MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cj | 2025-12-16 14:57:35+00:00
I did a fMRI study as a volunteer in college.

It involved going to the lab and practicing the thing (a puzzle / maze) I would be shown during the actual MRI. I think I went in to “practice” a couple times before showing up and doing it in the machine.

IIRC the purpose of practicing was exactly that, to avoid me trying ti learn something during the scan (since that wasn’t the intention of the study).

In other words, I think you can control for that variable.

(Side note: I absolutely fell asleep during half the scan. Oops! I felt bad, but I guess that’s a risk when you recruit sleep deprived college kids!)
by iterance | 2025-12-16 14:57:46+00:00
The fact is, most of the systems people use in their day do day that behave the way described simply require no mastery whatsoever. If your product, service, or device is locked behind learning a new skill, any skill, that will inherently limit the possible size of the audience. Far more than most realize. We can rail against this reality, but it is unforgiving. The average person who is struggling to put food on the table only has so many hours in the week to spare to stick it to the man by learning a new operating system.
by fluidcruft | 2025-12-16 14:58:04+00:00
I will, thanks.

> you can literally write python wrappers of Julia compiled libraries like you would c++ ones

Yes, please. What do I google? Why can't julia compile down to a module easily?

No offense but once you learn to mentally translate between whiteboard math and numpy... it's really not that hard. And if you were used to Matlab before Mathworks added a jit you were doing the same translation to vectored operations because loops are dog slow in Matlab (coincidentally Octave is so much better than Matlab syntax wise).

And again python has numba and maybe mojo, etc. Because julia refused to fill the gap. I don't understand why there's so much friction between julia and python. You should be able to trivially throw a numpy array at julia and get a result back. I don't think the python side of this is holding things back. At least back in the day there was a very anti-python vibe from julia and the insistence that all the things should be re-implemented in julia (webservers etc) because julia was out to prove it was more than a numerical language. I don't know if that's changed but I doubt it. Holy wars don't build communities well.
by delichon | 2025-12-16 14:58:10+00:00
I acknowledge that risk. But I think it is outweighed by the savings, exercise and reduced fire danger. And I shouldn't discount the value to me of living in light clothing in winter when I burn wood, but heavily dressed to save money when burning propane. To stop me you'd have to compel me.

This is not a small thing for me. By burning wood instead of gas I gain a full week of groceries per month all year!

I acknowledge the risk of AI too, including human extinction. Weighing that, I still use it heavily. To stop me you'd have to compel me.
by 1718627440 | 2025-12-16 14:58:37+00:00
No, I don't have any. It is because it was not so much a bug, but a decision about a tradeoff. They compressed by unifying similar looking glyphs. Sure, these glyphs weren't representing the same character, but they did look similar. It is the kind of error an human could also have made, except humans also know that sums are supposed to match, so they take that into account when reading. Also they have a probability score and when they are unsure they read again or ask. This are all things these printers can't do without doing supervised OCR.

The tested scans did look kind of crappy, so if you care about non altered glyphs maybe don't do a lossy compression on a low resolution scan. So these issue can totally happen with any printer if your resolution is too low, the glyphs are ambigous and you use a too aggressive lossy compression. This also happens with other approaches like vectorization or OCR.
by freedomben | 2025-12-16 14:59:31+00:00
This is cool very cool and I think I'll give it a try, though I'm wary about using a forked SSH so would love to see things land upstream.

I've been using mosh now for over a decade and it is amazing. Add on rsync for file transfers and I've felt pretty set. If you haven't checked out mosh, you should definitely do so!
by littlecranky67 | 2025-12-16 14:59:32+00:00
That describe a REST API implementation design, but doesn't really answer the particular question: How is the scoping implemented, i.e. how would any given Rust REST API framework couple a Db transaction to a HTTP scope. I mean, I know how that would look like if the framework ofered you no abstraction or DI whatsoever. You would pass the transaction (and maybe database handle) through all sorts of functions, create some sort of context object (that holds all sort of references to the http connection, database, transaction and whatnot, and call everything manually. Eventually you will end up building a similar custom-made abstraction that the built-in DI container in ASP.NET does. But I would expect there are some frameworks for rust that already deliver that.
by TrackerFF | 2025-12-16 14:59:40+00:00
Well, the good news is that overspending also stimulates the economy. For every person that purchases a sandwich or cup of coffee they don't really need, that's also some other persons salary.

But as others have mentioned, reckless / impulse spending can also be a sign of conditions like depression, BPD, ADHD, and the list goes on...
Show HN: BrowserWing – Turning Browser Actions into MCP Commands
by cg33 | 2025-12-16 15:00:00+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m sharing BrowserWing, an open-source experiment exploring a more efficient way for AI agents to control browsers.

Most browser-based agents today rely on frequent LLM interactions for DOM inspection, screenshot reasoning, and step-by-step execution. While this works, it’s slow and consumes a large number of tokens.

BrowserWing takes a different approach. Browser automation is implemented once as scripts and then exposed as MCP commands. AI agents focus on expressing intent and simply call these commands, instead of interacting with the browser step by step.

This significantly reduces interaction latency and token usage, while keeping browser execution deterministic and controllable.

This is an early release, focused on validating the idea rather than feature completeness. I’m especially interested in feedback from people building AI agents, browser automation, or MCP-based tools.

Repo: https://github.com/browserwing/browserwing

Thanks for reading.
by suprjami | 2025-12-16 15:00:31+00:00
Ostensibly nerds. Linux users and maybe Mac users. Technical people who understand more about the software industry than all Mozilla Corp management since Brendan.

It's difficult to monetize us when the product is a zero dollar intangible, especially when trust has been eroded such that we've all fled to Librewolf like you said.

It's difficult to monetize normies when they don't use the software due to years of continuous mismanagement.

I think giving Mozilla a new CEO is like assigning a new captain to the Titanic. I will be surprised if this company still exists by 2030.
Show HN: Xsql – Convert SQL Schemas Across MySQL, Postgres, and SQLite
by dawitworku | 2025-12-16 15:01:03+00:00
xsql is an open-source Rust CLI + TUI for converting SQL schema DDL between database dialects.

Instead of text-based rewrites, it parses CREATE TABLE statements into a small intermediate representation (IR), then emits equivalent SQL for the target dialect. This makes conversions safer, testable, and easier to extend.

It supports single-file and recursive folder conversion, includes a no-typing interactive TUI, and recently added an experimental IR v2 with constraint support and JSON output for CI and tooling use.

Feedback is very welcome, especially on schema portability and IR design.
by Levitz | 2025-12-16 15:01:04+00:00
It's technically not inevitable, sure. What has to happen for this not to become the future though, and what are the odds of that happening?

The rational choice is to act as if this was ensured to be the future. If it ends up not being the case, enough people will have made that mistake that your failure will be minuscule in the grand scheme of things, and if it's not and this is the future, you won't be left behind.

Sure beats sticking your feet in the sand and most likely fucking up or perhaps being right in the end, standing between the flames.
by Croak | 2025-12-16 15:01:41+00:00
When gcc was built most compilers were proprietary. Stallman wanted a free compiler and to keep it free. The GPL license is more restrictive, but it's philosophy is clear. At the end of the day the code's writer can choose if and how people are allowed to use it. You don't have to use it, you can use something else or build you own. And maybe, just maybe Linux is thriving while Windows is dying because in the Linux ecosystem everybody works together and shares, while in Windows everybody helps together paying for Satya Nadellas next yacht.
by raeroumeliotis | 2025-12-16 15:01:44+00:00
Marketing teams are moving faster than ever—creating, remixing, and deploying content across dozens of channels with the help of GenAI, automated workflows, and AI agents. But as our content velocity accelerates, so do critical questions:

How much do we need to know about the digital assets we use in our campaigns? And what do we need to provide to our customers?

Enter digital provenance: the emerging trust layer that verifies where digital content came from, how it was created, and whether it’s been altered.

It’s becoming essential across AI, marketing, and open-source ecosystems, and it’s reshaping how organizations think about authenticity, governance, and brand safety.
by DoctorOW | 2025-12-16 15:01:49+00:00
Queer people aren't causes, they're people. Imagine I worked on the Brave browser, and in my personal time maintained a website aimed at discouraging personal relationships with him. This would probably make me difficult to work with, despite my personal views not impacting the quality of my work. You might say these examples aren't one-to-one, and you're right. My example doesn't actually push any legislation forbidding him from having a relationship with a consenting person, and it costs a hell of a lot less than $1000.
by phantasmish | 2025-12-16 15:02:01+00:00
I regard the experience of most animals as being something like living in a slasher movie their entire lives, and Lovecraft’s work as coming closest to describing life writ large, stripped of pleasant lies.

… but I still think it’s a notable feature of humanity that we can escape much of that for long periods, yet always seem to invent problems for ourselves, can find trouble and discontent even when they don’t seek us out. A rabbit may contend with predators, with hunger, but it doesn’t seem they’ll drive themselves crazy with worry and want when sated and resting in their den. They deal with what’s in front of them, in rabbit-ways, and that’s that. What will they do today? Rabbit stuff. If they’re left to do rabbit stuff without external resistance, will they be content? Yeah. Tomorrow, will they be upset because they’re still going rabbit stuff? No.
by neuphonic | 2025-12-16 15:02:23+00:00
We’ve been playing with what's truly possible for low-latency, privacy-first voice agents, and just released a demo: Agent Santa.

The entire voice-to-text-to-speech loop runs locally on a sub-$250 Nvidia Jetson Orin Nano.

The ML Stack:

- STT: OpenAI Whisper EN tiny - LLM: LiquidAI’s 700M-parameter LFM2 - TTS: Our NeuTTS (zero-cost cloning, high quality)

The whole thing consumes under 4GB RAM and 2GB VRAM. This showcases that complex, multi-model AI can be fully deployed on edge devices today.

We'd love to hear your feedback on the latency and potential applications for this level of extreme on-device efficiency.
by chaidhat | 2025-12-16 15:03:04+00:00
You must have immense patience to daily drive codex. To be honest, I’ve observed better code quality from codex (in terms of separation of concerns, high cohesion loose coupling, etc.) but Opus has great quality at roughly 1/3rd of the speed. Try it on Cursor maybe then decide if you want to switch. I’m curious — have you tried gemini pro 3 and do you thibk deserve the hype?
by ramesh31 | 2025-12-16 15:03:28+00:00
This is the single biggest rub between eastern and western philosophical traditions. Of course we could all sit quietly on a pillow in zazen pose, minds blank, freeing ourselves of want and desire, living happily and peacefully with nothing. But that sounds boring. Give me all of the things. I will only live once, and I want them. If I die still desiring them, it will have been better spent than convincing myself I didn't.
by JoachimS | 2025-12-16 15:03:32+00:00
"RC4, short for Rivist Cipher 4". No, "Ron's Code 4".

And the default will now be AES-SHA1, where SHA-1 is to be deprecate by NIST in 2030. (https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2022/12/nist-retires-s...)
by linsomniac | 2025-12-16 15:03:35+00:00
My wife and I play nearly daily, it's become part of our routine. So much so that she's across the country visiting her family right now and we have done screen sharing calls to play Tiled Words. It's a really fun game, though the mechanics can sometimes be a little difficult (when I need to join two large halves of the puzzle but they need to be flipped).
by freehorse | 2025-12-16 15:04:04+00:00
Re: temporal resolution

Even if neuronal activity is (obviously) faster, the (assumed) neuro-vascular coupling is slower. Typically there are several seconds till you get a BOLD response after a stimulus or task, and this has nothing to do with fMRI sampling rate (fNIRS can have much faster sampling rate, but the BOLD response it measures is equally slow, too). Think of it as that neuronal spiking happens in a range of up to some hundred milliseconds and the body changing the blood flow happens much slower than that.

The issue is that measuring the BOLD response, even in best case scenario, is a very very indirect measure of neuronal activity. This is typically lost when people referring to fMRI studies as discovering "mental representations" in the brain and other non-sense, but here we are. Criticising the validity of the BOLD response itself, though, is certainly interesting.
by hcurtiss | 2025-12-16 15:04:08+00:00
Same. In a Powerboost, pulling my 5000 pound boat 500 miles to north Idaho is super easy, with a single refuel. In a Lightning that would be a nightmare, recharging 4-5 times. In truth, I’m excited about Ford’s pivot. I think electric motors with a range extender would be fantastic. Like the Chevy Volt for pickups.
by tristor | 2025-12-16 15:04:10+00:00
I can only assume you're referring to Mitchell Baker? Mitchell Baker has gotten a /lot/ of negative comments on HN, and some for good reason, but the constant ask of "how she won the position" and the like just shows the ignorance of the commenters...

Mitchell Baker co-founded Mozilla, and was the legal mind that structured both the split from Netscape that salvaged the code and wrote the majority of the Mozilla Public License and the legal/philosophical stance of the organization. She's an attorney with a specific background in intellectual property law, and without her contributions the entire world would be poorer for it. Mozilla, long before Firefox, was instrumental in the early parts of the open-source movement helping to define what it even meant to being open-source and creating a more rigorous and legally tested framework.

I am not a huge fan of Mitchell, so I understand and agree with much of the criticism, but it stinks of sexism or some other ulterior motive when people "wonderingly" suppose "how she won the position". Is anyone curious how Mark Zuckerberg became CEO of Meta, even though he's mostly blown through billions of dollars on boondoggles and acted in unethical ways? No, not at all, because he's the (co-)founder. So why is a different standard applied for Mitchell? Is it only because she's a woman, or is there some other reason?
by yashwantphogat | 2025-12-16 15:04:33+00:00
https://mergemonkey.dev/

I’ve been working on a small GitHub app called MergeMonkey.

It’s an AI PR reviewer, but intentionally quiet. It runs on new commits, gives a short structured summary (and diagrams for complex changes), and only goes deeper when explicitly triggered via PR comments.

The main idea is to avoid noisy reviews and black-box behavior. You bring your own model via OpenRouter, so you can choose the trade-offs yourself.

It’s still an MVP and I’m mostly looking for feedback from people who review PRs regularly.
by Retric | 2025-12-16 15:05:25+00:00
You’re confusing ideology with the way the world actually operates.

The general public doesn’t have enough information to make informed decisions when it comes to healthcare. This alone completely removes the usual market forces from providing any benefit when it comes to healthcare.

Cancer treatments don’t inherently cost that much money, the systems to ensure people are actually getting useful treatments are expensive. You can’t trust companies selling cures. You can’t trust every doctor when they have financial incentives to offer treatments. Insurance companies are in an adversarial relationship with providing treatments, which doesn’t result in efficient supervision here. Lawsuits offer some protection, but at extreme cost to everyone involved. Etc etc.

The net result of all these poor incentives is single payer systems end up being way more efficient, resulting in people living longer and spending less on healthcare.
by bruce511 | 2025-12-16 15:05:26+00:00
Making it a crime is very regional, and enforcement is basically non existent. But opening it is not the problem here.

The analogous problem would be letters opened and anthrax inserted. That doesn't (often) happen because mail is physical and hard to do at scale. (And the anthrax cant mine bitcoin.)

Given the ineffectiveness of current laws around ransomware, bonnets, phishing, identity theft, online scams etc, I don't think a law saying "don't do that" would be a solution.

And ISPs are (by far) not the only offenders here. Every public wifi would be an equally attractive attack point.
by everdrive | 2025-12-16 15:05:48+00:00
It's clear that the professional managerial class (PMC) has its own social circles and inputs. I don't see how else they could continue to lean so aggressively into positions which are alien to most normal people. I don't necessarily just mean "the elite are out of touch," although that's a fair reading of the situation as well.

Rather, we all talk about people being in a bubble. (and these days, everyone is in a bubble) The PMC is for certain in their own bubble and I really have no idea what the inputs are. They're totally alien to me.
by dawitworku | 2025-12-16 15:05:57+00:00
Author here

xsql started as a small internal tool to avoid rewriting SQL schemas by hand when switching between SQLite, PostgreSQL, and MySQL for local development and testing.

The main idea is to parse CREATE TABLE statements into a small intermediate representation (IR) instead of doing text-based rewrites. That makes the conversions easier to test and extend, and it’s why I’m experimenting with a richer IR v2 (including constraints and JSON output) rather than adding lots of ad-hoc rules.

The scope is intentionally limited for now (schema DDL only, no data migration). I’d really appreciate feedback on the IR approach, portability edge cases, or what features matter most in real-world schema migrations.
Show HN: New macOS dark pattern to force Tahoe upgrade
by hexbin010 | 2025-12-16 15:06:02+00:00
On MacOS Sequoia, under "Other Updates", it now pre-selects "macOS Tahoe 26.2" instead of the macOS Sequoia update.

These were the pre-selected checkboxes when I opened the dialog:

https://ibb.co/GfMw9ghL

They hide Tahoe it in the summary text too:

https://ibb.co/wZWb46CV

So to continue receiving updates for Tahoe, you have to now select the correct checkboxes.

This is really sneaky.
by tim333 | 2025-12-16 15:06:42+00:00
There's a difference between doing things like restricting immigration from culturally different places, which is quite a generally popular policy, and wanting to grab and imprison people without trial which is along the lines of Miller's policies. There's a danger with ostracising people for normal concerns that you drive them to elect extremists.

See for example the organised Chinese apply for asylum package tours https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7TNP2OTY2g before the last election. If the dems won't control immigration you get Miller et al in instead.
by dlisboa | 2025-12-16 15:07:50+00:00
> It has captured a staggering percentage of software development

In hindsight it's obvious why: it was the only free editor that has a product mindset and a product team behind. Microsoft put heavy hitters on it, some of their best engineers, treated it as some companies treat their core products.

Other IDEs/editors are mostly open source with no real direction and resources, or are proprietary expensive software.

It's unfortunate but to compete with VS Code you need a lot.
by jjmarr | 2025-12-16 15:08:20+00:00
The folks with big titles need to determine if the company's technical strategy is cloud-agnostic and whether 1000x growth in Q4 is a legitimate concern.

If Big Title wants to own the schedule impact they can make these demands.

Maybe I'm not read into the secret deal with Microsoft for next quarter that'll require all 3 of these.
by phantasmish | 2025-12-16 15:08:27+00:00
Multi-model or no, “AI in the browser” seems like one of those things destined to be eaten by “AI in the OS”, even more surely and to a greater degree than Dropbox was destined to be an OS feature. Having those same tools available system-wide covers the browser case while being far more useful and easier to use (because it’s one interface and set of behavior everywhere).
by CharlieDigital | 2025-12-16 15:08:34+00:00
> Microsoft knows this, and they make business decisions to maintain and expand this position

For the edification of the readership, please share how Microsoft's business decisions are being made to maintain a monopoly in your space. Are they buying out competitors? Are they using contract terms that forbid the use of other vendors? Are they under-pricing their product relative to the market?

If the cost of migrating results in "minimal gain", doesn't that mean that they have a top product and the market has other competitive products by definition?

If you can provide some evidence of how they actively use business practices to maintain a monopoly, it would go a long way to advancing this discussion instead of showing long-held biases and I'm sure some lawyers out there would be ready to make a name for themselves.