenly' endorse extreme views it's because they had held them back and feel enabled to say them now, an adult isn't going to become an extremist because someone was mean to them online.

I'm 20 years younger than Blow and even at my age I can tell I'm settled enough psychologically that adopting radically different views would require a lot of internal effort. Views don't exist in a vacuum, to believe radical things you have to radically alter all the other things you belief. I really don't think we should people like this like children without agency.
by bigyabai | 2025-12-18 21:23:02+00:00
Okay, you've been submitting this crackpot nonsense to HN for years now under various different accounts (sahil-gupta, sahil50, captobvious42). I see two likely possibilities:

1.) You are a profoundly misled individual with too much free time and no technical or deductive skills to speak of.

2.) You are a paid publicity management agent for Elon Musk relying on the benefit of the doubt from morons.

Either way, please stop submitting this substanceless bullshit. There's a reason why it gets flagged and there's a reason why we call you out on it every single time. Nobody thinks this but you.
by user3939382 | 2025-12-18 21:23:06+00:00
You have two underlying factors which make everything else downstream moot. Fractional reserve lending and plastic imports. FRL means a bank is depositing $5 and lending $50 then charging you interest for the $45 they never had in the first place. Now you must extract that interest from someone else, who likely finances the missing amount and compounds the problem. So that’s how we stay ‘afloat’ if you can call it that despite the problem of #2. #2. Plastic is made from oil. Whereas anyone would exchange labor for energy, energy prices money. It’s the civilizational bottleneck. It would be cheaper to empty fort knox into Boston Harbor than accept another ship of disposable plastic goods that we send to a landfill. It’s effectively taking a big wad of US wealth every day and lighting it on fire, then using the nonsense FRL to make up the difference.

Given all that, whatever labor or wage trick you do is rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. I know how to remediate the plastic issue, which is an engineering question. Until that’s addressed the union sq debt clock is counting the cargo ships docking to feed our money/energy/oil->landfill pipeline.
by brewdad | 2025-12-18 21:23:09+00:00
Really depends on the size of the school districts. There are districts with more than a 100,000 students and there are those with barely 100.

This is like saying "there are only 147 cities and towns who voted for X while 15,000 towns didn't, therefore X is very unpopular" without taking into account how many voters live in those cities/towns.
by Terr_ | 2025-12-18 21:23:11+00:00
> i've been hearing this "Gov would never let crypto live"... but i keep waiting?

I think the first step is to narrow what role/purpose of "crypto" we're trying to consider, that a government would or wouldn't permit to "live".

For example, imagine there's a 100% government-run system with only "official" transaction signing nodes and everyone's public key is on-file along with their real identity. That would be "cryptocurrency" in a technological sense, but clearly not the political change some people are interested in.

Next there's the economic distinctions like the unit of account [0] versus medium of exchange [1] versus store of value [2], which are all different roles. For example, gift-cards might be a medium of exchange in some sketchy places, but the unit of account is the dollar-amount on them. Which roles would cryptocurrency be actually taking?

> All i see are more and more govs and entities like blackrock being co-opted.

The way I see it, the optimistic utopian dreams of cryptocurrency are going nowhere. Meanwhile, big banks banks--or by upstarts trying to replace them in the same basic game--are trying to use "crypto" to grow while dodging normal laws and regulations.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_of_account

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medium_of_exchange

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Store_of_value
by jpbryan | 2025-12-18 21:23:14+00:00
>the commit atomicity and comprehensive history aren't supported by Word either, are they? That's just a function of maintaining 20 separate copies of the file with each set of changes.

Sure, you could, but that defeats the purpose of Google Docs which is to make the document collaborative. If you save each iteration in a different Doc, you might as well use Word.

It would also add friction to the workflow because a lawyer would need to download the document from Google Docs whenever they circulate it to a client or counterparty.

The best solution to the problem, in my opinion, is a docx native version control system. I write about how that works in our product Version Story in "On Building Git for Lawyers."

https://theredline.versionstory.com/p/on-building-git-for-la...
by ipython | 2025-12-18 21:23:27+00:00
Yep. Had that happen with the United app a few weeks ago. Unsolicited spam sent via push notification to my phone. Turns out that they added a bunch of notification settings - of course all default to on.

Turned them all off except for trip updates that day.

Best part is- yesterday I received yet another unsolicited spam push message. With all the settings turned off.

So these companies will effective require you to use their app to use their service, then refuse to respect their own settings for privacy.
by tptacek | 2025-12-18 21:23:27+00:00
If that were the case, we'd routinely see mysterious XSS exploits on social networks. The underlying bugs are almost always difficult to target! And yet we do not.

The biggest problem, again, is that the vulnerabilities disappear instantaneously when the vendors learn about them; in fact, they disappear in epsilon time once the vulnerabilities are used, which is not how e.g. a mobile browser drive-by works.
by nrhrjrjrjtntbt | 2025-12-18 21:23:29+00:00
You are right for most people. I am not (and cannot get) fit enough to walk and ride everywhere. I walk as much as I can because cars suck but I appreciate the car. You got me thinking about ebikes. Speed is also a thing though. Getting somewhere in 2 minutes instead of 10 is very convenient.
by wood_spirit | 2025-12-18 21:23:31+00:00
A decoder predicts the next word (token) to iteratively generate a whole sentence. An encoder masks a word in the middle of a sentence and tries to predict that middle.

The original transformer paper from google was encoder-decoder, but then encoder BERT was hot and then decoder GPT was hot; now encoder-decoder is hot again!

Decoders are good at generative tasks - chatbots etc.

Encoders are good at summaration.

Encoder decoders are better at summaration. It’s steps towards “understanding” (quotes needed).
by fragmede | 2025-12-18 21:23:57+00:00
So, uh, I've been being and idiot and running it in yolo mode, and twice now it's gone and deleted the entire project directory, wiping out all of my work. Thankfully I have backups and it's my fault for playing with fire, but yeesh.

I have https://gist.github.com/fragmede/96f35225c29cf8790f10b1668b8... as a guard against that, for anyone that's stupid enough like me to run it in yolo mode and wants to copy it.

Codex also has command line options so you can specifically prohibit running rm in bash, so look those up too.
by downrightmike | 2025-12-18 21:24:18+00:00
Cuda is 20 years old and it shows. Time for a new language that fixes the 20 years of rough edges. The Guy (Lattner) who made LLVM is working on this: https://www.modular.com/mojo

Good podcast on him: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/from-swift-to-moj...
by azemetre | 2025-12-18 21:24:21+00:00
The book "This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends" by Nicole Perlroth, while it's about the history of cyberweapons it does a very good job detailing the late 90s to early 2010s exploit market.

I don't have it in front of me, but I'm talking about the "nobody but us" era of exploit markets:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOBUS

Where the NSA seemingly was buying anything, even if not worthwhile, as a form of "munitions collection" to be used for the future attacks.

edit: this mostly ended in the US because other nations started paying more, add in more regulations (only a handful companies are allowed to sell these exploits internationally) and software companies starting to do basic security practices (along with ruling out their own bug bounties), it just mostly whimpered away.

Also relevant to the discussion, the book discusses how the public exploit markets are exploitive to the workers themselves (low payouts when state actors would pay more) and there are periods of times where there would be open revolts too (see 2009 "No More Free Bugs" movement, also discussed in the book).

Definitely worth it if you aren't aware of this history, I wasn't.
by jp57 | 2025-12-18 21:24:28+00:00
"git doesn't really work ... because docx is a binary blob."

Well, yes, but the binary blob is a zip archive of a directory of text XML files, and one could imagine tooling that wraps the git interaction in an unzip/zip bracket.

The real problem is that lawyers, like basically all other non-programmers, neither know nor care about the sequence of bytes that makes a file in the minds of programmers. In their minds the file IS what they see when they open it in word: a sequence of white rectangles with text laid out on it in specific ways, including tables with borders, etc. The fact that a lot of really complicated stuff goes on inside the file to get the WYSIWYG rendering is not only irrelevant to them, it's unknown.

Maybe the answer here will be along the lines of Karpathy's musings about making LLMs work directly with pixels (images of text), instead of encoded text and tokenizers [1]. An AI tool would take the document visually-standard legal document form, and read it, and produce output with edits, redlines, etc as directed by the user.

[1] https://x.com/karpathy/status/1980397031542989305
by throwup238 | 2025-12-18 21:24:48+00:00
Agreed. I use only one MCP server regularly and it’s a custom one integrated into my QT desktop app. It has tools for inspecting the widget tree, using selectors to click/type/etc, and take screenshots. Functionality that would otherwise be hard or impossible to reliably implement using CLI calls but gives Claude a closed feedback loop.

All public MCP server I’ve seen have been a disaster with too many tools and tokens polluting the context. It’s really most useful when you need tight integration with some other environment and can write a little custom wrapper to provide it.
by bayindirh | 2025-12-18 21:25:21+00:00
We want "normal" users to use Firefox, not to push it to a smaller niche with more force. Even though I don't like or use this "AI thingy", it should be equally easy to use and equally easy to disable.

If Firefox can provide a more anonymized gate to these providers and guarantee that prompts are not used for training, this would be a net win for people who want to use AI but doesn't know better, i.e. the "normal" users.
by cakealert | 2025-12-18 21:25:31+00:00
> Having beliefs, principles or values is not lying to oneself.

The lie is that you adopted "beliefs, principles or values" which cannot ever serve your interests, you have subsumed yourself into something that cannot ever reciprocate. Ideology by definition even alters your perceived interests, a more potent subversion cannot be had (up to now, with potential involuntary neural interfaces on the horizon).

> Citation needed

I will not be providing one, but that you believe one is required is telling. There is no further point to this discussion.
by CodeMage | 2025-12-18 21:26:01+00:00
FWIW, I'm starting to seriously consider this as a strategy that will allow me to get to retirement without completely messing up my health due to stress and burnout.

That said, there's something deeply wrong with our industry if that's the way we expect things to work. I never felt that teaching was my calling, but I might end up being forced into it anyway and taking up a job that someone with proper passion and vocation could fill. Why? Because my own industry doesn't understand that unlimited growth is not sustainable.

For that matter, "growth" is not the right word, either. We're all being told that scaling the ladder is the same thing as growing and developing, but it's not.
by dworks | 2025-12-18 21:26:14+00:00
GPT 5.1 has been pure magic in VSCode via the Codex plugin. I can't tell any difference with 5.2 yet. I hope the Codex plugin gets feature parity with CC, Cursor, Kilo Code etc soon. That should increase performance a bit more through scaffolding.

I had assumed OpenAI was irrelevant, but 5.1 has been so much better than Gemini.