MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tachim | 2025-12-17 00:42:38+00:00
I'm Tudor, CEO of Harmonic. We're huge believers in formal verification, and started Harmonic in 2023 to make this technology mainstream. We built a system that achieved gold medal performance at 2025 IMO (https://harmonic.fun/news), and recently opened a public API that got 10/12 problems on this year's Putnam exam (https://aristotle.harmonic.fun/).

If you also think this is the future of programming and are interested in building it, please consider joining us: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/Harmonic. We have incredibly interesting challenges across the stack, from infra to AI to Lean.
by DennisP | 2025-12-17 00:42:57+00:00
Software verification has gotten some use for smart contracts. The code is fairly simple, it's certain to be attacked by sophisticated hackers who know the source, and the consequence of failure is theft of funds, possibly in large amounts. 100% test coverage is no guarantee that an attack can't be found.

People spend gobs of money on human security auditors who don't necessarily catch everything either, so verification easily fits in the budget. And once deployed, the code can't be changed.

Verification has also been used in embedded safety-critical code.
by NothingAboutAny | 2025-12-17 00:43:00+00:00
man not a single one of those examples sounds like something I'd need, or even need an AI agent to do. I keep seeing the ads for AI browsers and the only thing I can think about is the complete and utter lack of a use case, and your post only solidifies that further. not that I'm disagreeing with you per se, I'm sure some people have a workflow they can't automate easily and they need a more complicated and expensive puppateer.js to do it. I just dont know what the heck I'd use it for.
by foobar1962 | 2025-12-17 00:43:04+00:00
> ..the top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you... on which step of the ladder do you feel you personally stand at the present time?

10, I'm living my best possible life. It's conceivable that my "best possible life" may not be as happy as the lifes of other people, but I have achieved the maximum that's possible for me.

Any other "possible life" would require some combination of different genes, being in a different place and living at a different time.
by griffzhowl | 2025-12-17 00:43:29+00:00
Thanks for the context, but there hasn't been a general tech sector crash since 2019, so I don't think the 2000-03 comparison is apt.

And while 2019 might have been third-highest year for investment in 2020, according to this it's been surpassed in 2021, 2022, and 2024

https://kpmg.com/xx/en/media/press-releases/2025/01/2024-glo...

So why have graduate hires continued to decline since 2023? It seems funds have been diverted from junior hiring into AI investments.

However, as others have remarked, this might be a case of "AI is not taking your jobs, AI investment is taking your jobs"

Junior hiring might pick up again once the spending spree is over
by anyfoo | 2025-12-17 00:43:56+00:00
This article is a bit bizarre in what the author seems to have expected, or rather not expected.

The 64 Ultimate is, as far as I know, an FPGA-implementation of an original C64. It is, for most intents and purposes, a C64.

So why are they so surprised that the original peripherals, like floppy drives, can be attached to it? The only special thing required for that is likely a level shifter on board (as the FPGA will hardly be 5V). And moreover, what's special about CRTs that it's so surprising that they can be attached as well? The output is bog-standard composite or S-Video, you can attach anything to it, just like to the original C64...

It's more interesting that it has an added HDMI output, Ethernet, and Wifi.
by sfink | 2025-12-17 00:44:18+00:00
Hm. I'm dumb so you'll need to spell it out for me.

MoFo and MoCo both have contributors, yes. Both have unpaid contributors, which apparently are not who you're talking about. Both also have paid people who work for them. Whether or not you call them "contributors" or "employees" doesn't matter much, I guess. But still, MoFo contributors, paid or not, do not work on Firefox. Firefox is not a MoFo product. Most MoCo contributors do work on Firefox. Firefox is a MoCo product. It's confusing because MoFo owns MoCo, but owning a company does not mean its products are your products, nor that you can freely assist with those products (especially in an arms-length setup involving taxes, which is the very reason for the MoFo/MoCo split in the first place.) MoFo does other things, non-Firefox things, like advocacy and pissing off HN commenters who assume that "Mozilla does X" headlines always mean MoCo is doing X.

One of us is confused. I have that uneasy sensation I get when something is going "whoosh!" over my head, so it might be me.
by cies | 2025-12-17 00:44:46+00:00
This is an interesting case. It may be good to feed it to other model and see how they do.

Also: it may be interesting to port it to other languages too and see how they do.

JS and Py are but runtime-typed and very well "spoken" by LLMs. Other languages may require a lot more "work" (data types, etc.) to get the port done.
by dboreham | 2025-12-17 00:45:13+00:00
0.02/wo: formal methods are just "fancy tests". Of course tests are good to have, and fancy tests even better. I've found that humans are pretty terrible on average at creating tests (perhaps it would be more accurate to say that their MBA overlords have not been great at supporting their testing endeavors). Meanwhile I've found that LLMs are pretty good at generating tests and don't have the human tendency to see that kind of activity as resume-limiting. Therefore even a not amazing LLM writing tests turns out to be a very useful resource if you have any interest in the quality of your product and mitigating various failure risks.
by marcus_holmes | 2025-12-17 00:45:27+00:00
Maybe, at the moment, because when Surfshark is banned people will learn how to make their own VPN (like I said, it's not hard), or find some other source. And then the government will move to ban that, and we'll go round the loop again.

The point, again, is that the tech is the same, and there's no method for determining what purpose the VPN is being used for.
by jameshilliard | 2025-12-17 00:45:35+00:00
> A warning about what?

It's basically a warning against attempting to apply jurisdiction to countries that are not parties to the Rome Statute.

> That the US thinks it rules the world and is terrified enough to go after individuals who just happen to work for the wrong employer?

The sanctions are due to specific actions(i.e. rulings) taken by the individuals against US and their allies.[0]

> That other parts of the world are not allowed to have their own sense and modalities of justice?

The issue is mostly one of jurisdiction, the ICC is attempting to unilaterally impose jurisdiction on to states that never agreed to delegate authority whatsoever to the ICC.

[0] https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/20...
by rmah | 2025-12-17 00:45:39+00:00
Yes, except their cookie preferences to comply with european law. Oh, and they should be able to change their theme from light/dark but only that. Oh and maybe this other thing. Except in situations where it would conflict with current sales promotions. Unless they're referred by a reseller partner. Unless it's during a demo, of course. etc, etc, etc.

This is the sort of reality that a lot of developers in the business world deals with.
by Macha | 2025-12-17 00:45:54+00:00
It's a change in purpose. Nihon-shiki was invented to teach Japanese people the Latin alphabet, with a view to replacing kana/kanji with the Latin alphabet. Therefore being understandable to someone with a good idea of the kana layout was the priority.

Hepburn was designed to teach non-Japanese people Japanese, therefore matching well to European (especially English) sounds was considered more important.

Suggesting Japanese romanise is a fringe position these days, much much more so than in the 1880s or the immediate aftermath of WW2, and making that kind of change is much easier when you have a population going from illiterate to literate than in a modern society, so nobody's seriously considered Nihon-shiki (or its slightly modernised descendent, Kunrei-shiki) a gateway to romanising Japanese for the Japanese for a long time now.

So this is sort of an official recognition that the primary purpose of romaji is for the benefit of foreigners.
by kevin_thibedeau | 2025-12-17 00:46:12+00:00
Kunrei-shiki is intended for domestic Japanese use. That's why it results in spellings that don't make logical sense for any Latin-based phonology. It's too focused on round trip unambiguity at the cost of phonetic clarity for non-Japanese. My big peeve is the company Mitutoyo using K-S, which everyone mispronounces because they don't know it's a poor transcription of "Mitsutoyo".
by Der_Einzige | 2025-12-17 00:46:32+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect

Or worse, your whole field can be insitutionally blind to its own failings and randoms outside of it actually DO know more than you!. Chiropractors are literally worthless and being told "oh you don't get it bro" by them is their cope for being scammers, not an example of "their Gell Mann amnesia"
by johnoliveiradev | 2025-12-17 00:48:24+00:00
Sharing an empirical regime-detection study based on structural coupling rather than correlation. Key finding: correlation can stay high while structural dependence collapses. The signal detects rigid, transitional and chaotic regimes across scales.

Black-box engine, results only. Not predictive, no ML.

Looking for feedback on interpretation and related literature.

Repo: https://github.com/johnoliveiradev/Multiscale-structural-reg...
by simonw | 2025-12-17 00:48:36+00:00
There are certainly dozens of better ways to do what I did here.

I picked JustHTML as a base because I really liked the API Emil had designed, and I also thought it would be darkly amusing to take his painstakingly (1,000+ commits, 2 months+ of work) constructed library and see if I could port it directly to Python in an evening, taking advantage of everything he had already figured out.
by agentastic | 2025-12-17 00:49:35+00:00
They need to compile the model for their chips. Standard transformers are easier, so GPT-OSS, Qwen, GLM, etc if there is demand, they will deploy it.

Nemotron on the other hand is a hybrid (Transformer + Mamba-2) so it will be more challenging to compile it on Cerebras/Groq chips.

(Me thinks Nvidia is purposefully picking architecture+FP4 that is easy to ship on Nvidia chips, but harder for TPU or Cerebras/Groq to deploy)
by makeitdouble | 2025-12-17 00:49:36+00:00
This study seems to be playing with what toxicity means.

Is the 43% cited at the top of the piece matching the same criteria they use for digging deeper in the study ?

Their specific definition of toxicity is in the supplementary material, and honestly I don't think it matches the spectrum of what people perceive as toxic in general:

> The study looked at how many of these Reddit accounts posted toxic comments. These were mostly comments containing insults, identity-based attacks, profanity, threats, or sexual harassment.

That's basically very direct, ad hominem comments. and example cited:

> DONT CUT AWAY FROM THE GAME YOU FUCKING FUCK FUCKS!

Also why judge Reddit on toxicity but not fake news or any other social trait peolple care about ? I'm not sure what's the valuable takeaway from this study, only 3% of reddit users will straight insult you ?
by dcre | 2025-12-17 00:49:59+00:00
I think the idea is not that there are features that aren’t listed, but rather that if a typechecker supports 10 features people care about and is missing 10 that people don’t really use, it will look a lot worse on a list like this than a typechecker with 100% compliance, when in practice it may not really be worse at all.

Edit: Based on this other comment, the point was also about things not covered by the spec. “The spec mostly concerns itself with the semantics of annotations, not diagnostics or inference.” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46296360
by rmah | 2025-12-17 00:50:00+00:00
I think the main limitation is not code validation but assumption verification. When you ask an LLM to write some code based on a few descriptive lines of text, it is, by necessity, making a ton of assumptions. Oddly, none of the LLM's I've seen ask for clarification when multiple assumptions might all be likely. Moreover, from the behavior I've seen, they don't really backtrack to select a new assumption based on further input (I might be wrong here, it's just a feeling).

What you don't specify, it must to assume. And therein lies a huge landscape of possibilities. And since the AI's can't read your mind (yet), its assumptions will probably not precisely match your assumptions unless the task is very limited in scope.
by qingcharles | 2025-12-17 00:50:30+00:00
I used to work adjacent to a team who worked from closely-defined specs for web sites, and it used to infuriate the living hell out of me. The specs had all sorts of horrible UI choices and bugs and stuff that just plain wouldn't work when coded. I tried my best to get them to implement the intent of the spec, not the actual spec, but they had been trained in one method only and would not deviate at any cost.
by AJRF | 2025-12-17 00:50:32+00:00
I was born in 1993. I kind of heard lots of rumbling about Microsoft being evil as I grew up, but I wasn't fully understanding of the anti trust thing.

It used to suprise me that people saw cool tech from Microsoft (like VSCode) and complain about it.

I now see the first innings of a very silly game Microsoft are going to start playing over the next few years. Sure, they are going to make lots of money, but a whole generation of developers are learning to avoid them.

Thanks for trying to warn us old heads!
Show HN: Learn Japanese contextually while browsing
by englishcat | 2025-12-17 00:50:40+00:00
Hi HN,

Just wanted to share a tool i've been working on to help with my own study routine. It’s a browser extension called Lingoku.

The idea is simple: we spend hours browsing the web in English every day. This tool replaces some of the english words with Japanese vocabulary based on your japanese level (Similar to Toucan, but with a better user experience).

It’s basically an attempt to make the "i+1" method actually passive, you understand the sentence because it's mostly english, but you pick up Japanese words naturally from the context. It uses an LLM in the backend to make sure the translations fit the context (so it distinguishes between different meanings of the same word).

since it uses paid AI APIs for the words replacement, I couldn't make it 100% free (server costs are real, unfortunately). However, there is a "forever free" plan with daily credits that doesn't require a credit card. it should be enough for casual daily browsing.

I built this because I struggle with Anki burnout and wanted a way to review words without feeling like i am "studying"

It supports Chrome, Edge, and Firefox now. would love any feedback or feature requests!

https://lingoku.ai/learn-japanese
by AJRF | 2025-12-17 00:50:43+00:00
I was born in 1993. I kind of heard lots of rumbling about Microsoft being evil as I grew up, but I wasn't fully understanding of the anti trust thing.

It used to suprise me that people saw cool tech from Microsoft (like VSCode) and complain about it.

I now see the first innings of a very silly game Microsoft are going to start playing over the next few years. Sure, they are going to make lots of money, but a whole generation of developers are learning to avoid them.

Thanks for trying to warn us old heads!
by haroldp | 2025-12-17 00:51:29+00:00
I get what you are saying, and I don't think you are wrong, but it has been like 100 monumental changes in 200 years. The demographic shift of the industrial revolution was particularly painful, to be sure. But we seem to be pretty good at coping with them, overall.

And again, I remain skeptical that general artificial intelligence is actually that close at hand.
by wudangmonk | 2025-12-17 00:52:16+00:00
The issue is that its not theirs and that is exactly the problem. You can't just use China's writing system and try to make it fit to your language. Japan might have a high literacy rate but that is despite their horrible system and not because of it. Plus you can argue that they're not really literate, they just limit themselves to using a small portion of their 'kanji' and write little hiragana hints that tell you how to pronounce the written symbols for all the rest.
by minimaxir | 2025-12-17 00:52:16+00:00
My opinion on the ending open questions:

> Does this library represent a legal violation of copyright of either the Rust library or the Python one? Even if this is legal, is it ethical to build a library in this way?

Currently, I am experimenting with two projects in Claude Code: a Rust/Python port of a Python repo which necessitates a full rewrite to get the desired performance/feature improvements, and a Rust/Python port of a JavaScript repo mostly because I refuse to install Node (the speed improvement is nice though).

In both of those cases, the source repos are permissively licensed (MIT), which I interpret as the developer intent as to how their code should used. It is in the spirit of open source to produce better code by iterating on existing code, as that's how the software ecosystem grows. That would be the case whether a human wrote the porting code or not. If Claude 4.5 Opus can produce better/faster code which has the same functionality and passes all the tests, that's a win for the ecosystem.

As courtesy and transparency, I will still link and reference the original project in addition to disclosing the Agent use, although those things aren't likely required and others may not do the same. That said, I'm definitely not using an agent to port any GPL-licensed code.
by mekoka | 2025-12-17 00:53:16+00:00
I won't go into too much details on the topic, as it's loaded with triggering elements. Let's just say that if you were to study how different cultures apprehend and conceptualize life and death (whether philosophically or religiously), I'm fairly sure that you'd come out the other end questioning a lot of your original assumptions (which I only presume you hold based on your comment). Our collective outlook can have significant and far reaching influence in individual decisions.
Ask HN: What happens when a new user's submission disappears?
by ursAxZA | 2025-12-17 00:54:08+00:00
My account is 8 days old and I submitted a link earlier today.

For the first few hours everything looked normal at first — the discussion page existed, and the submission appeared in my profile.

A few hours later, the discussion page disappeared. When I log out, the submission no longer appears in my profile at all.

There was no “dead” flag or moderation notice — it simply vanished.

─── ─── ───

Also, when I’m logged in I still see all five of my submissions, but when I log out only four appear. The missing one is exactly the link that disappeared. If this is just a display quirk on my side and others can still see it, apologies in advance — I may simply be misunderstanding how submissions behave for new users.

The post itself was harmless (an educational piece about a visualization method for helping children understand multiplication), so I’m trying to figure out whether this is normal behavior for new accounts or a sign that the submission was auto-filtered.

───────── ─── ─── ─── ─────────

So I’d like to ask:

• Is it common for low-karma, new accounts to have submissions silently filtered out?

• Do certain titles or post formats trigger automated removal?

• Could I have unknowingly violated a guideline?

And related to that:

• Is it acceptable to repost later with a different title?

• Or is there a recommended way to avoid triggering filters as a new user?

• Would this type of post have been better as a “Show HN”?

───────── ─── ─── ─── ─────────

I’m not trying to game karma — just trying to understand how HN handles new-user submissions so I can avoid repeating the same mistake.

If this is expected behavior, I’d appreciate any insight into the underlying heuristics.

If this question itself violates any norms, please let me know — I’m still learning how HN works.

Thanks.
by bmitc | 2025-12-17 00:54:16+00:00
My issue with them is that they claim their tools replace existing tools, but they don't bother to actually replicate all of the functionality. So if you want to use the full functionality of existing tools, you need to fall back on them instead of using Astral's "replacements". It's like one step forward and one step back. For me personally, speed of the tooling is not as important as what the tooling can check, which is very important for a language like Python that is very easy to get wrong.
by keeda | 2025-12-17 00:54:27+00:00
Sure, these features may never catch on... but if they do, consider the risk to Firefox: an underdog with dwindling market share that is now years behind capabilities taken for granted in other browsers. On the other hand, if these features don't pan out, they could always be deprecated with little hit to marketshare.

Strategically I think Mozilla cannot take that risk, especially as it can get feature parity for relatively low cost by embracing open-source / open-weights models.

As an aside, a local on-device AI is greatly preferable from a privacy perspective, even though some harder tasks may need to be sent to hosted frontier models. I expect the industry to converge on a hybrid local/remote model, largely because it lets them offload inference to the users' device.

There's not much I could do about a hosted LLM, but at least for the local model it would be nice to have one from a company not reliant on monetizing my data.
by jrowen | 2025-12-17 00:54:28+00:00
I'm not the one dismissing anything. I'm arguing for tolerance, goodwill, and cooperation. There are lots of practical concerns in life, there are tradeoffs, there is balance.

A few days ago you said "the impression the different groups have different ideals is correct." You've spoken mostly in mystical aphorisms so it's been hard to glean much.
by simonw | 2025-12-17 00:54:39+00:00
Whoa... it looks like the Firefox HTML5 parser is still maintained as Java to this day!

Here's the relevant folder:

https://github.com/mozilla-firefox/firefox/tree/main/parser/...

make translate # perform the Java-to-C++ translation from the remote # sources

And active commits to that javasrc folder - the last was in November: https://github.com/mozilla-firefox/firefox/commits/main/pars...
by jabbywocker | 2025-12-17 00:56:03+00:00
You aren’t refuting a negative because the statement isn’t “they are unrelated” the statement is “(with current information) there is nothing suggesting they are related”

If you’re close to the situation, and have a substantiated reason to believe the claim that there’s no current information suggesting they’re related is inaccurate, you should be able to back that up. Except we both know you can’t, because you’re attempting to refute something that wasn’t actually said.
by Supermancho | 2025-12-17 00:56:20+00:00
Indeed, 8:30p is no different from 2p or 10a for the act.

It's most likely a matter of happenstance. It happened to be the warmest time of the day (even though it was evening). Maybe the thinking was someone was home to help them find the valuables, maybe not.

> 8:30p seems like a dumb time for a home robbery.

The assertion that there is some optimization for some specific imagined motivation, is literal fantasy.
by eru | 2025-12-17 00:56:38+00:00
> I thought it already was, before Trump.

Not in the US, at least. Every administration since at least Bush jr slapped tariffs on a few things here and there, and mostly kept the previous admin's ad hoc tariffs in place.

In more practical places, like Singapore where I live, you'd be right: tariffs are by and large unthinkable.