MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cogman10 | 2025-12-17 17:30:03+00:00
> is damning to the concept of the state.

Not really.

It's a web browser and from a non-tech politician they already have the internet.

It's pretty hard to get a government to understand why the 1000 webkit browsers aren't actually competitive.

They'd rather send money and regulations towards something they can better understand like healthcare or right to repair. Heck, even "AI".
by glenstein | 2025-12-17 17:30:20+00:00
>If Mozilla killed andblocking extensions

Yeah but they haven't and they're not going to, so what's the point of fantasizing about what you would do in that situation? It's like tough guy syndrome, where a person constantly fantasizes about what they would do in the imaginary situation where one of their friends or family is disrespected, or doomsday preppers who spend their life imagining what they would do in an apocalypse that never comes.

That stuff belongs on archiveofourown.com, not news.ycombinator.com.
by danenania | 2025-12-17 17:30:43+00:00
Hey all,

I'm an engineer at Promptfoo (open source evals and red teaming for AI). We're launching a tool that scans GitHub PRs for common LLM-related vulnerabilities. This post goes into detail on how it was built and the kinds of vulnerabilities that LLM apps are most prone to.

It includes a few real CVEs in open source projects that we reproduced as PRs so we could test the scanner.

I'd love to hear your thoughts.
by qcnguy | 2025-12-17 17:30:45+00:00
Uh, you're planning to outsource regulatory compliance to an LLM? In the EU? Which has already banned the usage of "algorithms" that aren't "transparent" via the DMA? That isn't going to work.

As for cloning the US software industry with LLMs ... with which non-US LLMs, exactly? Mistral? The best LLMs for coding (which still can't handle many important tasks) are: Gemini, Claude, GPT. All non-EU models.
by pimlottc | 2025-12-17 17:31:19+00:00
I'm reminded of the song Small Bill$ by Regina Spektor:

His destiny was just too big to spend / So he broke it into smaller bills and change

By the time he'd try to buy the things he needed / He had spent it all on loosies and weed and

He had spent it all on chips and Coca-Cola / He had spent it all on chocolate and vanilla

He had spent it all and didn't even feel it / He had spent it all and didn't even feel it
by StrataCreator | 2025-12-17 17:31:19+00:00
I am building this for two reasons. One is that I went out with some colleagues who work in DevOps and they wouldn't stop complaining about vs code crashing every time they tried to open one of our system log files. The other as a challenge to see if I understand the problem area well enough to produce something better.

Where grep is the usual thing people use, or glogg or even notepad++, what I aim to build is something that is as fast as grep but gives a UI that is modern and capable of handling these 50GB files. There are other advantages of having a UI - being able to see the context in which the error appeared for example without having to run multiple queries.

So I am building Strata. A native desktop application (cross-platform) that uses memory mapping to handle massive files without fully loading them into RAM, it takes 8 seconds to open a 50GB file and once you do scrolling is buttery smooth with 60fps.

I have baked some additional features into it already: Live SSH Tail to allow people to view server logs instantly without transferring files around, Smart JSON analysis to detect and format JSON logs that have been collapsed into a single line making it impossible to read, currently working on improved search beyond just text to allow for regex and being able to search by via JSON properties.

I'd love to hear from other DevOps and SRE people, what features would make your life easier? Does anyone else need to deal with logs of this size and what are your current workflows and pain points?

Thanks everyone!
Show HN: Samata – A minimal personal workspace where everything is a page
by elcoan | 2025-12-17 17:31:41+00:00
Hi HN,

I’ve been working solo on Samata — a small web app for personal work.

I built it because my own notes, tasks, and project context were always scattered across different tools. Notes lived in one app, tasks in another, and projects somewhere else. I wasn’t missing features — I was losing context.

Samata is based on a simple idea: everything is a page. A task, a note, a project, an idea — all the same thing at different stages.

You start with an empty page, write a thought, link it to other pages, and optionally add a due date or status. When something becomes relevant (for example, due today), it appears automatically on the home page. There’s no system to design upfront.

This is intentionally not a team tool:

* no roles or permissions * no workflows or dashboards * no templates or automation

It’s meant for calm, personal work.

The project is early, but usable. I’m actively working on it and happy to answer questions or hear critical feedback.

You can try it here: https://samata.app/

You can try it instantly via a one-click demo (no signup). The demo runs in a shared space that resets periodically. https://samata.app/demo
by acituan | 2025-12-17 17:32:12+00:00
We know from the era of data the power of JOIN. Bring in two different data sources about a thing and you could produce an insight neither of them could have provided alone.

LLMs can be thought as one big stochastic JOIN. The new insight capabilities - thanks to their massive recall - is there. The problem is the stochasticity. They can retrieve stuff from the depths and slap them together but in these use cases we have no clue how relevant their inner ranking results or intermediary representations were. Even with the best read of user intent they can only simulate relevance, not really compute it in a grounded and groundable way.

So I take such automatic insight generation tasks with a massive grain of salt. Their simulation is amusing and feels relevant but so does a fortune teller doing a mostly cold read with some facts sprinkled in.

> → I solve problems faster by finding similar past situations → I make better decisions by accessing forgotten context → I see patterns that were invisible when scattered across time

All of which makes me skeptical of this claim. I have no doubt they feel productive but it might just as well be a part of that simulation, with all the biases, blind spots etc originating from the machine. Which could be worse than not having used the tool. Not having augmented recall is OK, forgetting things are OK - because memory is not a passive reservoir of data but an active reranker of relevance.

LLMs can’t be the final source of insight and wisdom, they are at best sophists, or as Terrence Tao put it more kindly, a mere source of cleverness. In this, they can just as well augment our self-deception capacity, maybe even more than counterbalancing them.

Exercise: whatever amusing insight a machine produces for you, ask for a very strong counter to it. You might be equally amused.
by anonym29 | 2025-12-17 17:32:25+00:00
I wondered this, too. I think the emphasis here was on the faster / lower costs models, but that would suggest that Haiku 4.5 should be the Anthropic entry on the table instead. They also did not use the most powerful xAI model either, instead opting for the fast one. Regardless, this new Gemini 3 Flash model is good enough that Anthropic should be feeling pressure on both price and model output quality simultaneously regardless of which Anthropic model is being compared against, which is ultimately good for the consumer at the end of the day.
by e2le | 2025-12-17 17:32:50+00:00
> Mozilla Mail

Aren't they already moving towards this? The Thunderbird team recently announced ThunderMail which will have an optional $9/year plan.

https://www.tb.pro/en-US/thundermail/

> Thunderbird for iOS

https://blog.thunderbird.net/2025/10/state-of-the-bird-2024-...

> We’ve also seen the overwhelming demand to build a version of Thunderbird for the iOS community. Unlike the Android app, the iOS app is being built from the ground up.
by netsharc | 2025-12-17 17:32:51+00:00
How much of the price can be attributed to "Steve Jobs coveted after this lamp"?

Obviously celebrity endorsements is nothing new, but "coveting" seems new to me. Imagine if it's Trump, Musk or your favorite dickhead celebrity coveting after the object, would you say "eww" or would you pay more to say "I own something that dickhead covets."?
by motbus3 | 2025-12-17 17:33:04+00:00
I honest dislike the idea of having yet another niche going with less competitors.

Coursera somehow got to be not good. I subscribed to the premium thing and it is not worth for me. I'd rather pay for the courses and do that on my time.

Udemy does that "promotion" nonsense to "encourage" to "buy it now" which I think is lame. It is not like they are steam. They are just cycling through the list and add 1000 bucks to whatever is not there. Also they store your cookies and track your device for that. That's despicable

I wish Coursera to rethink this decision and to rethink on the platform itself.
by ramshanker | 2025-12-17 17:33:15+00:00
Is there anything preventing incumbents from developing their own ASIC equivalent of a google TPU?

Or maybe the GPUs are not really that different from TPU.

To me, one of the secret sauce of AI chips is Memory amd Interconnect bandwidth. Memory everyone is using the same HBM series. No difgerentiation. Multi chasis Interconnect is already not bottlenecked vs compute. So GPUs aren,t any worse.

Ammuter Guesswork!
by TheJoeMan | 2025-12-17 17:33:25+00:00
Are there any suggestions for a minimal browser to use to interface with embedded / IoT? The firefox devs assume it is only used to access The Internet. For example, SSL scare-screens when connecting to a local 10.0.x.x address, or it trying to autofill a password for 192.168.1.1 which is nonsensical as the end devices are different in different (physical) locations. Don’t get me started on Apple devices auto-disconnecting from ad-hoc wifi networks without internet access.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-12-17 17:34:09+00:00
PipeWire with rtkit works incredibly stably with wildly short buffer lengths (low latency). Given the short buffer size, there's not much chance for big timing issues to arise (unless there's underruns with dead air, which doesn't seem to be the case).

This was a surprising assertion to hear. Maybe on some OS, doing reliable timing is a problem. But with modern audio pipelines, things feel like they are in an extremely good state.
by belorn | 2025-12-17 17:34:27+00:00
Initially, I would wait and see what Debian does. They might not package the browser with the same defaults as Mozilla.

I would also guess that there will be alternative packages for Firefox if there are enough people interested. Tor Browser is a example of Firefox being packaged using different defaults and plugins. In theory one could take Tor Browser, remove Tor, and have a hardenized version of Firefox with saner defaults.
by Nextgrid | 2025-12-17 17:35:07+00:00
This is an easy theory to prove; if AI was anywhere close to a senior engineer, we'd see the costs of software development drop by a corresponding amount or quality would be going up. Not to mention delivery would become faster. With LLMs being accessible to the general public I'd also expect to see this in the open-source world.

I see none of that happening - software quality is actually in freefall (but AI is not to blame here, this began even before the LLM era), delivery doesn't seem to be any faster (not a surprise - writing code has basically never been the bottleneck and the push to shove AI everywhere probably slows down delivery across the board) nor cheaper (all the money spent on misguided AI initiatives actually costs more).

It is a super easy bet to take with money - software development is still a big industry and if you legitimately believe AI will do 90% of a senior engineer you can start a consultancy, undercut everyone else and pocket the difference. I haven’t heard of any long-term success stories with this approach so far.
by arjie | 2025-12-17 17:35:08+00:00
It's a common cognitive error called Moral Thought-Action Fusion. The idea is that thinking about an action implies a desire to perform the action. You will see these in other circumstances as well. One place it is commonly used is in describing non-religious moral systems that must form their moral bases without axioms from God. A non-religious person may form a considered position against murder, for instance, but the fact that they state the pros and cons before choosing against is considered evidence that they wanted to.

The core reasoning system here is probably moral intuitionism: if you have an explanation for why something is bad, it is not something you consider intuitively bad and consequently you must be wanting to do it.

I think I've seen it in online communities a lot more in the last couple of decades, and I suspect it's just a characteristic of the endless march of Eternal September.
by fao_ | 2025-12-17 17:35:08+00:00
> If the purpose is to get some critical piece of information I need quickly, then no, I'd rather ask an AI questions about a long document than read the entire thing. Documentation, long email threads, etc. all lend themselves nicely to the size of a context window.

And what do you do if the LLM hallucinates? For me, skim-reading still comes out on top because my own mistakes are my own.
by fxn-m | 2025-12-17 17:35:22+00:00
We use apollo and gemini 2.5 flash lite with web search in a quick pass to ground and enrich data on the visitor. Right now, the queries are generic, as opposed to constructing more "tailored" queries based on what the host might be pitching to that visitor.

We're definitely going to be looking into finding more relevant signals on a case-by-case basis, and this kind of idea fits really neatly into that paradigm!
by adzm | 2025-12-17 17:35:30+00:00
It is surprising how long RC4 has lasted, honestly. Though it should have been dropped by everything long, long ago. That said, I remember when it came back for a short amount of time due to the BEAST attack which affected block ciphers in CBC mode. It's interesting that nowadays the most recommended mode of operation is galois/counter mode (GCM) which effectively turns 128-bit block ciphers into streams again.
by alyandon | 2025-12-17 17:36:35+00:00
I'm a bit of a curmudgeon about this.

Until service providers are no longer allowed to:

1) force the type of passkey stores used (e.g. hardware vs software) when I am providing the passkey store 2) force me to MFA (e.g. forcing touch ID, entering pin or unlock password, etc) when attempting to use a passkey

I'll continue to stick to plain old boring password + TOTP. I fully understand the security trade-offs like phishing resistance but password + TOTP is secure enough for me.
by jjmarr | 2025-12-17 17:36:45+00:00
Week 1: 64 interns

Week 2: 32 interns

Week 3: 16 interns

Week 4: 8 interns

Week 5: 4 interns

Week 6: 2 interns

Week 7: 1 intern

Week 8: 0.5 interns

Is it possible to make it to the end of the summer without getting sliced in half?
by CamperBob2 | 2025-12-17 17:36:46+00:00
I get access to inspiration from everybody's art, and so do you. Seems like a good deal to me.

Meanwhile, the next generation of great artists is already at work down the street from you. Some kids you've never heard of, playing around in a basement or garage you've probably driven past a hundred times. They're learning to make the most of the tools at hand, just like the old masters did. Except the tools at hand this time are little short of godlike.

It's an exciting time. If you wanted things to stay the same, you shouldn't have gone into technology or art.
by neom | 2025-12-17 17:36:58+00:00
Yeah me too. Wake up -> HN down -> That's weird, oh well it's usually only down for a few minutes -> I should check if HN is still down -> That's weird, oh well it's usually only down for a few minutes -> I should check if HN is still down -> loop.

That was a few hours ago. I'm glad this loop is broken.
by Aachen | 2025-12-17 17:37:01+00:00
You don't visit enough my friend :)

It's down about 8.4 minutes per week. On 26% of days it doesn't work at least once, and on 12% of days it has more than one consecutive failed check. The longest uptime streak was 24 days

I've been keeping track since exactly 2 years (to the day!) because I was surprised that it seemed briefly down for me on a daily basis. Was I getting unlucky and hitting it every time, or was it just down very often? Nobody posted anything so I started answering the question for myself :p

I've been meaning to post the tracker to HN but there's a pesky bug I want to fix: the "is it currently down" stat. I don't know how this is beyond me but something in the code bugs out. So this is my first time posting about it
by topnde | 2025-12-17 17:37:03+00:00
What they do is ask the visitor from which company they come from. Behind the scenes, this is what I imagine happens: - Kenobi scrapes that website and understands what it does - Has some prompts to transform the text in your website through the lens of your user: eg "Transform this text [your website text here] to appeal to a visitor from this company that does the following [scraped content here]"

Of course internally it might be much more complex than this but this is how I would do this if I had to build it.
by mjr00 | 2025-12-17 17:37:19+00:00
I went to university 2005-2008 and I was advised by many people at the time to not go into computer science. The reasoning was that outsourced software developers in low-cost regions like India and SEA would destroy salaries, and software developers should not expect to make more than $50k/year due to the competition.

Even more recently we had this with radiologists, a profession that was supposed to be crushed by deep learning and neural networks. A quick Google search says an average radiologist in the US currently makes between $340,000 to $500,000 per year.

This might be the professional/career version of "buy when there's blood in the streets."
by jeffwask | 2025-12-17 17:37:30+00:00
> To the extend that a newspaper site of today reminds you of illegal download or porn sites of the early 2000s.

This is so accurate as to how I feel hitting most major sites w/o an adblocker. Popups, automatic video blaring at max volume, annoying animations... it's 100% like hitting a Warez site.
by nkmnz | 2025-12-17 17:37:32+00:00
Tertiary education in Germany is pretty much a continuum. On one end, you have "Berufsakademien" that offer bachelor's degrees with integrated vocational training – you need to find the employer yourselves, they pay your fees and some salary that you can live off (more or less). On the other end, there's Ivory Tower Academia where no one cares about what happens outside of the classroom. And there is everything in between those two poles.
by treis | 2025-12-17 17:38:01+00:00
This is like people railing against images in their webpages or that run their browsers without JavaScript. Like that LLMs are a fundamental paradigm shift in how we interact with computers and the web. How it all plays out is up for debate but there's no doubt that 10 years from now LLMs will play a role in nearly every interaction we have with a computer. The only way that's not true is if something better comes along.

Pining for pre-AI world is like wanting families to gather around the radio. Those days are gone.
by orliesaurus | 2025-12-17 17:38:15+00:00
Interesting take... I'm seeing a pattern... People think AI can do it all... BUT I see juniors often are the ones who actually understand AI tools better than seniors... That's what AWS CEO points out... He said juniors are usually the most experienced with AI tools, so cutting them makes no sense... He also mentioned they are usually the least expensive, so there's little cost saving... AND he warned that without a talent pipeline you break the future of your org... As someone who mentors juniors, I've seen them use AI to accelerate their learning... They ask the right questions, iterate quickly, and share what they find with the rest of us... Seniors rely on old workflows and sometimes struggle to adopt new tools... HOWEVER the AI isn't writing your culture or understanding your product context... You still need people who grow into that... So I'm not worried about AI replacing juniors... I'm more worried about companies killing their own future talent pipeline... Let the genies help, but don't throw away your apprentices.
by armedpacifist | 2025-12-17 17:38:18+00:00
This was in 2020. Brendan Eich addressed this in a blogpost iirc, with a perfectly plausible explanation. It seemed like a bad/unfortunate design decision, which happens all the time in software development and not the conspiracy theory people claimed it to be. It was fixed in a matter of days.

If this is the main reason to not use Brave then I'm genuinly interested in hearing about the other reasons. I might learn something I wasn't aware of.

I don't understand all the hate Brave gets either. It passes pretty much all privacy tests ootb and I see 0 ads, on desktop and mobile. This is what actually matters to me.
Ask HN: Are those AI interviewing tools worth it?
by kevin061 | 2025-12-17 17:38:18+00:00
I have seen a thousand different tools: LockedOn AI, Final Round AI, Parakeet AI, but when I try to compare them, it seems there are little to no legitimate reviews on the services, and the most I can get is video demos from the makers themselves which will be hugely biased.

I am less interested in the cheating part of these systems and more in the mock interview systems that they offer so you can practice interviewing.

On the other hand, many of them cost hundreds of dollars for a 6-month or a yearly licence, and offer a very limited trial so it is nearly impossible to properly test them (I would need at least 3-4 interviews before I can decide on any of them).

And finally I could just use ChatGPT, but the voice mode is just not very good at "waiting", which will happen a lot when you are interviewing: moments of silence so you can gather your thoughts and articulate your answer effectively.

Has any of you used it? What do you think?