MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kot_manul | 2025-12-17 02:29:12+00:00
I experienced the same thing with both German and Dutch while trying to learn them via Duolingo over a period of 6 months or so. After all the drilling and gamified lessons I never even started to feel like I was actually _learning_ these languages. With German I figured was just me being stupid or not grokking it properly; it's different enough from English to "feel" very foreign. But Dutch isn't that different.

I remember only two sentences from the Dutch Duolingo, maybe because they were constantly repeated:

"Ik ben een appel." (I am an apple.)

and: "Nee, je bent geen appel!" (No, you are not an apple!)

For comparison, I did self-study with Japanese in my teens and learned enough to ace the first 1.5 years of college Japanese instruction without much effort. And I remember taking Spanish classes in high school and to this day can at least fumble my way through a basic conversation.

In contrast the only use I would have for what I learned of Dutch via Duolingo would be if I came across someone having a psychotic break. You're _not_ an apple, dude.

Granted, I spent more time with both Spanish and Japanese than with any language I tried with Duolingo, but my point is simply that Duolingo just doesn't make languages "click", at least not for me and apparently not for a bunch of others either.
Show HN: Deadlight · Zero-JS blogging for hostile networks (Workers and SQLite)
by gnarzilla_ | 2025-12-17 02:29:26+00:00
OP here. I built Deadlight because I wanted a blogging platform that actually works on high-latency connections (Satellite, 2G, Mesh).

Most modern platforms require megabytes of JS hydration just to show text. Deadlight sends raw semantic HTML from Cloudflare's edge using D1 (SQLite). It’s readable in `lynx` or on a 300-baud terminal.

*The Stack:* - Cloudflare Workers (Compute) - D1 (Storage) - Zero client-side JS (for readers)

*The Lock-in Question:* Building on proprietary edge infra is a risk. I included an "Eject" script that dumps the remote D1 DB to a local SQLite file and generates a docker-compose file, so you can self-host/migrate off Cloudflare instantly if needed.

I just released a CLI launcher (`npx create-deadlight-blog`) if you want to spin up an instance to test the latency.

Happy to answer questions about the architecture or the LoRa integration I'm working on.
by gnarzilla_ | 2025-12-17 02:29:46+00:00
OP here. I built Deadlight because I wanted a blogging platform that actually works on high-latency connections (Satellite, 2G, Mesh).

Most modern platforms require megabytes of JS hydration just to show text. Deadlight sends raw semantic HTML from Cloudflare's edge using D1 (SQLite). It’s readable in `lynx` or on a 300-baud terminal.

*The Stack:* - Cloudflare Workers (Compute) - D1 (Storage) - Zero client-side JS (for readers)

*The Lock-in Question:* Building on proprietary edge infra is a risk. I included an "Eject" script that dumps the remote D1 DB to a local SQLite file and generates a docker-compose file, so you can self-host/migrate off Cloudflare instantly if needed.

I just released a CLI launcher (`npx create-deadlight-blog`) if you want to spin up an instance to test the latency.

Happy to answer questions about the architecture or the LoRa integration I'm working on.
by Kuraj | 2025-12-17 02:30:03+00:00
KDE is SO GOOD.

I've distro hopped and DE hopped a lot before settling, but it's been amazing for me as somoeone who has switched over from Windows. It just doesn't get in the way, is super familiar for me, AND lets me do a lot of things I wish I had in Windows.

I was worried about the "choice fatigue" due to it being super configurable and all, but honestly the defaults are so sensible I haven't really had a reason to tinker with it much if at all.
by amw-zero | 2025-12-17 02:30:15+00:00
Compare the spec with the application here: https://concerningquality.com/model-based-testing/

I think we've become used to the complexity in typical web applications, but there's a difference between familiar and simple (simple vs. easy, as it were). The behavior of most business software can be very simply expressed using simple data structures (sets, lists, maps) and simple logic.

No matter how much we simply it, via frameworks and libraries or whatever have you, things like serialization, persistence, asynchrony, concurrency, and performance end up complicating the implementation. Comparing this against a simpler spec is quite nice in practice - and a huge benefit is now you can consult a simple in-memory spec vs. worrying about distributed system deployments.
by user3939382 | 2025-12-17 02:30:53+00:00
Firefox should look like Librewolf first of all, Librewolf shouldn’t have to exist. Mozilla’s privacy stuff is marketing bullshit just like Apple. It shouldn’t be doing ANYTHING that isn’t local only unless it’s explicitly opt in or user UI action oriented. The LLM part is absurd bc the entire overton window is in the wrong place.
by unsungNovelty | 2025-12-17 02:31:17+00:00
Copying portion of the comment I said under another comment:

I and many stuck with Firefox despite being it being horrible until quantum release because Mozilla was aligned with community. But their tech is better now but they aren't aligned with community.

It was the community that made Firefox overtake IE. They seem to forget that.

Unless its gonna come pre-installed like chrome, they need community make the user base grow. They are absolutely dumb for going after a crowd who are happy with Chrome while shitting on the crowd which want to be with them.
by kbelder | 2025-12-17 02:31:29+00:00
There's levels of this, though, more than two:

local, open model local, proprietary model remote, open model (are there these?) remote, proprietary model

There is almost no harm in a local, open model. Conversely, a remote, proprietary model should always require opting in with clear disclaimers. It needs to be proportional.
by Groxx | 2025-12-17 02:31:30+00:00
New this year? https://web.archive.org/web/20250000000000*/https://www.mozi...

I agree it's counter-evidence right now, and I think there has been a way to donate for a long time now (just to "mozilla", not "firefox" or setting any restrictions), but I'm not sure what the historical option has been...
by makeitdouble | 2025-12-17 02:33:30+00:00
The main issues probably arise on official documents and stuff with financial impact.

Like how many people end up with the same romanized name while being distinct in other alphabets. Then discrepancies between the different systems because they usually are sloppy on the handling of these matters.

Now that most stuff is electronic, these small differences can have wider effects and be a PITA to fix.
by encroach | 2025-12-17 02:33:34+00:00
This outperforms Gemini 3 pro image (nano banana pro) on Text-to-Image Arena and Image Edit Arena. I'm surprised they didn't mention this leaderboard in the blog post.

I like this benchmark because its based upon user votes, so overfitting is not as easy (after all, if users prefer your result, you've won).

https://lmarena.ai/leaderboard/text-to-image

https://lmarena.ai/leaderboard/image-edit
by rolph | 2025-12-17 02:33:52+00:00
1) Linux is made of many distros, each one with their own strong points and features. Many different maintainers matain them. There is no single point of funding for them.

2) Mozilla on the other hand makes basically one semi well-known product.

the way i see it mozilla has one thing to do, and didnt do it very well.

the linux GNU gang has a mountain to contend with and has has moved a mountain.

so what would be the secret sauce that mozilla doesnt have.
by komali2 | 2025-12-17 02:33:54+00:00
No ethical consumption under capitalism. My phone has minerals in it mined under slave-like conditions.

I'm all for everyone going full Libra - we do it at my co-op - but it makes sense to me that venture funded companies would "play the game" and light investor money on fire because, first, who gives a shit, and second, the investors want you to do that anyway so they can find out as fast as possible if you're a unicorn.

At my co-op, I spend hours writing future proof code and integrating FOSS solutions that I hope will serve us forever. When I'm at a startup, I'm looking for the fastest, maybe cheapest solution. YC gave us 200k in AWS credit? Guess we're on AWS. Another company in the cohort is some LLM IDE ala cursor and gave us a year free? Sure, burn tokens their investors are paying for, more agents for me. Vercel offers us a year of free hosting? Great, I hate nextjs but Claude loves it so fuck it, we deploy a nextjs app on vercel and lock ourselves deep into that ecosystem. Our product may not look like this at all in a year so I may be rewriting it in Vue or whatever when the vercel bills start coming in. Doesn't matter.
by NegativeK | 2025-12-17 02:36:01+00:00
I've taken somewhat of a parallel path.

I set foot in a shop for the first time at a hackerspace 11 or 12 years ago and eventually feel deep into machining. I spent huge swaths of my days there, and when I wasn't, I was reading about machining. Books, because there were few Youtubers doing it and the forums are thin. It's not a popular hobby and a lot of the professionals and hobbyists aren't computer savvy.

I focused on it to the detriment of other things. Friends commented last year on how absorbed I became and how much I was absorbing. Puttering around on a computer fell away, since it wasn't that relevant to the hobby. It wasn't necessary to use the aging laptop in my free time; I could read PDFs on my phone or old, used books.

But you're not looking at your phone often, because your hands are dirty. Or busy. Or there's a significant safety concern from lapsed attention. Or when doing related types of metal working, weld spatter might land on a face up phone and take chunks out of the glass. Or maybe a steel chip scratches the screen.

Eventually I drifted away from machining for another hobby, but I've come back to it now that I have space in my garage -- this time with more balance. I'm not out until after midnight on work nights. Instead, I'm up before dawn, working with my hands for an hour or two before work. After work, I spend time on learning things somewhat relevant to my career. On the weekends, I'll spend a few hours each day.

The machining isn't ever useful. I made a nylon washer on my lathe once for a dog harness -- I think that's the only item I've made that's not for the hobby itself. But it's tangible. The projects are incredibly slow, and no undo button means a small mistake can result in hours work thrown in the recycling. I spent maybe eight hours over the past four days making a tiny brass rod (as well as other, failed versions) to repair an older clockwork mechanism. A used replacement would've been relatively cheap on Ebay, but that's never the point.
by XorNot | 2025-12-17 02:36:46+00:00
Translation AI though has provable behavior cases though: round tripping.

An ideal translation is one which round-trips to the same content, which at least implies a consistency of representation.

No such example or even test as far as I know exists for any of the summary or search AIs since they expressly lose data in processing (I suppose you could construct multiple texts with the same meanings and see if they summarize equivalently - but it's certainly far harder to prove anything).
by vunderba | 2025-12-17 02:36:48+00:00
Nice job! There have been quite a few of these language substitution extensions over the years. (Language Immersion, Polyglot, MindTheWord, etc.)

I have a personal extension that I wrote (close to 12 years ago at this point) which does the same thing - translates random words on websites as you browse according to your linguistic level. It vastly predates LLMs though so it's all built on sentence segmentation, POS analysis for stemming, and other NLP techniques.

I've written a bunch of integrations for it so it works with websites, documents, even Kindle books.

https://mordenstar.com/projects/linguaswap

Now onto some feedback:

The site is visually a bit of a mess. The nav bar anchors but not to the top of the viewport (scroll and watch). Some of the cards are also different sizes. Some of the text isn't properly spaced (look for the colons).
by akkartik | 2025-12-17 02:37:17+00:00
Funny story: I can't get an Apple ID.

I tried around 10 years ago, repeatedly would provide a password, get a notification, click on it, get asked to type my new password.. and get told the password was invalid.

Anyways, I moved on with my life. I was only reminded of it this year when I got referred for a job at Apple.. and guess what, I still can't make an Apple ID. So now I can't ever get a job at Apple :) Oh well, first world problems.
by wahnfrieden | 2025-12-17 02:38:01+00:00
Sure but there are only a couple leading providers worth considering for coding at least, and there will be consolidation once investment pulls back. They may find a way to collude on raising prices.

Where switching will be easier is with casual chat users plus API consumers that are already using substandard models for cost efficiency. But there will also always be a market for state of art quality.
by naikrovek | 2025-12-17 02:38:54+00:00
Yep and the sky is blue and GitHub can charge for that too if they want to.

I don’t make policy at GitHub and I don’t work at GitHub so go ask GitHub why they charge for infrastructure costs like any other cloud service. It has to do with the queueing and assignment of jobs which is not free. Why do they charge per minute? I have no idea, maybe it was easiest to do that given the billing infrastructure they already have. Maybe they tried a million different ways and this was the most reasonable. Maybe it’s Microsoft and they’re giving us all the middle finger, who knows.
by aster0id | 2025-12-17 02:40:06+00:00
> Code is so cheap it’s practically free. Code that works continues to carry a cost, but that cost has plummeted now that coding agents can check their work as they go.

I personally think that even before LLMs, the cost of code wasn't necessarily the cost of typing out the characters in the right order, but having a human actually understand it to the extent that changes can be made. This continues to be true for the most part. You can vibe code your way into a lot of working code, but you'll inevitably hit a hairy bug or a real world context dependency that the LLM just cannot solve, and that is when you need a human to actually understand everything inside out and step in to fix the problem.
by cameldrv | 2025-12-17 02:40:28+00:00
This is headed for a severe backlash. Social media has broken a lot of trust, but the way AI is being deployed is taking that ball and running way further.

If someone who you thought was untrustworthy offered to sit in on your sensitive board meeting and take notes for free, would you think that was a good deal and let them do it? What about your doctor's appointment?

I really think the breaking point is close and you're going to see people figure out how to be the digital Amish and run what they need locally and live without the benefits of the rest.
by koolala | 2025-12-17 02:41:31+00:00
The harm to me is the implementation is terrible - local or not (assuming no AI based telemetry). If their answer is AI then it pretty much means they won't make a non-AI solution. Today I just got my first stupid AI tab grouping in Firefox that makes zero intuitive sense. I just want grouping not from an AI reading my tabs. It should just be based on where my tabs were opened from. I also tried Waterfox today because of this post and while I'd prefer horizontal grouping atleast their implementation isn't stupid. Language translation is a opaque complex process. Tabs being grouped from other tabs is not good when opaque and unpredictable and does not need AI.
by AnonC | 2025-12-17 02:41:33+00:00
That link is for Mozilla Foundation, which is a non-profit and donations to it do not go to the development of Firefox. Mozilla Corporation, the for-profit entity, owns and manages Firefox. The way to support Firefox monetarily is by buying Mozilla VPN where available (this is Mullvad in the backend) and buying some Firefox merchandise (like stickers, t-shirts, etc.). I think an MDN Plus subscription also helps.
by CrazyStat | 2025-12-17 02:42:06+00:00
Srsly? Srsly.

> The nonsense isn't just that they're assuming a point probability, it's that, conditional on that point probability not being true, there's only a 2% chance that theta is .5 += .01. Whereas the actual a priori probability is more like 99.99%.

The birth sex ratio in humans is about 51.5% male and 48.5% female, well outside of your 99.99% interval. That’s embarrassing.

You are extremely overconfident in the ratio because you have a lot of prior information (but not enough, clearly, to justify your extreme overconfidence). In many problems you don’t have that much prior information. Vague priors are often reasonable.
by _heimdall | 2025-12-17 02:42:38+00:00
That's an interesting example to use. I only use turn signals when there are other cars around that would need the indication. I don't view a turn signal as politeness, its a safety tool to let others know what I'm about to.

I do also find that only using a turn signal when others are around is a good reinforcement to always be aware of my surroundings. I feel like a jerk when I don't use one and realize there was someone in the area, just as I feel like a jerk when I realize I didn't turn off my brights for an approaching car at night. In both cases, feeling like a jerk reminds me to pay more attention while driving.
by robot-wrangler | 2025-12-17 02:42:45+00:00
Welcome to shop class. Safety goggles are required here, primarily for eye-safety but that said, all use-cases are equally valid. If you feel they clash with your style then feel free to leave them around your neck while operating the machinery.

Notice that if you go this route you get no additional safety, and actually introduced an extra hazard.. don't lean in or your goggles get caught in the machine and drag your neck closer to whirling blades! Sorry if it's rude, but there's no nice way to say that this is bad to do and even worse to advocate for. If you don't get it, ok, go be as unsafe as you want when it's your ass on the line. No need to take the next step towards also trying to kill safety culture.
by hauntsaninja | 2025-12-17 02:42:53+00:00
The conformance test suite is currently mostly focused on “what does an explicit type annotation mean”

A shared spec for this is important because if you write a Python library, you don’t want to have to write a different set of types for each Python type checker

Here are some things the spec has nothing to say about:

Inference

You don’t want to annotate every expression in your program. Type checkers have a lot of leeway here and this makes a huge difference to what it feels like to use a type checker.

For instance, mypy will complain about the following, but pyright will not (because it infers the types of unannotated collections as having Any):

x = [] x.append(1) x[0] + "oops"

The spec has nothing to say about this.

Diagnostics

The spec has very little to say about what a type checker should do with all the information it has. Should it complain about unreachable code? Should it complain if you did `if foo` instead of `if foo()` because it’s always true? The line between type checker and linter is murky. Decisions here have nothing to do with “what does this annotation mean”, so are mostly out of scope from the spec.

Configuration

This makes a huge difference when adapting huge codebases to different levels of type checking. Also the defaults really matter, which can be tricky when Python type checkers serve so many different audiences.

Other things the spec doesn’t say anything about: error messages quality, editor integration, speed, long tail of UX issues, implementation of new type system features, plugins, type system extensions or special casing

And then of course there are things we would like to spec but haven’t yet!
by SunlitCat | 2025-12-17 02:43:01+00:00
This article already feels like it’s on the right track. DirectX 11 was perfectly fine, and DirectX 12 is great if you really want total control over the hardware but I even remember some IHV saying that this level of control isn’t always a good thing.

When you look at the DirectX 12 documentation and best-practice guides, you’re constantly warned that certain techniques may perform well on one GPU but poorly on another, and vice versa. That alone shows how fragile this approach can be.

Which makes sense: GPU hardware keeps evolving and has become incredibly complex. Maybe graphics APIs should actually move further up the abstraction ladder again, to a point where you mainly upload models, textures, and a high-level description of what the scene and objects are supposed to do and how they relate to each other. The hardware (and its driver) could then decide what’s optimal and how to turn that into pixels on the screen.

Yes, game engines and (to some extent) RHIs already do this, but having such an approach as a standardized, optional graphics API would be interesting. It would allow GPU vendors to adapt their drivers closely to their hardware, because they arguably know best what their hardware can do and how to do it efficiently.
by MarsIronPI | 2025-12-17 02:43:41+00:00
> - Mozilla Search - metasearch that isn't based on Bing/DDG/Google

As much hate as Brave gets overall, I think Mozilla should take a page from Brave's book if they're going to make a search engine. I think they should have their own index, possibly supplemented by Bing or Google. Let people opt-in to using their browsers to help crawl for the search engine index, like Brave does. Then add in some power-user features like goggles and custom ranking, and they'd have a pretty compelling search engine. They should even be able to subsidize it somewhat with advertising: DDG and Brave Search are the only two websites I allow ads on, because they're usually relevant and they're never intrusive.
by NegativeK | 2025-12-17 02:44:32+00:00
I've slowly pushed away the classic attention manipulating applications -- basically anything that will find new content to keep you engaged. Tiktok feels like the maximalist example, but other similar apps, social media text feeds, and parts of Youtube (though, I've so aggressively tuned Youtube that it has a very limited content base to show me.)

TV isn't for TV's sake; it's for relaxing a little with someone I care about.

I can read longer form news articles and not need to stay abreast of what's happening daily.

I've found that I'll eventually grow bored and annoyed with things meant to steal attention, at which point I'll excise them from my life. It just might take an unfortunate while to get there.
by kerameikos34 | 2025-12-17 02:45:22+00:00
This is utter nonsense. LLMs are dumb. Formal Methods require actual thinking. Specs are 100% reasoning.

I highly dislike the general tone of the article. Formal Methods are not fringe, they are used all around the world by good teams building reliable systems. The fact they are not mainstream have more to do with the poor ergonomics of the old tools and the corporate greed that got rid of the design activities in the software development process to instead bring about the era of agile cowboy coding. They did this just because they wanted to churn out products quickly at the expense of quality. It was never the correct civilized way of working and never will be.
by CuriousRose | 2025-12-17 02:45:55+00:00
I'm thinking more at an SMB level, not necessarily for secure mail, PGP and the like.

IMAP + CalDev + CardDev sat on-top of cPanel is getting a bit long in the tooth for companies that want exchange-like mail solutions outside of the big two. Unfortunately MS and Google run the "spam" filters as well, so you really need an established company that they can't afford to irritate to enter the space - see Mozilla - to reliably force acceptance of enterprise mail outside the Duopoly they have.

Zoho is trying their best also in this space - not sure how successful they have been on the trusted email provider and integration front.