MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bko | 2025-12-16 16:47:50+00:00
Okay, you have no bargaining decision when you have N providers, so we should get rid of all providers with a single provider because only then you'll be in better bargaining position.

And now your death will have a meaningful change to the career bureaucrat or politician that made the decision that led to your death.

Because power of an individual vote is much more powerful than the power to take your business elsewhere. That's if you can find out the responsible party that makes these decisions and they're not appointed but elected, otherwise you'd have to mount an influence campaign on the politicians with 90% re-election rate to change said bureaucratic leader.

Makes a lot of sense.
by wasabi991011 | 2025-12-16 16:47:58+00:00
The opposite is also true, the tech world views itself as more sacred that any other part of humanity.

You say it's obvious that the existence of AI is valuable to offset a few artists' jobs, but it is far from obvious. The benefits of AI are still unproven (a more hallucinatory google? a tool to help programmers make architectural errors faster? a way to make ads easier to create and sloppier?). The discussion as to whether AI is valuable is common on hackernews even, so I really don't buy the "it's obvious" claim. Furthermore, the idea that it is only offsetting a few artists' jobs is also unproven: the future is uncertain, it may devastate entire industries.
by bombcar | 2025-12-16 16:48:03+00:00
To be precise "have no health insurance" and "have access to healthcare" are not two sides of the same coin.

Everyone in the USA has access to emergency care and stabilization, the practical results of which are that for emergencies, you get helped, payment is worked out later.

If you have no problem with having no intention of paying, the system absorbs the cost.
by infogulch | 2025-12-16 16:48:51+00:00
Maybe don't drop the warranty disclaimer just yet.

> The MMWA requires conspicuous disclosure of warranty terms (e.g., designations like "Full" or "Limited" as prominent titles).

> The common practice of ALL-CAPS WARRANTY DISCLAIMERS (e.g., "AS IS, NO WARRANTY") stems primarily from state adoptions of UCC § 2-316, which requires disclaimers of implied warranties to be "conspicuous" (and suggests all-caps as one way, especially in plain text).

- Grok https://grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5_5c7db73a-ffd2-48b2-bb36-296f...

That said, maybe it wouldn't be too hard to argue there is obviously no implied warranty with a crass license like WTFPL.
by directevolve | 2025-12-16 16:48:55+00:00
The important point here is that you can become much more effective by cutting wasted activity.

Wasted motion and power saps your time, energy, and motivation. It obscures your vision. It creates unnecessary risk. It decreases your awareness and adaptability.

Examples from my own life: - Teach kids to self-assess using an explicit rubric, instead of delivering feedback yourself every step of the way.

- Move slower and use the minimum power possible when doing chores.

- Jog more slowly and stay in zone 2, where you feel like you can go forever.

- Determine the smallest software performance test scale that makes the issue you’re trying to resolve reliably apparent.

- Resolve as much uncertainty as you can about new software features through separately scripted spikes before attempting to orchestrate them in the full codebase.

- Invest passively in index funds.

- Strip down presentations and pause a few seconds after most sentences. That lets the message sink in, gives you space to decide if you need to say more, and gives the audience a chance to respond if you’re not addressing their confusion effectively.
by vdupras | 2025-12-16 16:48:55+00:00
Propaganda is supposed to be for the proles. Whatever those bureaucrats say is not the candid truth, that should be obvious to anybody. Once the elite begins absorbing it at its first level of speech, it's a sure sign that the nation is in decline.

We don't refer to the same problem. This problem you're referring to is not about finding those people who have the ability, so rare among non-american people, to consume stuff. It's about ramping up production while at the same time paying tribute to the US. This is, indeed, a difficult problem to solve and no doubts requires the best minds of the economic academia world.

However, the nature of the problem changes once the US stops being the world police. The problem becomes figuring out what's the pecking order now.
by netdevphoenix | 2025-12-16 16:49:18+00:00
I love Mozilla but this feels like marketing imo.

From the article: "AI should always be a choice — something people can easily turn off" and "Firefox will remain our anchor. It will evolve into a modern AI browser". I highly doubt you will be able to turn of the transformer tech features in an AI browser imo. And they won't make a separate browser for this.

This really feels like the beginning of the end for Mozilla, sadly.

Are there any true alternatives (not dependent on financing or any engines from third parties) to Google, if you wish to use the web in 2025?
by Buttons840 | 2025-12-16 16:49:19+00:00
There is a lack of competition.

Watch and you'll see all sorts of things happening that shouldn't be possible in an economy with healthy amounts of competition.

An example that has been on my mind recently is dynamic pricing [0], where everyone is charged a different amount based upon what an algorithm thinks the company can get away with. When healthy competition exists, you can't just arbitrarily charge people more, because they'll just go buy from a competitor.

What does it mean when the things that happen in a healthy free market aren't happening?

I grew up listening to right-wing news radio, and one of the first things I learned in the realm of politics is that "our economy is great; offer quality goods and services at a competitive price and you will make a modest profit and grow and succeed". My political journey in the following decades is a tale of me seeing more and more that idea is false. The companies that truly shape our world first curry favor from those who already have wealth and power, and then focus on crushing competition and establishing a monopoly rather than making a profit; that's why these huge world-changing companies go a decade or more without ever making a profit--the news radio people never gave me an explanation for that.

[0]: https://youtu.be/16i7bPQtoCY?t=720
by MisterTea | 2025-12-16 16:49:20+00:00
> Hex will let you know when he is bored by interrupting your work with a note in your terminal

Cats routinely initiate attention grabbing denial of service attacks by blocking access to hardware so this needs proper emulation to increase the realism. I have a few recommendations:

Mouse trapping - when cat pops up the mouse cursor should be limited in motion as if you turned the sensitivity down to near 0. This emulates a cat who lies directly on top of your mousing hand while using said mouse.

Keyboard injection - after cat pops up all further typing results in cat-on-a-keyboard output. This emulates a cat sitting or walking across your keyboard.

Screen jacking - The screen has a cat shaped blank spot that obscures most of your working environment. This can also be paired with cat-on-a-keyboard typing. Emulates cat sitting in front of monitor, likely on top of keyboard.

Once hardware denial fails they move on to destroying your personal items:

destruction of personal items - USB solenoids strategically placed behind any object that you either a. cherish or b. do not want spilled. "That nice book you were just admiring - now it has coffee all over it because I am need something."

I could go on but these are a good starting point.
by OkayPhysicist | 2025-12-16 16:49:24+00:00
I think you're lacking historical context: Unions were the ones doing the fighting and killing. That's why we have workers rights to be eroded: people fought, killed, and died for them.

The government enshrining protections for collective bargaining was a compromise to end such violence. Today, if a workplace is violently suppressing your right to collectively negotiate your working conditions, you can sue them, as opposed to having to kick off the largest insurrection in the United States since the civil war. This is good for everybody.

Specifically, the events I was referring to were

"Throwing dynamite at the cops" - The Haymarket Massacre, where when the cops were called to break up a rally for the 8 hour workday, workers threw dynamite at them. The resulting fight and subsequent executions left 8 dead workers, and 7 dead pigs from the Chicago Police Department.

"Blowing up bridges" - International Association of Bridge and Structural Iron Workers's bombing campaign of non-union projects, which ultimately escalated to the an anti-union rag The Los Angeles Times getting bombed (21 dead propagandeers).

"Kneecapping scabs" - Not a specific event, just a thing that happened, or was threatened with happening, across the country

"Dragging the foreman out of their house and shooting them" - The Coal Wars, fought in West Virginia ultimately escalating to the famous Battle of Blair Mountain (~150 deaths between the miners, the the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency, and a couple US army grunts)
by QuercusMax | 2025-12-16 16:49:31+00:00
I've wanted to be able to play boogie-woogie piano for a long time, and as a pianist who took a decade of lessons and has played for another 30 years after that, I feel like I should know how to play just about anything, right?

Of course that's ridiculous. Boogie-woogie piano has very strong rhythm in the left hand which needs to be drilled until you can play it without any thought - and then for the right hand, you need to learn how to play all the little bluesy riffs, runs, etc. None of this is especially difficult in isolation (one hand at a time), but doing two complicated new things at once is just too much.

So I've just been practicing the pieces individually until I can do them automatically - my brain becomes more like a conductor telling my hands to play specific macros.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-12-16 16:49:33+00:00
> this paradigm completely fails for almost anyone with an income that isn't above the 50th percentile

I'm in Wyoming, and our threshold is under 200% the poverty line. That's $53,300 for a family of 3 [1]. Median household income–nationally–is $84k [2]. In Wyoming, it's $75k [3].

That's a gap. But it's a workable one.

[1] https://health.wyo.gov/healthcarefin/chip/doesmychildqualify...

[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N

[3] https://usafacts.org/answers/what-is-the-income-of-a-us-hous...
by zzbn00 | 2025-12-16 16:49:38+00:00
This is exactly the thing. In UK electricity price is set by the cost of generating it from natural gas. After losses, etc, you get about 1/3 of power in electricity compared to heat in the gas. And the heat pump has an efficiency factor of about 3. So you get back to unity.

While electricity is priced off gas, current heat pumps do not have a strong economic case.
by colesantiago | 2025-12-16 16:49:42+00:00
"The World’s Most Trusted Software Company"

I'm sure the new leader of the trojan horse (fox?) is not going to pivot to AI...

"...Third: Firefox will grow from a browser into a broader ecosystem of trusted software. Firefox will remain our anchor. It will evolve into a modern AI browser and support a portfolio of new and trusted software additions..."

"It will evolve into a modern AI browser"

and there it is, the most "trusted" software company pivoting to AI.
by ryandrake | 2025-12-16 16:50:30+00:00
The promise of being able to run a business without having to employ people is just too alluring to these guys. They feel like they're nearly on the cusp of it: Like any day now, the technology will be there, and it can just be AI + robots, and the C-suite and shareholders can just pocket all the returns. No more pesky bags of meat to feed and clothe. You can feel it--they are absolutely salivating over the idea. "If we can just get rid of the need for human labor, Line Will Go Up forever!"
by chasd00 | 2025-12-16 16:50:42+00:00
Don't forget, the bubble talk is more around "AGI is right around the corner, don't get left out!" and not so much the application of an LLM to business process flows. There's definitely value in some use cases to using an LLM but I don't see the massive bets on AGI paying off in timelines Wall St. is comfortable with. Further, my feeling is the AGI promise and investment is what is keeping some of the model providers in business. From what I understand, inference cost per user doesn't scale the way a webserver does. With an LLM, more users means significantly more infrastructure cost and Google, Meta, MSoft can afford to run/train models at a loss because they get revenue elsewhere but not everyone is in that boat.
by bostonwalker | 2025-12-16 16:50:46+00:00
RE your link, I am not sure that anything of value has been articulated in describing this vague notion of "Collective Flourishing". After reading the page two or three times, the best I can understand is that it seems to be a call for technical solutions to problems that are actually deeply social in nature and require social solutions. Strange to see such nebulous slop coming from an official government agency.
by glenstein | 2025-12-16 16:50:59+00:00
Right. The myth that keeps getting confidently repeated in HN comment sections is that Mozilla supposedly lost market share due to a series of strategic missteps. But it basically was about the pivot to mobile, and the monopoly lock-in of Google. Actually think one fantastic remedy for Google's search monopoly might be allowing the use of alternative browsers on Android via a pop-up rather than preloading and privileging Chrome. Because browsers and mobile are part of the strategy of creating a path dependency tied to Google search.

But to your point, I think the simple reality is that LLMs are increasingly taking the place of search and so having all your funding based on search licensing might be risky when it's at least possible that we're going to be in a new paradigm sooner than later.

I honestly think AI in the browser right now is generally very half-baked and doesn't have any well thought out applications, and raises all kinds of trust issues. I can think of good applications (eg browse the Kindle unlimited store for critically acclaimed hard sci-fi books), but there might be better ones that I'm not thinking of. It just might make sense to be involved so you went caught flat-footed by some new application that quickly progresses into something people expect. And of course because HN commenters are famously self-contradictory in response to literally everything Mozilla does, it's a damned if they do damned if they don't situation: if they load AI into the browser it's pointless feature bloat. If they don't then they were sitting on their thumbs while the world moved on when they should have been reinventing themselves and finding new paths to revenue.
by alwa | 2025-12-16 16:51:17+00:00
The behavior that this article outlines is outrageous. But it makes me uncomfortable for this to be the kind of place where anonymous strangers self-investigate lurid allegations against random accused, no matter how disturbing the allegations.

Most of us don’t have the tools or the time to do it properly, at least on here; and that can end badly [0]. It rarely achieves a thoughtful considered outcome, and there are other places to do that kind of thing if you want to—some of those communities, like Bellingcat, seem pretty well-practiced in their methodologies, and their findings seem to have accordingly high impact.

[0] e.g. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-22214511 … and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_of_Sunil_Tripathi
by saschabuehrle | 2025-12-16 16:51:18+00:00
Yes, we default conservatively, when in doubt, escalate. A few specifics: Uncertain validation: We combine multiple signals (confidence scores, semantic similarity, format checks...). If any signal is borderline, we escalate. Better to overpay occasionally than return a bad response.

Wrong domain detection: The domain classifier isn't a gate, it selects which validator to apply. If the validator then fails, it escalates regardless. So a misclassified query still gets caught at the validation layer.

False-negative rates (good responses wrongly escalated): ~7-10% at the beginning, depending on domain. We're okay with this, it means slightly higher cost but never compromised quality. The self-learning engine tightens this over time as it sees your actual traffic patterns.
by nickcw | 2025-12-16 16:51:38+00:00
The fact that sftp is not the fastest protocol is well known by rclone users.

The main problem is that it packetizes the data and waits for responses, effectively re-implementing the TCP window inside a TCP stream. You can only have so many packets outstanding in the standard SFTP implementation (64 is the default) and the buffers are quite small (32k by default) which gives a total outstanding data of 2MB. The highest transfer rate you can make depends on the latency of the link. If you have 100 ms of latency then you can send at most 20 MB/s which is about 200 Mbit/s - nowhere near filling a fast wide pipe.

You can tweak the buffer size (up to 256k I think) and the number of outstanding requests, but you hit limits in the popular servers quite quickly.

To mitigate this rclone lets you do multipart concurrent uploads and downloads to sftp which means you can have multiple streams operating at 200 Mbit/s which helps.

The fastest protocols are the TLS/HTTP based ones which stream data. They open up the TCP window properly and the kernel and networking stack is well optimized for this use. Webdav is a good example.
by pama | 2025-12-16 16:51:39+00:00
You asked for specific feedback, but here is generic feedback: a new github account coupled to a new HN account does not inspire any sense of added infra safety. I would rather use modern pytorch/safetensors and tools that dont allow executing pickles from checkpoints. If you execute someone elses pickle you probably already lost no matter what checks you want to add over time.
by vkou | 2025-12-16 16:51:49+00:00
In the US, twenty day wait list for a broken toe, seven month wait list for a neurologist, five month wait list for a deviated septum surgery, and good luck finding a PCP taking new patients.

This quality of service costs me and my wife ~$23,000/year.

Sure, we can walk into urgent care and get seen. I've also never had a problem walking into a walk-in clinic in Canada, either. The clinic's lobby and the doctor's car in the parking lot isn't as nice over there, though.
by MadnessASAP | 2025-12-16 16:52:21+00:00
Well you start as the governor of the Bank of Canada for 5 years, then the governor of the Bank of England for another 7. After that you spend about 5 years in private finance. In parallel you spend that time acting as an economic advisor to multiple governments. Then the day comes where a major party needs a new leader, all the existing senior leadership either doesnt want it or is some manner of "problematic" and anyways, its not like they're going to win. Then whaddaya know, turns out Canadians like the idea of someone whose spent their whole life in macroeconomics at a time when global economics are all kinds of fucked up.

So it wasn't overnight, but it was a case of just the right person at just the right time.
by kafkaesque | 2025-12-16 16:52:22+00:00
I'm not sure why you are drawing a parallel to a good doctor that smokes.

I never said "Doctor Mike" is a bad doctor. I have no idea if he is a good or bad doctor.

Further, an ad hominem is when a person attacks someone's character without any base.

I wrote specifically about him not being at the forefront and questioning his values, as displayed by his actions during the pandemic. His actions were literally not in line with Covid guidelines. Those are guidelines that were formulated by hundreds (thousands?) of doctors, all of whom sought to be at the forefront of medical science during a pandemic.

As another user said, MRI scans not corresponding to brain activity is not really news, and in at least the part of the US I live in, MRI scans are not so easily recommended, especially since they're not covered by health insurance.

Dr. Amen should be called out, of course, but it doesn't mean a doctor is at the forefront for doing so.
by EvanAnderson | 2025-12-16 16:52:38+00:00
Almost no new technology is respectful enough to its users for me to consider making accomodations for it in my life.

It's not just that it's not fun. Any fun I derive is canceled-out by the inevitable loss.

I've felt white-hot blazing anger so many times when a feature is taken away by an "update" that I am not permitted to revert. I don't want to feel that feeling anymore.
by dbdr | 2025-12-16 16:52:50+00:00
For one, being childless is a choice (mostly, especially since adoption is a possibility). It's indeed OK to have different opinions for what how laws apply differently to people based on their choices. Being gay is not a choice, it is rather similar to race/ethnic background, and it's generally not OK to have laws that treat people differently based on something like that. I'm sure there are more nuances to add, but it seems to me that makes it quite a different situation.
by ReliantGuyZ | 2025-12-16 16:53:25+00:00
It's shocking and offensive to artists and to like-minded others because AI labs have based the product that is replacing them off of their existing labor with no compensation. It would be one thing to build a computerized artist that out-competes human artists on merit (arguably happening now), this has happened to dozens of professions over hundreds of years. But the fact that it was built directly off of their past labors with no offer, plan, or even consideration of making them whole for their labor in the corpus is unjust on its face.

Certainly there are artists with inflated egos and senses of self-importance (many computer programmers with this condition too), but does this give us moral high ground to freely use their work?

How many people is it OK to exploit to create "AI"?
by Mithriil | 2025-12-16 16:53:40+00:00
I think what people tend to forget when speaking of inevitability is that the scope of their statement is important.

*Existence* of a situation as inevitable isn't so bold of a claim. For example, someone will use an AI technology to cheat on an exam. Fine, it's possible. Heck, it is mathematically certain if we have a civilization that has exams and AI techs, and if that civilization runs infinitely.

*Generality* of a situation as inevitable, however, tends to go the other way.
by mindslight | 2025-12-16 16:54:09+00:00
Your usage of the word "naive" to describe how you thought of the establishment is weird to me. I was surely naive. And I still don't even really see that as a bad thing (is it not the job of youth to imagine a better world and push us forward?). But I saw the establishment as more suffocating, tired, preaching to the lowest common denominator, puppets of entrenched interests, etc.
by rchaud | 2025-12-16 16:54:11+00:00
India is divided by its caste system and religion to a much greater extent than it is by language. Successive governments have put far more effort into dominating its Muslim and Sikh minorities than implementing a high - quality universal education system that harmonizes a base level of skill across the population. The most educated state in the country is the Communist-run Kerala where the people speak Malayalam.

India is similar to the USSR in that it buckets disparate languages, religions and cultures into a single nation with inevitable separatist tendencies.