MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dctoedt | 2025-12-17 17:44:58+00:00
> (probably the most difficult one to do on an app) speaking / conversation practice.

Conversation practice with humans [0] is key: As a child I had complete, native-level fluency in French, because my first few years of school were in the local schools of a farm village in the interior of France (my US Air Force dad was stationed at a nearby air base). All through high school and college back in the U.S., I took French for the easy A. But now mumble years later, when my wife and I watch French TV shows on Netflix, I have to rely on the subtitles because I just can't keep up.

I've read comments by people from non-English-speaking countries who say they learned English by watching Friends on TV. I can't imagine how they did it.

[0] Maybe someday an AI could substitute for a human native speaker in conversation practice?
by chrismjelde | 2025-12-17 17:45:01+00:00
Also re: ‘deceptive advertising’ - if what you mean is that the output of the model will misrepresent what the host site actually sells/provides, that does happen on occasion, and it’s a top priority for us. We’re constantly working to reliably improve what Kenobi outputs in any given situation. It’s partially a research problem (i.e. deeply understanding the host website, and the nuances of their offerings, as well as research on the visitor, where the time window is seriously constrained), and it’s a model + prompting problem.

One of the ways we want to enhance Kenobi is to allow the host site to plug in more data sources (e.g. an FAQ, KB, etc). This helps solve the research problem, and it also increases the utility of the tool because more the very generic website can be be customized in more nuanced, specific, and esoteric ways, depending on the visitor.
by sublinear | 2025-12-17 17:45:11+00:00
Yup hearing big talk about competition and doom is a strong signal that there is plenty of demand.

You can either bet on the new unproven thing claiming to change things overnight, or just do the existing thing that's working right now. Even if the new thing succeeds, an overnight success is even more unrealistic. The insight you gain in the meantime is valuable for you to take advantage of what that change brings. You win either way.
by Xerox9213 | 2025-12-17 17:45:29+00:00
I think a lot of families actually restrict or eliminate screen time altogether, and gather round using either no technology, old technology, or new technology that imitates old technology, e.g. Yoto. There is value found in reducing our technology use. Some people may want to avoid AI on ethical grounds, or may be cautious about the cognitive effects of its use.
by __jl__ | 2025-12-17 17:45:30+00:00
Mostly at the time of release except for 1.5 Flash which got a price drop in Aug 2024.

Google has been discontinuing older models after several months of transition period so I would expect the same for the 2.5 models. But that process only starts when the release version of 3 models is out (pro and flash are in preview right now).
by riskable | 2025-12-17 17:45:31+00:00
I wish people would get off the "AI is the worst thing for the environment" bandwagon. AI and data centers as a whole aren't even in the top 100 emitters of pollution and never will be.

If you want to complain about tech companies ruining the environment, look towards policies that force people to come into the office. Pointless commutes are far, far worse for the environment than all data centers combined.

Complaining about the environmental impact of AI is like plastic manufacturers putting recycling labels on plastic that is inherently not recycleable and making it seem like plastic pollution is every day people's fault for not recycling enough.

AI's impact on the environment is so tiny it's comparable to a rounding error when held up against the output of say, global shipping or air travel.

Why don't people get this upset at airport expansions? They're vastly worse.
Show HN: Jungl – Auto Remediation for your AWS misconfigurations
by aman-s | 2025-12-17 17:45:37+00:00
Hi HN! I’m Aman and along with my cofounder Aarya, we're building Jungl (https://jungl.cloud), an event-driven security tool for detecting and remediating AWS misconfigurations.

Most cloud security programs we've spoken to fall into one of two patterns: periodic scanners that find issues hours later and generate tickets to fix resource misconfigurations, or restrictive IaC/approval workflows that slow developers down.

Jungl's approach is to evaluate the operational and security risks for resources that are created/updated and take quick action by monitoring and/or applying a remediation - automatically. The goal is to reduce the number of manual, hands-on fixes of resource non-compliance, giving developers the freedom to create/update resources however they want on AWS while still allowing cyber teams to ensure enterprise security. Think of us as a cloud engineer who works with every developer behind the scenes to monitor (and fix) each resource to make sure it won’t cause a security issue.

How it works: - We ingest relevant CloudTrail events for the 6 services we support right now - We evaluate rules (that you enable at a service-level) that produce: discovery (what’s wrong + evidence), recommended actions, and whether the discovery is eligible for automated remediation - If automated remediation is enabled, Jungl applies only explicit, scoped remediations. Otherwise, it generates a ticket for a human to accept or reject.

What we mean by "context": A big challenge with remediation is avoiding breaking systems. We use context to understand the intent behind each resource by looking at: - the resource’s exposure surface - dependency graph (what other resources it is connected to) - how the resource is being called or used in your codebase - the severity of the rule - historical logs of how the resource was being used

A concrete example: A bucket policy with access to the public - the last thing you want is for a developer to accidentally forget to remove public access and then 12 hours later, you see that the bucket was inviting unsolicited traffic. Jungl would immediately remove that bucket policy statement if the rule was enabled due to the criticality of it.

(We recorded a short demo here: https://youtu.be/P_GMyNwBZ5k?t=252)

We're early and still increasing coverage and the rule library. Some resources have multiple plausible fixes and choosing the least disruptive option is the hard part so we're building the workflows for that now, and building the application to support more context-aware decision making.

If you want to give us a try, here's the creds: Website: https://jungl.cloud/sign-in Username: hn@jungl.cloud Password: RG^J$T2!huMsF2c

And if you run AWS infra and have opinions about automated remediation (good or bad) or what we're doing, we'd love feedback.

Thanks for reading!
by nemo1618 | 2025-12-17 17:45:53+00:00
Years ago there was a YouTuber, "Surveillance Camera Man," who went around pointing a camera at people with no pretense. Frequently the subjects were upset by this and became aggressive, even violent. I believe the intended message was that this is a natural and justified reaction to being surveilled, and yet there is little outcry because public surveillance is largely invisible and/or faceless (e.g. just a CCTV camera mounted on a building, rather than a stranger invading your personal space).

The YouTube account is no longer around, but you can still watch it on archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20190220131525/https://www.youtu...
by almosthere | 2025-12-17 17:46:00+00:00
We had 3 interns this past summer - with AI I would say they were VERY capable of generating results quickly. Some of the code and assumptions were not great, but it did help us push out some releases quickly to alleviate customer issues. So there is a tradeoff with juniors. May help quickly get features out, may also need some refactoring later.
by willvarfar | 2025-12-17 17:46:23+00:00
I desperately want the kind of success we used to have searching on google back over a decade ago. Relevant results. A few annoying ads started appearing with paid placement, but we all ignored them.

Nowadays google search results are so cluttered with paid promotion that the genuine content creating websites and blogs are drowned. So we turn to AI not because it's better than the old straightforward search, but because it is better and currently less ad-laden than the current search?
by averynicepen | 2025-12-17 17:46:25+00:00
Yes, and that's the point. In my opinion, this is the perfect use case for generative AI, one that takes advantage of the strengths of the technology while avoiding its weaknesses.

The generative UI example in the article is an example of the complete opposite of this idea - obtuse implementation of generative AI where it creates more problems than solutions. Yes, there is value in the idea of personalized UI. But UI/UX derives a lot of its value from consistency, as the other comments in this thread have mentioned. Losing that in exchange for personalization is a huge net negative, in my opinion.
by everfrustrated | 2025-12-17 17:46:39+00:00
The biggest problem I have with passkeys is being tied to a single device you still need a flow to reset/get in _without_ the passkey. As you're only as secure as your weakest link passkeys don't add any security.

That said, if you have a mac with a fingerprint scanner they sure are very convenient option.

And don't get me started on terrible vendors like Rippling that only support a single passkey! Madness.
by poad4242 | 2025-12-17 17:47:15+00:00
> *Thanks! I actually tracked the Teflon/ROCKET driver work closely during my initial research (it was the 'Plan B' in my original proposal if the vendor blobs failed entirely).* >

> *The main reason I stuck with the closed-source `rknn` stack for this specific project was operator support for Transformers. Teflon is getting great at standard CNN ops (Fused ReLU, Convs, etc.), but the SigLIP vision encoder relies on massive Transposes and unbounded GELU activations that currently fall off the 'happy path' in the open stack.*

> *To your point on the system constraints (small scratchpad): I suspect the current open-source drivers would hit the exact same 32KB SRAM wall I found. The hardware simply refuses to tile large matrices automatically. My 'Nano-Tiling' fix was a software-level patch; porting that logic into the Mesa driver itself would probably be the 'Holy Grail' fix here.*
by salawat | 2025-12-17 17:47:17+00:00
I'm just shocked people aren't clueing into the fact that tech companies are trying to build developer dependence on these things to secure a "rent" revenue stream. But hey, what do I know. It's just cloud hyper scaling all over again. Don't buy and drive your own hardware. Rent ours! Look, we built the metering and everything!
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-12-17 17:47:19+00:00
> there's no doubt that 10 years from now LLMs will play a role in nearly every interaction we have with a computer

I tend to agree with you. Doesn’t make what Mozilla is doing sensible.

In 1995, one could correctly observe that the internet would “play a role in nearly every interaction we have with a computer.” It would not follow that every app must reïnvent the network stack.

An AI helping out can be useful. Every app being a tiny AI is a cacophony of idiots.
by PaulHoule | 2025-12-17 17:47:20+00:00
I'm doing as much to keep Firefox alive as anybody.

Wherever I've worked as a dev in a decade I've always developed Firefox-first and let the testers turn up Chrome issues. So the products that I am involved with just work with Firefox all the time.

I know there are a lot of people like me, people who are passionate and engaged with technology but have problems with "big tech" and if they turn people like me away than it really will be a "niche browser that nobody tests"
by glenstein | 2025-12-17 17:47:23+00:00
My favorite anecdote on this front: someone posted a comment on Lemmy, a fediverse alternative to Reddit, claiming Arch was "broken" and Linux users were delusional for thinking it was functional for the average person.

And when people ask them what they meant, they revealed that they used some package from the arch user repository that apparently required manual compiling for every update.

And instead of thinking that this wasn't the unusual behavior of a particular package, they insisted that this was the normal Linux packaging experience, which was why Linux as a whole was a terrible operating system.

A bunch of commenters chimed in emphasizing that the whole package distribution system in Linux is designed to among other things, handle dependencies and avoid manual compiling (though it's available as an option), and they were all dismissed as just being fanboy apologists.
by adastra22 | 2025-12-17 17:47:43+00:00
I don't watch those kinds of movies. I have, on the other hand, worked for a large aerospace firm supplying these weapon systems.

A transponder is how civilian planes tell exactly where they are relative to each other. Missiles use IR, radar-bounce, and other methods for the last-mile delivery of explode-y bits, but when launched from afar (e.g. a surface-to-air missile launched from land towards something over the horizon) they need to be pre-loaded with the exact position of the target, as they need to get close to it before switching to a homing mechanism. If the target has a radio transponder, that makes this step trivially easy.

If Venezuela wanted to shoot one of these planes down, with the transponder off the missile is as likely to lock on to a commercial airliner. They're not going to take that risk.
by agendacreativa | 2025-12-17 17:47:53+00:00
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by vel0city | 2025-12-17 17:47:59+00:00
> And removing a regulator is extremely difficult.

This isn't based in reality in the slightest, or you just haven't been paying attention to the Trump administration. It seems like Trump has had little issue replacing a lot of key regulators in a heartbeat. And in a few months after we get the opinion from Trump v. Slaughter it'll probably be stupid simple for the President to remove anyone for any reason anytime regardless of if its an "independent" agency.

Meanwhile we've had Supreme Court justices openly receiving millions of dollars in bribes while deciding cases in favor of those who paid the bribes, and nothing is happening.
by afavour | 2025-12-17 17:48:03+00:00
I’m an AI skeptic. I think a lot of these pronouncements about how AI is going to revolutionize the workplace and/or society itself are made by snake oil salesmen who are looking out for their own profits. And yet. I think skepticism can go too far.

One area I really do think AI is going to take over is web search. Primarily because web search these days is so shitty but that’s besides the point. AI is absolutely going to be a core feature used by the users of web browsers, and a web browser is the core of what Mozilla offers. They absolutely should be present in this space. And I hope, even though it’s an immense challenge, they might be able to offer an alternative to the aforementioned snake oil salesmen.
by Rotundo | 2025-12-17 17:48:22+00:00
I decided to not work on the bleeding edge of technology.

Mostly I work on "legacy systems" written in languages that don't have much churn. There is a lot of work to do in this area and most younger developers are not interested in doing it. Job safety is great. The pay isn't amazing but not bad either. Work/life balance is excellent at 36h per week.

I expect to work here until my retirement.
by Nextgrid | 2025-12-17 17:48:26+00:00
It's performative when you talk whatever the market wants to hear rather than sticking to an opinion (no matter how flawed it is). This behavior reminds me of the cryptobros that were hailing NFTs/web3 as the next best thing since sliced bread, and when that didn't came to pass quietly moved onto the next grift (AI) with the same playbook.

(also I’m just talking out of my ass on a tech forum under a pseudonym instead of going to well-publicized interviews)
by yencabulator | 2025-12-17 17:49:04+00:00
> (if anyone knows how to verify HIBP does only what it says it does [rather than blindly trust and hope for the best], would love to read more about it)

I recall HIBP documents their hashing protocol so that it should be possible to have a non-web client you can trust more.

https://haveibeenpwned.com/API/v3#PwnedPasswords
by ifh-hn | 2025-12-17 17:49:15+00:00
As long as I'm still in control, and it's actually useful, I don't see any issues with this direction, especially given the competition.

In fact I regularly use the summarize page functionality in one of my profiles and find in very convenient.

This seems like the usual Firefox criticism, where they get schtick for doing the same as all the others who don't.
by lenerdenator | 2025-12-17 17:49:56+00:00
No one's "Pining for pre-AI world". Many people use some amount of AI every day, whether they know it or not. I use Claude Code extensively, for example.

I know it's a paradigm shift. That's not the problem. The problem is that it's often wedged into workflows in ways that aren't helpful to me or are actively harmful. And then there's the question of what is done with the data. I don't need another tech company, non-profit or not, getting a hold of my chatbot conversation history and doing God knows with it.

Mozilla should be a better facilitator of the ecosystem around AI than just putting it in Firefox. Take care of the concerns before just shouting "me too" on a bunch of LLM features, which, to be honest, shouldn't even be a concern for FLOSS.

If someone wants GenAI in Firefox, they can create a branch, design it, implement it, and put it up for discussion. I don't need some CEO telling me the direction of the project. It's the cathedral vs the bazaar, which has been a major part of the FLOSS ethos for decades now.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-12-17 17:49:59+00:00
"It feels off-mission" is incredibly weak opposition to something that would go against core values. It just means this guy's price is higher than 150 million dollars.

Everybody has their price. I'm ideologically opposed to advertising but if someone put 150 million dollars on my table and told me to stop making an issue out of it I think I'd take the money. Being set for life trumps being called a hypocrite.
by tibbydudeza | 2025-12-17 17:50:12+00:00
Not surprised.

They pulled back out of the EU and other markets like South America and BYD opened up an assembly plant in Brazil.

Turn back the clock and Ford ruled the EU with saloons like the Escort, Mondeo and later the Focus - they were caught unawares with shift to compact SUV's and had the popular Ecosport but never invested in the product line and it was left to wither and die.

They are teaming up with Renault to use their EV platform to maintain a token presence in the EU but consumers today are smarter and more informed and will not buy badge engineered Fords.
by zhyder | 2025-12-17 17:50:38+00:00
End of an era: video (with broadband Internet penetration) was the best tool we had for 15+ years. But LLMs are now good enough, including in image+infographic generation and factuality (especially when grounding resources are provided... which is where human experts still matter). I think video is now better only for learning physical hands-on skills... and those videos tend to be on YouTube rather than on Udemy or Coursera.

Coursera's model will still survive for a while, given people's desire for branded credentials (university degree credits or company-branded certificates)... until the university bubble bursts too in a 10+ years. Start of trend: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/poll-dramatic...

A bit of a plug: we tried building a consumer business, with a learning experience built atop these LLMs: https://uphop.ai/learn . Still offered for free to consumers, but we're now succeeding much better on B2B ("you either die a consumer business or live long enough to become B2B" was v true for us).
Show HN: The feature gap "Chat with PDF" tuts and a regulated enterprise system
by 2dogsanerd | 2025-12-17 17:50:44+00:00
I've spent the last few months architecting a RAG system for a regulated environment. I am not a developer by trade, but I approached this with a strict "systems engineering" and audit mindset.

While most tutorials stop at "LangChain + VectorDB", I found that making this legally defensible and operationally stable required about 40+ additional components.

We moved from a simple ingestion script to a "Multi-Lane Consensus Engine" (inspired by Six Sigma) because standard OCR/extraction was too hallucination-prone for our use case. We had to build extensive auditing, RBAC down to the document level, and a hybrid Graph+Vector retrieval to get acceptable accuracy

The current architecture includes:

Ingestion: 4 parallel extraction lanes (Vision, Layout, Text, Legal) with a Consensus Engine ("Solomon") that only indexes data confirmed by multiple sources

Retrieval: Hybrid Neo4j (Graph) + ChromaDB (Vector) with Reciprocal Rank Fusion

Performance: Semantic Caching (Redis) specifically for similar-meaning queries (40x speedup)

Security: Full RBAC, Audit Logging of every prompt/retrieval, and PII masking.

I documented the complete feature list and gap analysis

https://gist.github.com/2dogsandanerd/2a3d54085b2daaccbb1125...

My question to the community: Looking at this list – where is the line between "robust production engineering" and "over-engineering"?

For those working in Fintech/Medtech RAG: what critical failure modes am I still missing in this list?
by prmph | 2025-12-17 17:51:17+00:00
Don't really agree here. The point against him is thinking in a very shallow way that stopping ad block means bringing in so much, which I guess is true in a certain basic level, but ignores how shitty that would contribute to making the internet.

And believe it or not, human behavior is such that something that is not even i in the space of possibilities is much less likely to occur that something that has been considered and rejected. It might have been rejected ow, but what the calculus changes?
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-12-17 17:52:05+00:00
> This is the hill you want to die on? That being a bigot should be a protected status for CEOs?

That is a wildly uncharitable take. I'm not OP, but I believe that nobody, CEOs or otherwise, should be fired for their activities outside of work. That can be political beliefs, but doesn't have to be either. And yes, that means that sometimes someone whose beliefs you find repugnant is going to have a good job. That is the price of a free society, and I think it's worth it.
by foxyv | 2025-12-17 17:53:01+00:00
I used to drink a lot of seltzer purchased in those 1 liter bottles. Then I bought a countertop soda maker. I can make the same amount of soda that I was paying $1.50 for at the store for $0.20 now. (I refill my own CO2 off a 10 lb tank) I can't imagine paying more than $0.50 for a liter of soda anymore. They have got to be making an obscene profit on those drinks.

Even weirder, the drinks that I flavor myself taste way better than the ones in the store. I suspect they have been titrating their flavoring down over time. Root Beer I make myself using drink powder tastes way better than the ones from the store. Same for grape and orange sodas.