MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by racktash | 2025-12-16 15:29:40+00:00
(Highly subjective opinion incoming.)

I've been thinking a lot lately, challenging some of my long-held assumptions...

Big tech, the current AI trend, social media websites serving up rage bait and misinformation (not to imply this is all they do, or that they are ALL bad), the current political climate and culture...

In my view, all of these are symptoms, and the cause is the perverse, largely unchallenged neoliberal world in which the West has spent the last 30-40 years (at least) living in.

Profit maximising comes before everything else. (Large) Corporate interests are almost never challenged. The result? Deliberately amoral public policy that serves the rich and powerful.

There are oases in this desert (which is, indeed, not inevitable), thankfully. As the author mentioned, there's FOSS. There's indie-created games/movies. There's everyday goodness between decent people.
by tsunamifury | 2025-12-16 15:29:50+00:00
Uh it is specifically and exactly what it proved. It changed the entire planets awareness of needs and has since changed the direction of humanity.

Many don’t need to commute, purchase lunch food, shop downtown, buy commuter consumables etc. we do so because we have in the past. And I say this as a life long lover of the classic pre covid city life.

Now we discovered most people are content at home with some food, entertainment and a few hobbies. The rest of the consumption is a mix of boredom and ritual.

And more than half the population would be out of a job without that
by lxgr | 2025-12-16 15:29:57+00:00
Neither do all EU member states (in case you mean that by "European") issue ID cards, nor do the ones that do universally enable them for digital signatures.

Many EU countries have existing e-signature rails completely independent from physical ID cards, which only have to conform to ICAO document verification standards (and these are intentionally not usable in an e-signature context).
by contravariant | 2025-12-16 15:30:04+00:00
Ultimately I think the paradox comes from mixing two paradigms that aren't really designed to be mixed.

That said you can give a Bayesian argument for p-circling provided you have a prior on the power of the test. The details are almost impossible to work out except for a case by case calculation because unless I'm mistake the shape of the p-value distribution when the null-hypothesis does not hold is very ill defined.

However it's quite possible to give some examples where intuitively a p-value of just below 0.05 would be highly suspicious. You just need to mix tests with high power with unclear results. Say for example you're testing the existence of gravity with various objects and you get a probability of <0.04% that objects just stay in the air indefinitely.
by nickpp | 2025-12-16 15:30:36+00:00
I live in Eastern Europe and my "news sources" are friends in hospitals asking us to donate for desperate causes.

Governments-paid treatments are god-sent but many times the funds are limited so they only cover older, cheaper treatments. Approval and funds for newer ones come so late, sometimes too late.

Germany has one of the most developed economies on the planet so naturally has more spend on healthcare. But that can change and when the money is tight, tough choices have to be made. I'd make those choices for myself rather than trust the State to do it for me.
by netsharc | 2025-12-16 15:30:41+00:00
That's easy. All of your sentences in the original post sound insanely misinformed and wrong. I suppose now that I've made an assertion it's my duty to post links to articles disproving you? The rule is, you're the first to make the claims, you need to back them up.

But with the wonderful world of the Internet, we can find anything as "proof" that anything we claim is true. Want to see proof that the earth is a flat sphere? I can do that. Tons of videos and blogs from nutjobs out there. If you want to find proof about 10000 raped and killed children, I bet you can find blogs and tweets from Elon Musk's soup of shit.

Ironically I'll trust linked ChatGPT or Gemini responses more than tweets and blogs (but not from Grok, an AI that claims Elon Musk is more athletic than LeBron James). But I bet you already know that these AI systems are censored to not tell the world about those things you already know is happening, because these systems are controlled by the man!

Show me you're not an white-supremacist extremist nutjob...
by mnls | 2025-12-16 15:30:46+00:00
Firefox exists as long as uBlock exists. It’s a niche product and the only (thin) argument about using it is “don’t let Google become a monopoly" (the very same company that keeps Mozilla alive). Its terrible management decisions, its questionable telemetry and at the end of the day, its performance are the reasons why it will never catch up and it will never get new users.
by D-Machine | 2025-12-16 15:31:29+00:00
Well, a lot of task fMRI designs are pretty shameless and clearly haven't taken the temporal resolution issues seriously, at least when it comes to interpreting their findings in discussions (i.e. claiming that certain regions being involved must mean certain kind of cognition, e.g. "thoughts" must be involved too). And there have definitely been a few papers trying to show they can e.g. reconstruct the image ("thought") in a person's mind from the fMRI signal.

But I don't think we are really disagreeing on anything major here. I do think there is likely some useful potential locked away in carefully designed resting-state fMRI studies, probably especially for certain chronic and/or persistent systemic cognitive things like e.g. ADHD, autism, or, perhaps more fruitfully, it might just help with more basic understanding of things like sleep. But, I also won't be holding my breath for anything major coming out of fMRI anytime soon.
by PaulHoule | 2025-12-16 15:31:47+00:00
Chrome NERFed the filtering API which limits the effectiveness of ad blockers in Chrome. I think that's the one point of technical superiority that Firefox has.

I think Firefox is not alive based on being "a better product" in most respects, it's alive because it's the anti-Chrome, I mean, that's why I run it. In the early 2000s I despaired for the future because I was afraid it would be impossible to browse the web without Internet Explorer and thus, Windows -- Mozilla and Firefox kept hope alive.

Mozilla might not be happy with it but a large chunk of their user base are the kind of anti-big tech people who will explode on Mastodon if you confess that you make an AI generated image once in a while. It might not be rational, but the fury is deep. The thing though is that people's connection to Firefox is not rational it's about wanting to feel you have some choice, control and agency in technology. This article which is the top story on HN expresses this sentiment and it's success shows that a lot of HN users [1] feel this way

https://blog.mathieui.net/this-is-not-the-future.html

Firing your customers so that you can get some imaginary new customers is a story that rarely has a happy ending.

[1] who I think like those Mastodonsters are inclined to like technology but want to be in control, like political Linux enthusiasts.
by CrazyStat | 2025-12-16 15:32:05+00:00
Huh.

This is an interesting post but the author’s usage of Lindley’s paradox seems to be unrelated to the Lindley’s paradox I’m familiar with:

> If we raise the power even further, we get to “Lindley’s paradox”, the fact that p-values in this bin can be less likely then they are under the null.

Lindley’s paradox as I know it (and as described by Wikipedia [1]) is about the potential for arbitrarily large disagreements between frequentist and Bayesian analyses of the same data. In particular, you can have an arbitrarily small p-value (p < epsilon) from the frequentist analysis while at the same time having arbitrarily large posterior probabilities for the null hypothesis model (P(M_0|X) > 1-epsilon) from the Bayesian analysis of the same data, without any particularly funky priors or anything like that.

I don’t see any relationship to the phenomenon given the name of Lindley’s paradox in the blog post.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindley%27s_paradox
by ptx | 2025-12-16 15:32:27+00:00
It's disconcerting that he's on the fence about this. They obviously seriously considered the option and worked out an estimate of how much money it would bring in. Would they have done it for $175 million?

It also seems at odds with the user being in control of their own data, which he says "there is something to be said about". Mozilla wouldn't be able to impose that sort of restriction on the user if the user were really in control, so I suppose that's why he only voices weak and vague support of user control.
by electroly | 2025-12-16 15:32:32+00:00
I'm curious, have you had this support checked by a native speaker of Chinese/Japanese/Korean? Due to Han unification (Unicode's biggest mistake) many code points require different glyphs depending on the target language, but Unifont only has a single glyph per code point--it's impossible for the one glyph to be correct in all CJK languages. It seems more likely that this "kinda works" for CJK but renders incorrect glyphs some of the time.
by lukechilds | 2025-12-16 15:32:35+00:00
Hi Umbrel CTO and cofounder here, appreciate the thoughtful feedback.

> how do I keep using this thing in 5–10 years without your cloud, your app store, your updates?

The code is publicly available with a non-commercial restriction. If Umbrel the company disappears it's possible for a community maintained fork to live on. Someone else in this discussion mentioned that the NC clause hurts maintainability due to no future company being able to profit from taking over maintenance. They suggested we add a clause revoking the NC restriction if Umbrel goes out of business. It's a good suggestion and something we'll definitely consider, I think it should be possible.

Regarding apps specifically, we have the concept of "community app stores". Anyone can host their own app store which is just a public git repo that any other user can use by pasting it's url into their web ui once. Community app stores completely bypass our main app store, they don't rely on our infrastructure and will continue working if we disappear. There are already hundreds of community app stores in use:

- https://github.com/getumbrel/umbrel-community-app-store/fork... - https://github.com/search?q=in%3Areadme+sort%3Aupdated+-user...

> automatic off-site backup that isn’t tied to one vendor, painless replacement/restore if the hardware dies

We recently shipped backups baked directly into umbrelOS. You can backup to a local NAS, USB device, or another Umbrel (local or remote). You can restore individual files from hourly/weekly/monthly snapshots, or restore the entire state of your Umbrel onto a fresh device from your backups.

https://x.com/umbrel/status/1970508327479320862

> portable across generic hardware

We currently support running on Raspberry Pi, all amd64 devices, virtual machines and there is unofficial support for running in Docker.

> The interesting opportunity here isn’t selling a fancy N100 box, it’s turning “self-hosted everything” into something your non-technical friend could actually live with.

I completely agree, that's the plan.
by DiogenesKynikos | 2025-12-16 15:32:40+00:00
Here's what is says about Times New Roman:

> Objectively, there’s nothing wrong with Times New Roman. It was designed for a newspaper, so it’s a bit narrower than most text fonts—especially the bold style. (Newspapers prefer narrow fonts because they fit more text per line.) The italic is mediocre. But those aren’t fatal flaws. Times New Roman is a workhorse font that’s been successful for a reason.

It says that there are problems. They're just not fatal.

> It even implores the reader with a bold "please stop". It makes no arguments to support this stance and offers no alternatives.

It says that there are plenty of alternatives (it specifically mentions Helvetica) that are better than Times New Roman. The argument is that Times New Roman is okay, but that it has flaws, and that there are easily available fonts that are superior. If someone is devoted enough to fonts to write a blog about them, then the existence of superior alternatives is enough of a reason to not use a font.
by yboris | 2025-12-16 15:32:41+00:00
In related news: ironically, Psychedelics disrupt normal link between brain’s neuronal activity and blood flow - thus casting some doubt on findings that under psychedelics more of the brain is connected (since fMRI showed elevated blood flow, suggesting higher brain activity).

https://source.washu.edu/2025/12/psychedelics-disrupt-normal...
by trinsic2 | 2025-12-16 15:32:48+00:00
One person has more impact than you think. Many times it's one person that is speaking what's on the mind of many and that speaking out can bring the courage to do what needs to be done for many people that sitting on the fence. The Andor TV series really taught me that. I'm working on a presentation of surveillance capitalism that I plan to show to my community. It's going to be an interesting future. Some will side with the Empire and others with side with the Rebellion.
by otterley | 2025-12-16 15:32:55+00:00
> The right is that of copyright, one that is granted by the public to incentivize the creative arts. Disney and other rights holders need to hold up their end of the bargain

Are you contending that Disney isn’t producing new content because they are permitted to control dissemination of their works? That doesn’t square with either reality or incentive.

Besides, there's nothing in the Constitution that says that on top of advancing the "Progress of...useful Arts" that unlimited dissemination is required to promote that goal. On the contrary, the Constitution allows Congress to provide authors the "exclusive Right to their respective Writings" -- which directly contradicts your argument.
by arielcostas | 2025-12-16 15:32:57+00:00
But enterprises may negotiate not to use (and pay) Copilot, can't they? Or go with another provider if it's such a big deal. Plus it being enabled by default in every VS Code (I haven't checked this, last I remember you need to sign in with GitHub) gets you on the free tier where you make zero revenue for Microsoft and some expense (not too much, probably).
by tshanmu | 2025-12-16 15:33:02+00:00
As large language models (LLMs) transition from research prototypes to production systems, practitioners often need reliable methods to verify that model outputs satisfy required constraints. While sampling-based estimates provide an intuition of model behavior, they offer no sound guarantees. We present BEAVER, the first practical framework for computing deterministic, sound probability bounds on LLM constraint satisfaction. Given any prefix-closed semantic constraint, BEAVER systematically explores the generation space using novel token trie and frontier data structures, maintaining provably sound bounds at every iteration. We formalize the verification problem, prove soundness of our approach, and evaluate BEAVER on correctness verification, privacy verification and secure code generation tasks across multiple state of the art LLMs. BEAVER achieves 6 to 8 times tighter probability bounds and identifies 3 to 4 times more high risk instances compared to baseline methods under identical computational budgets, enabling precise characterization and risk assessment that loose bounds or empirical evaluation cannot provide.
by rjbwork | 2025-12-16 15:33:17+00:00
I'm paying for my search engine now. I'd pay for Firefox if Mozilla wasn't a fucking clown car of an organization at the business level. I have a deep respect for the engineering team there, but the bean counters running the place should long ago have been ousted. It's the same cabal paying themselves exorbitant salaries and driving completely inane initiatives that nobody wants (see pocket, now AI). I'm not giving them a dime until they get their corporate shit together and I'll be disabling whatever crap they're shoving into Firefox.
by SubiculumCode | 2025-12-16 15:33:41+00:00
This isn't really true. The issue is that when you combine data across multiple MRI scanners (sites), you need to account for random effects (e.g. site specific means and variances)...see solutions like COMBAT. Also if they have different equipment versions/manufacturers those scanners can have different SNR profiles. The other issue is that there are many processing with many ways to perform those steps. In general, researchers don't process in multiple ways and choose the way that gives them the result they want or anything nefarious like that, but it does make comparisons difficult since the effects of different preprocessing variations can be significant. To defend against this, many peer reviewers, like myself, request researchers perform the preprocessing multiple ways to assess how robust the results are to those choices. Another way the field has combatted this issue has been software like fMRIprep.
by titzer | 2025-12-16 15:33:41+00:00
> Did you just complain...only to post an AI generated song about it?

Yeah, I absolutely did. Only I wrote the lyrics and AI augmented my skills by giving it a voice. I actually put significant effort into that one; I spent a couple hours tweaking it and increasing its cohesion and punchiness, iterating with ideas and feedback from various tools.

I used the computer like a bicycle for my mind, the way it was intended.
by freedomben | 2025-12-16 15:33:50+00:00
First want to address the general hate/distrust Mozilla is getting. Based on their behavior the last many years, this is fair.

However, we've got a new CEO, and one from the Firefox side who openly talks about Firefox being the core focus for Mozilla. This is exactly what we've been asking for! I think we should give them a chance.

On the AI thing - I don't personally want AI in my browser. However, I do see some inevitability there, and I appreciate the stated approach:

> there’s still an AI Mode coming to Firefox next year, which Enzor-DeMeo says will offer users their choice of model and product, all in a browser they can understand and from a company they can trust.

If I can easily turn it off or point it at my own provider, this seems fine to me (maybe even good). I'm quite hesitant to let AI take any actions, but if there is sufficient user control/configurability then it could end up being a useful feature. If it's programmable through an API (such as with extensions) I could see some real personal use for that!

Let's not forget that Mozilla is one of the most important players in the open web. They made some big mistakes, but if they course correct and become what we need them to be, they could be one of the most important heroes of the time.
by mason_mpls | 2025-12-16 15:33:50+00:00
Perhaps we need more collective action & coordination?

I don’t see how we could politically undermine these systems, but we could all do more to contribute to open source workarounds.

We could contribute more to smart tv/e-reader/phone & tablet jailbreak ecosystems. We could contribute more to the fediverse projects. We could all contribute more to make Linux more user friendly.
by madmountaingoat | 2025-12-16 15:33:56+00:00
I don't think you're wrong so much as you've tread into some semantic muddy water. What did the OP mean by 'inevitable', 'political' or 'everything'?. A lot hangs on the meaning. I lot of words could be written defending one interpretation over another and the chance of changing anyone's mind on the topic seems slim.
by Majromax | 2025-12-16 15:35:29+00:00
> In addition to Mastermind, Wordle also falls into the same category.

> Optimal play to reduce the search space in both follow the same general pattern - the next check should satisfy all previous feedback, and included entries should be the most probable ones, both of those previously tested, and those not.

The "next check should satisfy all previous feedback" part is not exactly true. That's hard-mode wordle, but hard mode is provably slower to solve than non-hard-mode (https://www.poirrier.ca/notes/wordle-optimal/) where the next guess can be inconsistent with previous feedback.
by worksonmine | 2025-12-16 15:35:33+00:00
I suggest the opposite and not starting with all the plugins and instead try to learn the vim way of doing things. Being too locked in to the old ways could prevent discovering all the great things vim can do.

The examples you mention already exist.

- navigation: plenty of native navigation in neovim, does lazy add anything specific?

- language integration: lsp, requires config sure but git clone isn't much work.

- integrated terminal: just run `:term`

Learning to think in vim means unlearning a lot of old habits. Today I only use fzf.vim, nvim-lspconfig and a theme, not even a plugin manager (I will migrate to the native one that's in nightly when it reaches stable though). Pretty much vanilla Neovim. I'm considering trying nvim-dap to get better debugger support but so far I'm fine with :termdebug for the languages it supports (c/go/rust just works).

When I find something I want vim to do I start with a keybinding, then a function, and maybe if it's complex add a plugin. Adding half of the available plugins just because creates an unnecessary attack vector you now have to keep an eye on.
by orthecreedence | 2025-12-16 15:35:40+00:00
Another post arguing against the profit mechanism and modern commercial capitalism without realizing it. It's arguing against the symptoms. The problem is a system that incentivizes creating markets where a market was not needed and convincing people it will make their lives better. Yes, the problem is cultural, but it's also deeply ingrained in our economic protocol now. You can't scream into the void about specific problems and expect change unless you look at the root causes.
by lxgr | 2025-12-16 15:35:41+00:00
German ID cards also support eID functionality on their citizen ID cards and even permanent resident ID cards, but ironically EU citizens are qualified for the issuance of neither, so they had to introduce another type of card for them to not run afoul of EU anti-discrimination laws.

All of this is currently pretty messy and there's only limited practical cross-country acceptance of eIDAS signatures, but is supposed to get unified under the banner of EUDI (EU Digital Identity) "wallets".
by tav1 | 2025-12-16 15:35:44+00:00
Live Demo: joinmesh.xyz

Hi HN,

I built Mesh because I wanted a self-hosted alternative to Slack that didn't require a complex backend or central database. It runs entirely on the Nostr protocol using the NIP-29 specification (relay-based groups).

The architecture is:

Backend: A custom NIP-29 compliant relay written in Rust.

Frontend: Next.js client that connects via WebSockets.

Auth: No email/password; uses end-to-end cryptographic keys (Nostr identity).

The goal was to prove that you can have "Slack-like" real-time features (channels, admin roles, kick/ban) without giving up data sovereignty. Since it's Nostr, you can swap the relay out anytime and migrate your data easily.

It’s still early days (v1), so I’d love feedback on the Rust relay implementation or the group handling logic.

Happy to answer any questions!
by logicallee | 2025-12-16 15:35:55+00:00
out of curiosity, would you donate some of your GPU time as part of a distributed cloud of computers running AI to develop a browser?

My project ToyBrowser[1] got to the stage that it is able to render some very simple web pages and post on the Internet.

The size of the Internet standards for technologies is immense, but a million people contributing a few hours of GPU time might be enough to code it up if it is distributed in small and clear parts.

The result could be entirely in the public domain and people could have it do whatever they want. We are already collecting feature ideas here [2]

would you contribute a few hours of your gpu to make it a reality?

[1] https://medium.com/@rviragh/our-new-ai-generated-browser-bar...

[2] https://pollunit.com/en/polls/ahysed74t8gaktvqno100g