MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by concinds | 2025-12-17 12:41:53+00:00
This isn't the same as bigcorps offloading their compliance costs to open-source ""vendors"". No one's obligated to do anything. The disclosure window is meant to address a tradeoff between giving the dev a chance to fix it, and minimizing users' risk until patch issuance. But if the dev can't fix it, the risk tradeoff shifts and you do have a duty to make it public for users' sake. You can't take it for granted that you're the first one and only one to have found that vulnerability.
by palata | 2025-12-17 12:41:56+00:00
> That's a lot of arguments unrelated to what I wrote.

What I understand they are saying is that donations wouldn't be nearly enough. Which is related to what you wrote, which is that you would gladly donate to Firefox (not Mozilla, but Firefox).

They compared it to the largest non-profits in America, presumably because if we look at the money spent by Mozilla every year, that's similar. Right now Google pays for Mozilla, and if you wanted to replace that with donations, it would have to become one of the biggest charities in America. Which does not sound plausible.

If I understood correctly, I'm not the OP :)
by exagolo | 2025-12-17 12:43:39+00:00
If not having to adjust queries is a major driver for your considerations, then I would highly recommend looking at SQLGlot (https://github.com/tobymao/sqlglot), a transpiler that makes you (more) independent of query dialects. They already support 30 dialects (big vendors such as Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, but also loads of the specialists such as ClickHouse, SingleStore or Exasol). Repo is maintained extremely well.

Picking the best solution for your concrete workload (and your future demands) should be equally important to the implementation effort, to avoid that you run into walls later on. At least as long as data volume, query complexity or concurrency scalability can be challenges.
by gosub100 | 2025-12-17 12:43:51+00:00
At least with pre-AI search, the info is provided with a source. So there is a small level of reputation that can be considered. With AI, it's a black box that someone decides what to train it on, and as someone said elsewhere, there's no way to police its sources. To get the best results, you have to turn it loose on everything.

So someone who wants a war or wants Tweedledum to get more votes than Tweedledee has incentives to poison the well and disseminate fake content that makes it into the training set. Then there's a whole department of "safety" that has to manually untrain it to not be politically incorrect, racist etc. Because the whole thesis is don't think for yourself, let the AI think for you.
by Lerc | 2025-12-17 12:44:09+00:00
I think this will be a significant thing in the future, but right now I think the reasoning abilities are too limited. It can reasonably approximate a vector database where it can find related things, but I think that success can hide the failure to find important things.

I'd like to be able to point a model at a news story and have it follow every fact and claim back to an origin, (or lack of one). I'm not sure when they will be able to do that, they aren't up to the task yet. Reading the news would be so much different if you could separate the 'we report this happened' from the 'we report that someone else reported this happened"
by bambax | 2025-12-17 12:44:20+00:00
> Killing one of its advantages over the Chromium engine, being able to have a fucking adblocker that's actually useful, and that nowadays is a fucking security feature due to malvertising, will be another nail in the coffin, IMHO.

Well, it would be a shot in the head. What would be the point of using Firefox if it can't block ads better than Chrome, and on mobile as well???

Doing so would not "bring in an additional 150 millions, or 50 millions, or 1 million! It would kill the product instantly.
by aeve890 | 2025-12-17 12:44:22+00:00
>Suddenly every framework, in every language, was copying Rails. Django did it for Python. Laravel did it for PHP. CakePHP and CodeIgniter had already been doing something similar, but Rails set the template that everyone followed.

Nah son, I won't allow the great Symfony to be erased from history and replaced with Laravel. Not on my watch.
by plainOldText | 2025-12-17 12:44:26+00:00
This Scott Wlaschin talk [1] is a good introduction to TLA+. And the slides [2].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qs_mmezrOWs

[2] https://speakerdeck.com/swlaschin/tla-plus-for-programmers
by graemep | 2025-12-17 12:45:00+00:00
> English has a long tradition of stealing words from other languages then mangling them almost beyond recognition because we're too lazy to take efforts to pronounce them correctly. To me, this is a form of language arrogance.

Other languages do the same to English words. Lots of words have been borrowed and borrowed again across multiple languages changing pronunciation each time.

> Why, for what purpose? Seems to me the only plausible reason is more because of erudite snobbishness than out of any practical utilitarian reason.

Possibly because the term tidal wave is misleading as it has nothing to do with tides?

> for example the German zeitgeist

That is a great word.

> So often one hears TV newsreaders including those on the BBC

The BBC used to be very good at this a long time ago now. I believe they got rid of the unit that provided the guidance on the pronunciation of foreign words.
by Aldipower | 2025-12-17 12:45:37+00:00
I have maybe 20 hardware synths and I do a lot of sequencing. And yes it wasn't a problem 25 years ago, that is exactly why I still use an Atari STe! :-) But today it is a problem. It is just not possible to do complex and tight sequencing today with a normal Win, Mac or Linux computer. Even with my RME PCIe card. Your argument, "it wasn't a problem decades ago, so it cannot today either" is simply not correct.
by csomar | 2025-12-17 12:45:46+00:00
Except Qatar doesn't really have much Oil? They produce Gas which a different beast and used mostly for electricity or heating. They are also not friendly (actually hostile) to Saudis or the UAE; so they can't be working on this by proxy.

Have you considered that they are doing this because of humans right and .. /s who are we kidding this is Qatar we are talking about.

My only explanation of this, is that the collapse of the "order-based" system affects countries like Qatar disproportionately as part of their existence hangs on the respect of that order.
by squigz | 2025-12-17 12:46:08+00:00
This seems like a needlessly antagonistic response? GP was only pointing out that the voxel shape is fundamentally important to Minecraft. It's not just a matter of Notch's artistic talent, as you said.

Anyway I don't think anybody is saying Notch invented this stuff or Minecraft was the first to do certain things. But it's probably worth pointing out that, ripped off or no, those other games haven't become remotely close to the popularity of Minecraft, so Notch clearly did something right... maybe the Creepers are why?
Show HN: YapType: hassle-free yap-to-text for Linux
by deklesen | 2025-12-17 12:46:21+00:00
I found that having a quick way to locally transcribe what i am saying is helpful for my workflow, especially when vibe-coding or generally when chatting with AI models, as small transcription errors are mostly not a problem.

So I built YapType. It's just <200 lines of code total. On press of a shortcut, it transcribes locally and opens the result in your text editor - simple as that.
by nickjj | 2025-12-17 12:46:50+00:00
Having switched to Firefox about 10 months ago, one thing I notice is every site I visit works but a lot of sites load way slower than Chrome. YouTube is a big one.

How much of that is Firefox rendering being worse vs artificial slowdowns by Google owned sites kind of doesn't matter in the end. Objectively it's a slower browsing experience but I solely use it for uBlock Origin.
by moron4hire | 2025-12-17 12:46:55+00:00
The only reasons I've ever put effort into Firefox support in my software was A) I find it helps push me to write towards standards better if I include multiple browser engines, which makes it more likely I'll support Safari without extra effort, which is difficult for me to test on because I don't daily drive any Apple devices (works about 80% of the time), and B) to avoid the shit-fit I would receive if I ever posted it as a "Show HN." It has never come up as an actual user requirement.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-12-17 12:47:18+00:00
>I think people want AI in the browser

I don't. And the whole idea of Firefox's marketing is that it won't force things on me. Ofc course om frustrated. My core browser should serve pages and manage said pages. Anything else should be an option.

I'm beyond tired of being told my preferences, especially by people with incentives to extract money out of me.
by danaris | 2025-12-17 12:47:20+00:00
...Safari??

Apple doesn't collect your browsing data, they build in privacy controls that are pretty much as strong as they can manage given the state of the world, and while it doesn't support uBO, it supports a variety of pretty solid adblockers (I use AdGuard, which, AFAICT, Just Works™ and even blocks YouTube ads most of the time, despite their arms race).
by kgwxd | 2025-12-17 12:48:05+00:00
Fine, but don't make my machine do work as part of the agreement between host and advertiser (the only reason I can utilize an ad blocker in the first place). And definitely don't try to make it so my machine can't object to you trying. On top of all that, most places want to take my money, AND force ads, AND make my machine part of the process.
by ivape | 2025-12-17 12:48:13+00:00
Free money did not dry up. I genuinely couldn’t imagine the upteenth saas or data startup trend continuing for another several decades towards the end of the last one. There was almost nothing left to build until AI …

There were symptoms of it right here on HN. Lots of fiddling around with framework churn, not really building anything compelling. The 2010s were not inspiring in that regard, and I personally felt like it was an unworthy field … until AI reinvigorated it (speaking entirely from a creative standpoint).
by m4rtink | 2025-12-17 12:49:04+00:00
I would name PeerTube the project and the various PeerTube instances various organizations are running (like for example https://vhsky.cz/) as a good Youtube alternative.

Sure, you might not have all the media on one big convenient pile like on Youtube, but that is kinda the point (with no single pile owner there is no single entity that decideds what goes on the pile or not).
by chmod775 | 2025-12-17 12:49:18+00:00
> From what I remember, it's not addon-users, as most users never have used even just a single addon.

If most users who install Firefox do so for superior adblocking and those same users are also very likely to turn off telemetry (which I think some privacy/adblock extensions probably do by default?), then at Mozilla's end one might get the impression that "most users don't use extensions" - even though the vast majority of users do.

So to answer the questions of:

> Who is Mozilla's core audience?

It's probably the kind of user that has telemetry off. You don't know much if anything about them.
by palata | 2025-12-17 12:49:37+00:00
> I don't see why there wouldn't be people happy to pay for a browser.

I admittedly didn't check the numbers, but a comment in a sibling thread says that if Mozilla was to replace their revenue with donations, they would have to become one of the biggest charities in America.

Is that even realistic? Like would they make that kind of money just from donations?
by vintermann | 2025-12-17 12:50:15+00:00
Is that how it works this time, though?

* I'm into genealogy. Naturally, most of my fellow genealogists are retired, often many years ago, though probably also above average in mental acuity and tech-savviness for their age. They LOVE generative AI.

* My nieces, and my cousin's kids of the same age, are deeply into visual art. Especially animation, and cutesy Pokemon-like stuff. They take it very seriously. They absolutely DON'T like AI art.
by xmcqdpt2 | 2025-12-17 12:50:31+00:00
I think that's just true in general. Business users at $work are already saying that they would rather just talk to ChatGPT (with voice for some reason I, a keyboard person, doesn't understand) than deal with GUIs. They want to describe what they need and have the computer do it, not click around.

Once you've abstracted away the UI (and the training on how to use it) it will be a lot easier to just swap one SaaS for another.
by webdevver | 2025-12-17 12:51:26+00:00
irc has a very low return on investment. crazy amount of tinkering for what is ascii characters vaguely thrown in your direction. it clearly has cultural staying power (and it does act as a strong filter for technically-minded people), but a oneliner chatroom in your terminal is a fun option for both newbies who get easily intimidated, and pros who dont have much free time anymore.
by layer8 | 2025-12-17 12:51:34+00:00
I only have the most vague mental model of my body [0], and I also don’t bio-engineer its cellular innards, which would be the rough equivalent of what a developer does in large software projects.

[0] Which becomes painfully obvious when one ages, as all kinds of things start to hurt, and one doesn’t have a good understanding of why exactly, and how to stop it.
by ErroneousBosh | 2025-12-17 12:51:54+00:00
I used it on an IBM Workpad Z50 (WinCE device, really quite cute) booted into NetBSD. It had a fairly slow MIPS processor and 16MB of RAM but with a 1GB IBM Microdrive (spinning rust in a CF card format) and a wifi card (Orinoco Gold, recovered from a scrap supermarket barcode scanner gun) it made an awesome portable setup.

I believe taviso still posts on here. Pretty sure we chatted on IRC at some point. Anyway, it was taviso who had the coolest configs and that's where I got all my inspiration from, using it.

You know what? I might just fire it up on something, I'm sure I've got a netbook around here somewhere.
by kakacik | 2025-12-17 12:52:12+00:00
A reliable, corporate-friendly, with advanced support model alternative of Exchange + AD is something that could sink a titan like Microsoft in 2 decades, at least its non-cloud business (but then for cloud alone they are just one of many, nothing special there).

Literally everybody is fu*king fed up with M$ arrogance. But you can't get rid of Active Directory and Exchange. Make comparable alternative (with say 80% of most used use cases, no need to die on some corner case hill) and many many corporations will come.

This won't come from some startup, it has to be a company like Mozilla.
by theandrewbailey | 2025-12-17 12:52:47+00:00
> Also the other cores will do useful gameplay work so one CPU core for the GPU is ok.

In the before times, upgrading CPU meant eveything runs faster. Who didn't like that? Today, we need code that infinitely scales CPU cores for that to remain true. 16 thread CPUs have been around for a long time; I'd like my software to make the most of them.

When we have 480+Hz monitors, we will probably need more than 1 CPU core for GPU rendering to make the most of them.

Uh oh https://www.amazon.com/ASUS-Swift-Gaming-Monitor-PG27AQDP/dp...
by senfiaj | 2025-12-17 12:53:12+00:00
> I don't perceive that as an ordering issue. "Pure mathematics" has multiple division definitions, what we see here is the definition you use in class 1: integer division. The issue here is not associativity, it is that the inverse of an integer division is NOT integer multiplication, the inverse of division is the sum of multiplication and the modulo. Integer division is a information destroying operation.

Agree, I've gone too far with integer division. But a similar problem exists for floats as well. In abstract mathematics the order of some operations between real numbers doesn't matter, but since the CPU floats have limited size and accuracy, it does. This is why when you are calculating some decreasing convergent series, you should better to start from the smallest terms, because the accuracy would be lost during float normalization when adding a tiny term to an already large accumulated sum. A compiler is unlikely to do any optimization here and people should be aware of this. Compilers can't assume the intention in your code, so they make sure the program behavior isn't affected after the optimizations.

> Yes, this is because optimizing compilers are not optimizers in the mathematical sense, but heuristics and sets of folk wisdoms. This doesn't make them any less impressive.

I'm not implying that it's not impressive, but I'm implying that compilers still aren't magic wands, and you should still optimize the algorithms (to a reasonable degree). Just let the compiler do the microptimizations (all this register allocation golf, instruction reordering, caching, the discussed division trick, etc.). IMHO this suboptimal output in this particular case was somewhat expected because it's some "niche" case although it's obvious. I'm not blaming the compiler people. Yes someone could add that optimization rule for my case, but as I said, It's quite rare and it's probably not worth adding optimization rules for such case to make the optimizer more bloated and complicated.
by oriettaxx | 2025-12-17 12:53:13+00:00
yes, you are sure right, I apply here my prejudices against any big institution to whom citizens delegate power: as any institution may start well, then there is a parabola that tend to lower effectiveness and efficiency... and so on.

A quick search returned me figures of costs compared to population 'served', in which the EU is relatively lean compared to other national bureaucracy (first of all its huge cost in France!), but these figures are not comparable due to huge differences in duties...

For example I would suggest as an indicator: the cost in investment in EU to create a job

but yes, no doubt I personally I think any money invested in huge institutions to which people delegate power is a waste not just in money but in people ability to live better: as I wrote the 'regulation' approach I don't like: of course I like when (for example in protecting privacy) EU is able to face big multinational corporations, but I would prefer much more investments in citizens awareness about ...privacy, for example, to stay on that subject.

I personally think EU approach is: people are stupid (and, even worse, are allowed to be stupid, or up to: people have the right to be stupid) and our duty is to protect them by regulations and laws! (and often this aim justify any mean)

I do not want to grow up in a family where my parents have this approach.
by a2128 | 2025-12-17 12:53:34+00:00
Looking at the automatic first email and the network tab, this appears to be just wrapping around guerrillamail which is a classic disposable email website, and polling their API (doesn't seem to use websockets). Can you clarify what relationship you have with guerrillamail, if any, and whether or not the encryption and zero persistence claims extend to guerrillamail's service?
by jennyholzer2 | 2025-12-17 12:53:37+00:00
In my experience Google's AI summaries are consistently accurate when retrieving technical information. In particular, documentation for long-lived, infrequently changing software packages tends to be accurate.

If you ask Google about news, world history, pop culture, current events, places of interest, etc., it will lie to you frequently and confidently. In these cases, the "low quality summary" is very often a completely idiotic and inane fabrication.
by xmcqdpt2 | 2025-12-17 12:54:58+00:00
Also, having to retrain users to use a new shitty UI after they got used to the previous shitty UI is a major moat of many SaaS services. The user doesn't care about the web portal, they just want to get work done. Switching to a different web portal needs to be a big net positive because users will correctly complain that now they are unproductive for a while because the quirks and bugs of the previous SaaS don't match those of the new SaaS.

In a world where the interface is "you talk to the computer" you will be able to swap providers way more easily.
by rdm_blackhole | 2025-12-17 12:55:24+00:00
> The EU is just itching for any opportunity to get rid of US tech firms because they’re increasingly seen as sovereignty risks. And while the GDPR fines (that this likely refers to) appear huge on absolute terms, they are still low enough that US firms voluntarily decide to violate those laws and just pay the fines.

That is not even remotely close to the truth. The EU is not itching to get rid of Microsoft nor Windows nor Google. If these companies left tomorrow, the EU will have enormous problems replacing them if that is even possible in the first place.

The EU countries should have had a homegrown version of each US service up and running and on par with their US counterparts a decade ago, then the EU would have had leverage but as it stands, they have none.

Unless you think that every governmental office will switch to Ubuntu tomorrow morning, in which case I have a bridge to sell you.

Not to mention that the entire EU's messaging needs are met via US companies. Let's see how long the EU can last without WhatsApp, IMessage and Facebook Messenger.

My guess is not long unless you want to use Telegram which was most likely backdoor-ed by the French government not long ago.

This is the problem with the EU as it stands, there is really no mea-culpa from the institutions for their inaction and getting caught with their pants down.

All of this was foreseeable and could have been avoided, yet here we are.
by ineedasername | 2025-12-17 12:57:09+00:00
Yeah, though I can imagine a conversation like this:

SWE: "Seriously? import PIL \ read file \ == (c + 10%, m = m, y = y, k = k) \ save file done!"

Exec: "Yeah, and first blogger get's a hold of image #1 they generate, starts saying 'Hey! This thing's been color corrected w/o AI! lol lame'"

Or not, no idea. i've not understood the choice either, besides very intelligent AI-driven auto-touch up for lighting/color correction has been a thing for a while. It's just, for those I end up finding an answer for, maybe 25% of head scratcher decisions do end of having a reasonable, if non intuitive answer for. Here? haven't been able to figure one yet though, or find a reason/mention by someone who appears to have an inside line on it.
by zoobab | 2025-12-17 12:58:04+00:00
"effective antitrust enforcement, and escape regulatory capture"

Give me an example where Antitrust was actually breaking any monopoly.

In the EU and the Microsoft antitrust case, the remedy was to give the best poison to the competitors (free software Samba in that case) in that case royalties over patents.

Antitrust don't work, fines are too low, remedies are not working, and the administration is biased and politicized.
by palata | 2025-12-17 12:59:06+00:00
Do they like the browser, or do they like the fact that it's not owned by Google?

When I use Firefox, either it's because I don't have a choice (my distro doesn't ship Chromium in a way I like, i.e. not Flatpak) or because I make an effort to "support" Firefox. But once in a while, I need to use Chrom(ium) because the website doesn't work on Firefox. Not that it is necessarily Firefox' fault, but the fact remains that if Chrome was an independent non-profit, I would most likely use Chrome and not Firefox.
by jwr | 2025-12-17 12:59:32+00:00
> I'm just not willing to upload all these private documents of mine to other people's computers where they're likely to be stored for training or advertising purposes.

And rightfully so. I've been looking at local LLMs because of that and they are slowly getting there. They will not be as "smart" as the big models, but even a 30B model (which you can easily run on a modern Macbook!) can do some summarization.

I just hope software for this will start getting better, because at the moment there is a plethora of apps, none of which are easy to use or even work with a larger number of documents.