MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by LordDragonfang | 2025-12-17 21:13:19+00:00
> which I guess is true in a certain basic level...

Which is the level he's acknowledging it on. Short term profit that cannibalises product value and user goodwill is all-too-common in the modern corporate climate, and he's acknowledging the elephant in the room.

> ...but ignores how shitty that would contribute to making the internet

Presumably, that would be the reason "he considers it "off-mission""

While I agree that him phrasing his reason not to so weakly instead of "doing so would kill firefox" is a little concerning, a CEO probably doesn't want to be overly honest about the other, less investor-friendly elephant in the room, "the only reason anyone uses Firefox is for uBO".

But also, we don't actually know how exactly he said it, since it's not a direct quote. For all we know, it was an offhanded remark, or he said it in a tone that meant he knew what a terrible idea it was. We're trying to read tea-leaves from a single paraphrased remark.
by Groxx | 2025-12-17 21:13:32+00:00
tbh I think it's safe to claim they're strictly inferior to passwords, though in almost all cases they're literally identical (as you point out).

e.g. that phone call case: some places will tell you a temporary password (over the phone) to enter next time, and then you come up with a new one when you log in. there is no equivalent flow for passkeys, because you can't enter them by hand. a site could of course build that for passkeys (like a temporary password with special UI for entering it), but literally every site with passwords can do that by default, it just needs a general admin UI which almost always exists.

(most I've encountered will email you a temp password, and in principle you could email a temp passkey too... but that doesn't work by phone / for manual entry, and is there a spec on that file format? I don't think so? in your password manager right now: is there a place to manually import a passkey for a website? half of mine don't have one for passkeys, but every single one I've ever seen has a way to manually enter a password)
by kristianp | 2025-12-17 21:13:32+00:00
I find this approach strange. Surely if you're sorting data, don't do it naively by raw bytes. Use your knowledge of the data type and sort using the appropriate comparison operations of the data type. E.g. sorting by 64 bit ints little endian, do the comparison based on that. If using packed numbers, they must be unpacked first.
by dec0dedab0de | 2025-12-17 21:13:52+00:00
Interesting, but It doesn't answer why a bank would hold a completely vacant building for 15 years.

I think we need Vacancy taxes that go up based on the percentage of time vacant over different spans of time. Anything that makes owning an empty building a bad investment in all circumstances. This needs to apply to all units in a multitenant building.
by jorvi | 2025-12-17 21:13:59+00:00
> something closer to a real hospital team, where you have experts of different disciplines

That is not how hospitals work. The surgery departement won't have a crack team of different disciplines to teach budding surgeons everything. They'll only have veteran surgeons to guide less-experienced surgeons.

What you will have is interdepartmental cooperation / hand-off, and you'll have multi-discipline roles like surgical oncologist.

In the same way, you won't have devops seniors training front-end juniors.
by rekabis | 2025-12-17 21:14:06+00:00
I have been working with computers since 82, on the Internet since 88, on the web since 92 and in the IT industry since 97.

I have yet to see any solid, significant evidence that passkeys are materially more secure than a random 32-character password + TOTP 2FA.

If a site or app refuses to let me create my own login and forces me to use a provider, I’m not going to be a customer under any circumstances.

If a site or app refuses to let me use a password+TOTP combination (as in, it forces passkeys), I am similarly out.

That’s not to say I don’t use passkeys. I have them on my Microsoft accounts, for one. But that is only after I have fully set up the account, and that the account plays very nice with the Microsoft Authenticator app, even going so far as to do challenge-response auth in coordination with the app, and plumping TOTP up to 8 characters.

Will I switch to passkeys elsewhere? Not for some time to come. My passwords make use of the entire two-byte UTF-8 character set, in that less than ½ of all characters typically generated can be found on a U.S. keyboard. So long as websites don’t restrict password length to moronically short values, a 32-character password with 2,048 possibilities for every character ought to be reasonably difficult to crack.

And then, of course, comes TOTP 2FA.
by VonGuard | 2025-12-17 21:14:20+00:00
Imagine that, the United States is attempting to pervert truth into utter and complete lies. It's almost as if this is the only brand the United States has left.

At this point in my life if I see something with United States looks good compared to the rest of the world I just immediately assume it is a lie. Because the United States is nothing but lies and greed anymore. We cannot even claim innovation as a central motivator anymore.
by azamatvalitov | 2025-12-17 21:14:22+00:00
Hi HN, I’m trying to understand how people actually handle medication routines when more than one adult is involved (partners, caregivers, divorced parents, aging parents, etc.). Alarms help with remembering, but the harder part seems to be certainty: “Did I take it?” / “Did you give it?” / “Was that today or yesterday?” I’ve seen people use pill organizers, notes on the fridge, shared calendars, texts, and reminders, but handoffs still break down and anxiety creeps in. If you’ve dealt with this: What system worked best for you? What failed in practice? Was confirmation/logging more important than reminders? I’m exploring a very lightweight approach focused on confirmed timestamps rather than more alerts, and I’d really appreciate real-world experiences. Thanks! (If anyone’s curious, I’m collecting early interest here: https://medanchor.app/ — totally optional.)
by invaliduser | 2025-12-17 21:14:57+00:00
The first ad blocker was released in 1996 [1] and in 1999 we had a lot of shiny, blinking and very colorful ads already [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_blocking#History

[2] https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/exhibitions/web-banners-in-t...
by bdbdbdb | 2025-12-17 21:15:39+00:00
> If you ask it "given these arbitrary metrics, what is the best business plan for my company?" It'd be really hard to verify the result. I'd be hard to verify the result from anyone for that matter, even specialists.

Hard to verify something so subjective, for sure. But a specialist will be applying intelligence to the data. An LLM is just generating random text strings that sound good.

The source for my claim about LLMs not summarizing but abbreviating is on hn somewhere, I'll dig it out

Edit: sorry, I tried but couldn't find the source.
by ahazred8ta | 2025-12-17 21:16:01+00:00
Buster Crabbe had a cameo on the show as retired general 'F. Gordon'. Crabbe: "I've been doing this since before you were born." Gerard (who has been frozen for 500 years): "Oh? You think so?" Crabbe: "You'd be surprised."

Related: June Lockhart had a cameo on Bab5 with Mumy.
by vshabanov | 2025-12-17 21:16:30+00:00
It's still written in Ur/Web. And the type-safety of Ur/Web is the reason I started writing it -- I couldn't imagine myself using untyped JavaScript.

Ur/Web is not very practical for reasons other than type safety: the lack of libraries and slow compilation when the project gets big. The language itself is good, though.

Nowadays, I would probably choose OCaml. It doesn't have Ur/Web's high-level features, but it's typed and compiles quckly.
by snyhlxde | 2025-12-17 21:16:51+00:00
Today’s best LLMs mostly decode autoregressively from left-to-right, which gives great quality but is terribly slow. Diffusion LLM can decode many tokens in parallel thanks to their non-casual, any-order generation, but they must be trained from scratch, or expensively adapted from autoregressive (AR) checkpoints with a mismatched, non-casual diffusion objective; we find this mismatch often hurts quality and breaks many effective KV-cache related serving optimizations. This blog introduces Jacobi Forcing, a new training technique that converts LLMs into native casual parallel decoders. Jacobi forcing keeps the casual AR backbone and addresses the AR-to-diffusion mismatch by training the model to handle noisy future blocks along its own Jacobi decoding trajectories. This yields an AR model which behaves like a diffusion-style decoder—decoding multiple tokens per pass, but still from left to right—with up to 4.5x higher tokens-per-forward and 4x wall-clock speedup on coding and math, while retaining near-AR generation quality.
by epolanski | 2025-12-17 21:17:05+00:00
I've always found an enormous amount of good practices (not just engineering ones) in aircraft operations and engineering that would be applicable to software engineering.

I've always day dreamed of an IT organization that combined those with the decision-making procedures and leadership of modern armies, such as the US Army one.

I've re-read multiple times FM22-100 which I find strikingly modern and inspiring:

https://armyoe.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/1990-fm-22-100...

While I do understand that business leadership cannot compare to the high standards of those required by way more important stakes, I think there's many lessons to learn there too.
by soared | 2025-12-17 21:17:26+00:00
In the current world isn’t the “downtown parking lot” situation more common? Where the value of the asset is increasing so quickly year over year, that locking in a contract right now for x years mean forfeiting the increases of future years - meaning the value of your asset is more when vacant than when rented/built on? IE why sell my parking lot this year for $5M when I’m 2 years it will be worth $7M, so I’m better off waiting and taking no income for the next two years as opposed to taking $5M and investing it.
by strongpigeon | 2025-12-17 21:18:16+00:00
A problem is that the externalities of leaving a space vacant are not priced in. Having a bunch of storefront vacant in an area makes it much less appealing and devalues all the other properties surrounding it. It does seem like a vacant storefront tax, which is briefly mentioned at the end of the article, could address this, if partially.

This whole extend and pretend deal seems like it's simply accumulating risk hoping this will pass, while risking an even bigger, potentially systemic crash. Though I honestly don't know that much about the commercial finance world.
by curt15 | 2025-12-17 21:18:23+00:00
>How can you cite “precedent” when Myers v. United States decided this issue in favor of the unitary executive back in 1926? The administrative state that exists today was only facilitated by the FDR Supreme Court overruling a bunch of precedents.

And in doing so they reshaped the precedent. One can't claim Brown v Board is not precedent just because Plessy v Ferguson already spoke on the same matter.
by enraged_camel | 2025-12-17 21:19:29+00:00
"Independent agencies don’t exist" is not a serious description of how U.S. statutes and doctrine work. "Independent agency" is not a vibes-based label. It's standard terminology for agencies Congress structures to be somewhat insulated from direct presidential control (e.g. multi-member commissions with fixed terms and (often) for-cause removal). Congress has, in fact, established a number of such agencies headed by multi-member bodies whose officers may only be removed by the President "for cause." [1]

The Constitution may not use the modern civics phrase "executive branch," but it plainly creates what we now call one: "The executive Power shall be vested in a President..." Even if we grant the semantic point, it doesn't prove the legal conclusion you want. Congress's authority to create agencies and offices and design their basic structures (subject to constitutional limits) is well-recognized. [2]

You're also wrong to treat Myers v. United States as if it ended the discussion. Myers involved a purely executive officer (a postmaster) and is part of a broader removal-power line of cases. [3] Humphrey’s Executor (1935) limited the sweep of Myers in the context of independent commissions by upholding Congress's ability to restrict removal of FTC commissioners to specified causes (e.g. "inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office"). [4]

Your analogy to "congressional aides" and "judicial law clerks" is a category error. Aides/clerks are staff whose authority flows through, and is controlled by, constitutional officers. Independent commissions are Congress-created offices exercising delegated statutory authority, and the question is how far Congress may structure that delegation (appointments, terms, partisan-balance requirements, and sometimes removal limits) consistent with separation of powers.

Finally, the Woodrow Wilson citation is doing sleight of hand. The passage you quote is about insulating administration from day-to-day politics ("administrative questions are not political questions") and it indeed contains elitist/racist language about voters. [5] But (1) that’s an argument about civil service/administration, not a dispositive argument about the constitutionality of independent commissions, and (2) it's historically confused to imply this is a late/progressive "invention": as early as 1887 Congress created the ICC with explicit bipartisan-balance language and explicit for-cause removal language. [6]

If you think Humphrey’s Executor was wrongly decided and should be overruled, that's an argument you can make. But pretending "independent agencies don't exist" (or that Myers settled everything) just isn't accurate as a description of U.S. law, and someone with your background and experience should know this.

[1] https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artII-S2-C2-3... [2] https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R45442 [3] https://www.oyez.org/cases/1900-1940/272us52 [4] https://www.oyez.org/cases/1900-1940/295us602 [5] https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/the-study-of-ad... [6] https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/interstate-comm...
Ask HN: Are people using Agents to clone/port codebases
by stevehiehn | 2025-12-17 21:20:04+00:00
TO BE CLEAR: I am not doing this! But, I keep thinking about it. What happens if I give a large codebase to Claude and say "Port the entire project to a different language. Do not use any existing code or class/method signatures. Maintain all functionality, but use alternative architecture where possible" Is this a thing? In theory can people now just rip entire platforms like NBD?
by teach | 2025-12-17 21:20:06+00:00
> Is it used outside of Sqlite?

Not really. It's one of the early _distributed_ version control systems, released a little after git but before git gained widespread acceptance.

It has a built-in (optional) web UI, which is cool, and uses SQLite to store its state/history.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_(software)
by HeavyStorm | 2025-12-17 21:20:20+00:00
Thank God someone still has a functioning brain.

You should replace devs vertically, not horizontally, otherwise, who'll be you senior dev tomorrow?

Jokes aside, AI has the potential to reduce workforce across the board, but companies should strive to retain all levels staffed with humans. Also, an LLM can't fully replace even a junior, not yet at least.
by harmmonica | 2025-12-17 21:20:27+00:00
I’d support a land value tax myself so don’t take this following comment as criticism, but you don’t even need a land value tax in the case of LA. You do need to repeal Prop 13 for investment properties. I wager most of those years-vacant properties have a generous Prop 13 assessment and so the owner can just sit on it because their carrying cost is closer to zero than what it would be in any other tax regime. Then all of us folks around them continue to make the adjacent area nicer and they just ride off into the sunset while the absurd delta between their taxable value and market value increases.

Prop 13 is like the anti land value tax. Makes places like Texas look downright progressive.
by ssl-3 | 2025-12-17 21:20:34+00:00
If/when the bubble pops, manufacturers will find that they can't butter their bread like they could when the datacenter craze was booming. In a world that is paved by growth, companies aren't very good at shrinking.

It doesn't matter what consumers do or don't do -- we plebians are a tiny portion of their present market. We can buy the same GPUs from the same folks as before, or we can do something different, and it won't matter.

Whatever we do will be a rounding error in the jagged, gaping, infected hole where the AI market once was.
by tannhaeuser | 2025-12-17 21:21:06+00:00
SP/OpenSP and older SGML tools were most certainly available and used to assemble HTML docs from command line apps in the 1990s for complex websites with lots of content such as software documentation. The editor of the HyTime spec with its strong focus on adapting and transforming to multimedia and web was working with a training/education company. W3C's long-term validator service ran off SP.
by overfeed | 2025-12-17 21:21:16+00:00
Makefiles are a perfect abstraction over proprietary CI/CD DSLs and commands.

As a polyglot, having to remember and the difference is awful - so I make(ha!) local Makefiles that invoke the relevant tool, the same routine concepts (lint, build, or run tests) may be "yarn foo -arg1", "npx -foo", "go bar" depending on project and tool, which gets annoying when you're frequently switching between projects.

Big tech with monorepos solve this cognitive effort using a unified build system (blaze, buck, buck2). IMHO, Make makes a decent glue system at smaller organizations lacking a compiler/build/tooling team.
by omneity | 2025-12-17 21:21:28+00:00
While an LLM is trained on trillions of tokens to acquire its capabilities, it does not actively retain or recall the vast majority of it, and often enough is not able to make deductive reasoning either (e.g. X owns Y does not necessarily translate to Y belongs to X).

The acquired knowledge is a lot less uniform than you’re proposing and in fact is full of gaps a human would never make. And more critically, it is not able to peer into all of its vast knowledge at once, so with every prompt what you get is closer to an “instance of a human” than “all of humanity” as you might think of LLMs.

(I train and dissect LLMs for a living and for fun)
Ask HN: Local tools for working with LLM datasets?
by platypii | 2025-12-17 21:21:44+00:00
I’ve been doing data science for years, and am very familiar with jupyter notebooks and more recently been using duckdb a lot. But now I have this huge pile of output tokens from my 4090s, and it feels characteristically different from data I’ve worked with in the past. Notebooks and duckdb on the CLI don’t feel like they’re built for working with huge volumes of text data like my training set and llm output traces.

What have you found work well for this? I’m trying to fine-tune on a text dataset and be able to inspect the output from eval runs. I would prefer local and open source tools to a paid service.
by AlexandrB | 2025-12-17 21:21:44+00:00
The words "bigot" and "racist" have been so overused that they've lost all meaning. "Fascist" is not all that far behind. In a recent interview, Nick Fuentes (much more deserving of the bigot label than Eich) openly said he's a racist. I suspect he lost 0 supporters by doing this. Abusing the language like this has consequences - not good ones.
by devalexwells | 2025-12-17 21:21:53+00:00
For me, no. I hate writing applications, but not sure automating all of it is beneficial to either party. Applying sucks, I get it, but...

As an applicant, I often discover reasons for or against applying for a company during the application process.

As an interviewer, it's not a dealbreaker, but it definitely stands out when someone puts in the effort to write a clear, thoughtful application.

So it would depend heavily on what the "savings" are here. Where does "20+ hours" come from?
by FuriouslyAdrift | 2025-12-17 21:22:18+00:00
Not really. Within the Court, the divide is primarily between originalists and pragmatists. This has been a fight going back a long time in legal theory. It had been dominated by pragmatists since the 1920s and the tide started to turn in the late 1980s. The current Court is dominated by originalists.

It has little to do with political parties even though originalist thought is more aligned with conservative social and political thinking and pragmatists are more aligned with progressive thinking.
by 8cvor6j844qw_d6 | 2025-12-17 21:22:56+00:00
> anti-crawler protections

Sometimes I could not open the comment section, receiving a blank page with "... We're sorry" or something along these lines when opening from new private window. It works when opening normally.

Logging in on the private window seems to resolve the issue. Can you take a look on this if possible?
by bdbdbdb | 2025-12-17 21:23:10+00:00
I'm not saying it needs to be perfect, but the guy in this article is putting a lot of blind faith in an algorithm that's proven time and time again to make things up.

The reason I have become "bearish" on AI is because I see people repeatedly falling into a trap of believing LLMs are intelligent, and actively thinking, rather than just very very fine tuned random noise. We should pay attention to the A in AI more.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-12-17 21:23:33+00:00
Original web clients were not designed for (today's) ads. Graphics were optional. There was no Javascript

I even still use the original line mode browser and other utilties in the 1995 w3c-libwww from time to time

The "modern" protocols are handled by the local forward proxy not the client

TLS1.3, HTTP/2, QUIC, etc.
by CGMthrowaway | 2025-12-17 21:23:44+00:00
>In my reality, POTUS is doing everything he can to grind down Congress's power of the purse.

And it hasn't been working well. DOGE failed, SCOTUS has not yet issued a final determination on pocket rescissions, and the Fed can only buy treasuries on the secondary market, meaning the bond market is in control. There is also the debt ceiling which requires Congress to raise it.
by missedthecue | 2025-12-17 21:24:18+00:00
It synthesizes a more comprehensive report, using more sources, more varied sources, more data, and broader insights than a human analyst can produce in 1-2 days of research and writing.

I'm not confused about this. If you don't agree, I will assume it's probably because you've never employed a human to do similar work in the past. Because it's not particularly close. It's night and day. *Note that I'm not saying 20 minutes of deep research beats 9 months of investigative journalism with private interviews with primary sources or anything like that. I'm talking about asking an analyst on your team to do a deep dive into XYZ and have something on your desk tomorrow EOD.
by snarf21 | 2025-12-17 21:24:38+00:00
Agreed, this is like AI doing your homework. A select few will use it to learn but most will copy/pasta, let it create their PR and slack the rest of the day. But at least they are "trying" so they won't get fired. And it requires strong senior engineers to walk them through the changes they are trying to check in and see why they chose them.
by rayiner | 2025-12-17 21:24:47+00:00
I’m responding to the OP’s criticism that proponents of the unitary view of the executive “believe this is the government defined by the Constitution, regardless of precedent.”

It seems odd to complain about giving insufficient respect to precedent, when that precedent itself overruled a prior precedent.

I agree precedents should be overruled when they are contrary to the text of the constitution, such as when Brown overruled Plessy. There are a lot of 20th century precedents that are wrong and are based more on convenience and a desire to appease FDR than on the text of the constitution.