MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by imiric | 2025-12-17 19:48:58+00:00
I'm not swayed by appeals to authority, but this is a supremely bad take.

"AI" tools are most useful in the hands of experienced developers, not juniors. It's seniors who have the knowledge and capability to review the generated output, and decide whether the code will cause more issues when it's merged, or if it's usable if they tweak and adapt it in certain ways.

A junior developer has no such skills. Their only approach will be to run the code, test whether it fulfills the requirements, and, if they're thorough, try to understand and test it to the best of their abilities. Chances are that because they're pressured to deliver as quickly as possible to impress their colleagues and managers, they'll just accept whatever working solution the tool produces the first time.

This makes "AI" in the hands of junior developers risky and counterproductive. Companies that allow this type of development will quickly grind to a halt under the weight of technical debt, and a minefield of bugs they won't know how to maneuver around.

The unfortunate reality is that with "AI" there is no pathway for junior developers to become senior. Most people will gravitate towards using these tools as a crutch for quickly generating software, and not as a learning tool to improve their own skills. This should concern everyone vested in the future of this industry.
by dpark | 2025-12-17 19:49:34+00:00
> Attempts to characterize the above as hyperbolic probably stem from a mismatch in culture.

I think it comes from a mismatch in goals rather than culture. If your perspective on Mozilla is that its only job is to keep making and maintaining the #4 browser and funding almost entirely with Google search money then all of this stuff looks pretty reasonable.

If you think Mozilla should have a broader set of revenue streams and/or more products, then you probably have a different perspective.
by rayiner | 2025-12-17 19:49:53+00:00
Myers v. United States, written by Justice Taft in 1926: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/272/52/

It contains an exhaustive historical analysis explaining why the President has unrestricted power to remove executive officers.

The “unprincipled” decisions were the ones like Humphrey’s Executor that sought to find ways to implement the 20th century concept of an “expert administrative state.” That’s not the government that was created in our constitution.
by mapontosevenths | 2025-12-17 19:49:59+00:00
Where did you get the idea that he's the least bought? It's factually inaccurate.

He literally publicly offered oil executives whatever they wanted for a billion dollars, and though he didn't make that much (that we can prove) has been delivering on that promise since. [0]

While being "honest" in the sense of "staying bought" and delivering the promised graft is somewhat commendable, it's not exactly evidence that he holds some sort of moral high ground.

[0] https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/4961820-oil-bi...
by deepGem | 2025-12-17 19:50:12+00:00
What will eventually pan out is that senior devs will be replaced with junior devs powered by AI assistants. Simply because of the reasons you stated. They will ask the dumb important questions and then after a while, will even solve for them.

Now that their minds are free from routine and boilerplate work, they will start asking more 'whys' which will be very good for the organization overall.

Take any product - nearly 50% of the features are unused and it's a genuine engineering waste to maintain those features. A junior dev spending 3 months on the code base with Claude code will figure out these hidden unwanted features, cull them or ask them to be culled.

It'll take a while to navigate the hierarchy but they'll figure it out. The old guard will have no option but to move up or move out.
by drfolgers | 2025-12-17 19:50:17+00:00
Ads and page level analytics aren’t the only thing gathering data.

There is server-side now (and previously) hosted by the site owner.

It’s a lost cause to fight this. I admire you all for using FF because uBO just for the experience, but it’s only a partial data block. Serverside and thumbprinting- you can’t be anonymous even with Tor, VPN, etc.
by Animats | 2025-12-17 19:50:50+00:00
The constitutional language for appointments is:

He (the president) shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law: but the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments.

So the president can appoint various officials, but the Senate must, by majority vote, confirm the ones that Congress hasn't designated as not requiring confirmation.

On the removal side, there's this:

The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.

Note "all civil Officers of the United States". Any government employee can be impeached. A few judges have been impeached and convicted over the last 200 years.

That's all the Constitution says.

Cabinet members and some other high officials serve "at the pleasure of the President", and Congress has delegated authority for lower level civil servants to the executive branch and the Merit System Protection Board.

So the question for the various semi-independent boards and commissions is whether the president can remove them, or whether they need to be impeached to be removed. This is a real question where the members have a term of office set by law. Federal Trade Commission members have a 7-year term. Security and Exchange Commission members, 5 years. Federal Reserve commissioners, 14 years. Arguably, they should serve out their term unless impeached. The constitutional argument is that the executive branch has only enumerated powers, those listed in the Constitution. Since the constitution specifies both appointment and removal by impeachment, that covers the only ways such officers can enter office or be removed from it unless Congress provides otherwise.
by 1-more | 2025-12-17 19:50:54+00:00
I only addressed "who would want to carry this stupid heavy thing" because that's the only part of the comment I objected to. By now it seems like everyone is reading it as "who would want to carry this stupid heavy thing for the duration of a light rail ride" whereas I read it as "who would want to carry this stupid heavy thing at all" and I'm the odd one out.
by input_sh | 2025-12-17 19:51:10+00:00
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/company/

Third paragraph. They didn't go down the official YC route, they just let their initial users invest in it. How many of those investors do you think are among us here pushing it at every opportunity because it's in their (undisclosed) financial interest to do so? Even when it makes no sense to do so like here?
by CGMthrowaway | 2025-12-17 19:51:29+00:00
Yeah the FCC is really about Weiner[1], if anything, not Humphrey's. Weiner established some precedent of "inferred" independence for agencies of a certain character (e.g. those whose function is wholly judicial or legislative) even when explicit removal protections are not included in the law.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiener_v._United_States
Show HN: A netcat for the NAT era – connect peers via passphrase only
by gonc | 2025-12-17 19:51:56+00:00
Hi HN,

I’ve always found traditional nc frustrating when dealing with modern networks. It assumes one side has a reachable IP and a listening port—conditions rarely met when both peers are behind NATs, CGNATs, or firewalls. I built a Go-based netcat-style tool that enables ad-hoc P2P connections using only a shared high-entropy passphrase. No inbound ports, no known IPs, and no manual coordination required. Both peers just run the same command, e.g. nc -p2p <passphrase>

Practical example:

like a FRP alternative, no public server doing reverse-proxy, no exposed ports. For example, if you frequently need to reach 10.0.0.1:22 inside your company network, run this on any host inside the company LAN:

gonc -p2p <passphrase> -linkagent

Later, from home you can initiate a tunnel with the same passphrase:

gonc -p2p passphrase -link 3080;3080

After that, both sides can proxy to any IP:port on the peer LAN using the local SOCKS5 listener.

The "Magic" behind it:

Instead of a central relay or a complex VPN, it uses a three-stage handshake:

1. Rendezvous: The passphrase deterministically derives a unique MQTT topic and a self-signed TLS certificate/key pair.

2. Discovery: Both peers connect to a public MQTT broker (acting as a "bulletin board") to exchange STUN-discovered candidate addresses. The broker never sees the passphrase or the raw traffic.

3. Connectivity: It tries direct TCP first, then falls back to UDP hole punching. If the NAT is particularly "difficult," it uses a "birthday paradox" strategy (spraying 600+ ports) to force a collision.

4. Security: Once connected, the MQTT channel is dropped. All data flows P2P over mTLS. Since the TLS certs are derived from the secret, impersonation is impossible without the passphrase.

Key Features:

- No "Client" or "Server": Both sides run the exact same command.

- Zero Infrastructure: Uses public MQTT/STUN servers; no need to host your own signaling server.

- Familiar Interface: Supports stdin/stdout piping and -e for executing programs (like a p2p reverse shell or service portal).

- SOCKS5 Built-in: Can act as a persistent tunnel/agent to access internal LANs (FRP/NGROK alternative without the central proxy).

Why not just use Tailscale/Wireguard?

Tailscale is great for a permanent mesh, but sometimes you just want to pipe a 500MB tarball or a quick shell to a friend's laptop right now without managing nodes, ACLs, or login providers. This is meant to be a "throwaway" secure pipe.

Looking forward to your thoughts!
by reactordev | 2025-12-17 19:52:06+00:00
Do NOT do this. Anyone who gains access to the repo, gains access to all environments. I repeat, DO NOT DO THIS!!!! Do not deploy from your terminal. Do use CI/CD and do use environment variables and secrets to provide those keys from a secure location. DO NOT STORE THEM IN .git!!! All it takes is one dependency to ruin your day.

npm install at your own risk then and wait for the breach…
by jsnell | 2025-12-17 19:52:10+00:00
There are plenty. But it's not the comparison you want to be making. There is too much variability between the number of tokens used for a single response, especially once reasoning models became a thing. And it gets even worse when you put the models into a variable length output loop.

You really need to look at the cost per task. artificialanalysis.ai has a good composite score, measures the cost of running all the benchmarks, and has 2d a intelligence vs. cost graph.
by sfc32 | 2025-12-17 19:52:28+00:00
The multi-LLM approach is a great direction and I like the polished feel of the application. Moving up to a more project managenent approach is welcomed. I will download and give it a go.

One thought - vendors like cursor.ai have the benefit of highly tuned prompts, presumably by programming language, as the result of their user bases. How is it possible to compete with this?

On another note, I have played around with v0 etc, but AFAIK there is no really good UX/UI AI tool that can effectively replace a designer in the way that coding tools are replacing engineers (to a certain extent).
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-12-17 19:52:29+00:00
> Founders are special, because they are not beholden to this social support network to stay in power

Of course they are. Founders get fired all the time. As often as non-founder CEOs purge competition from their peers.

> The only others they are beholden too are their co-founders, and in some cases major investor groups

This describes very few successful executives. You can have your co-founders and investors on board, if your talent and customers hate you, they’ll fuck off.
by dragonwriter | 2025-12-17 19:52:39+00:00
> But that doesn't mean they go wrong all the time

They do, in fact, go wrong all the time, or at least, all the times that the actors involved are sufficiently confident that they think they can both gain something and get away with it.

Which is why the price of freedom is eternal vigilance, both to limit the occurrence of the conditions in which they go wrong, and to identify and correct the points where that prevention fails before they become a positive feedback loop.
by jdthedisciple | 2025-12-17 19:52:44+00:00
To those saying "OpenAI is toast"

ChatGPT still has 81% market share as of this very moment, vs Gemini's ~2%, and arguably still provides the best UX and branding.

Everyone and their grandma knows "ChatGPT", who outside developers' bubble has even heard of Gemini Flash?

Yea I don't think that dynamic is switching any time soon.
by sksq96 | 2025-12-17 19:52:48+00:00
I get the concern, but I think the arms race already exists. Corporate systems are optimizing for engagement whether we participate or not. A personal AI isn’t another persuasion engine, it’s a filter and advocate that lets humans opt out of that race by default. The escalation comes from asymmetry; giving individuals their own representation is what actually restores balance rather than intensifying it.
by Jiro | 2025-12-17 19:53:14+00:00
>The UI for this gets in the way and should only ever present itself if I happen to have both kinds of devices registered.

I disagree. It is very annoying when some service fails to show an option on the grounds that I can't use it. It makes it difficult to resolve problems. If the option is just missing, I have no way to tell whether the company doesn't provide the option, whether the company made some sort of mistake (they can't provide an email option because they lost my email), whether I made a mistake, or whether the company just has a bad UI that tries to hide the option. And don't forget the situation where I tried to google online for some help in using the UI, I found a 6 month old Reddit post showing the option, and I can't figure out if the company changed the UI in the past six months.

They should show it greyed out with a note "no key of this type registered".
by wat10000 | 2025-12-17 19:53:37+00:00
They don't become a CEO so they can legally kill people. Both types are committing the crime to make money. The killing is just a side effect. If you have the sort of mindset where you'd stab someone while committing a robbery, but you're smart enough not to commit petty robberies in the first place, then you probably won't have much ethical trouble with emitting deadly pollution, maintaining unsafe working environments, and that sort of thing when you're putting your talents to more legal uses.

It's not equating running a firm in general to committing home invasion robberies and murders. It's equating running a firm which kills people in the pursuit of profit as worse than committing home invasion robberies and murders. There are examples of such firms, so that part is just factual. The second part is a value judgment, but a simple "X worse than Y because X kills more people than Y" doesn't seem very ideological to me.
by free_bip | 2025-12-17 19:53:47+00:00
Right, it doesn't work the same for humans as it does AI agents.

If you finetune a model and it starts misbehaving, what are you going to do to it exactly? PIP it? Fire it? Of course not. AIs cannot be managed the same ways as humans (and I would argue that's for the best). Best you can do is try using a different model, but you have no guarantee that whatever issue your model has is actually solved in the new one.
by ashtonsix | 2025-12-17 19:53:53+00:00
No, but it could help people build those synthesis tools much faster.

P4Synth takes a (mathematical) group of functions/expressions and finds strong candidate implementations for every class in that group. Then, as long we have a fast (expression → class) mapping for that group we can use the generated solutions as a database embedded within the compiler for automated expression replacement (or mapping from expressions to circuits/technology).

Vivado/Quartus (FPGA) technology mapping and LLVM's InstCombine stage are essentially this. InstCombine's pattern library is partially human-authored, partially generated by search tools; it lists ~30k subexpression replacements like a+a+a → a*3. P4Synth competes with those search tools. For hard function classes, existing methods might take weeks on a supercomputer: P4Synth speeds that up exponentially.

It only solves a narrow toy problem right now (4-input boolean functions), but I believe the technique could scale with modifications (like A* style prioritisation over signal-set novelty and implementation score).
by n2d4 | 2025-12-17 19:54:06+00:00
What are some compiler flags that would compile the code such that an attacker could take advantage? And what would the attack be?

Or is this just a theoretical argument, "it is hypothetically possible to create a technically-spec-compliant Rust compiler that would compile this into dangerous machine code"? If so it should still be fixed of course, but if I'm patching my Linux kernel I'd rather know what the practical impact is.
by Leftium | 2025-12-17 19:54:17+00:00
Deeply nested comments become nearly unreadable. For example: https://hnplusplus.vercel.app/item/46288491

- comments are pushed all the way to the right side, in a very narrow column

- also must scroll down several screens of just colored stripes

Loading of nested comments could be sped up by using an unofficial API like https://github.com/cheeaun/node-hnapi

- This API sends all the child items of an item at once

- (However due to aggressive caching, many recent children could be missing)

I would add a max-width to the top nav, too. At 2560x1440, the top nav stretches all the way to the corners, making them hard to reach. (Also looks weird with the max-width of the content.)

Some items have over-sized favicons

- It seems to be the job posts, which all lead to 404s

Perhaps some settings to adjust the font. I find the font too small/light.

---

Here are some ideas you may consider taking from my HN frontends (they are both MIT open-source)

- Latest version: https://hn.leftium.com

- Still rendering comments from older version: https://hw.leftium.com

- Based on the HN clients I found most readable: https://hackerwebapp.com (with some ideas from https://hckrnews.com)

Mobile page down: tapping the numbers scrolls that item to the top. I find this more ergonomic than scrolling on mobile.

I reduced items down to two lines to fit more items per screen. I noticed I don't use the poster's id to to decide which items to open so I only show the poster's id on the item page itself.

Items always open comments; the posted URL can be opened from the comments page. (Personally, I always read the comments, and sometimes don't even open the original URL.)

I find highlighting the OP's id useful. I plan to also add toggle highlighting of other specific user ids.

Seeking orange: I highlight items that pass a certain points/comments threshold. First just the icon, then the number, too. Helps more interesting items stand out.

When I re-implement comments, I plan to create a view that focuses on top-level comments and reading a single "thread" at a time.

- So you can choose which conversations to read.

- There will also be a way to expand all the comments for certain users that are more interesting (like the OP).
by IAmBroom | 2025-12-17 19:54:34+00:00
> > You can't take pictures of the entire contents of a book and publish it.

> Copyright is "mostly" civil law, not criminal.

Does that matter? Seriously - doesn't the 1st Amendment also protect against the government raising civil complaints?

I think the better point here is: Disney suing you for copyright violations is not a First-Amendment case, because Disney is not the US government - so this isn't a Free Speech issue at all.
by throwaway__ai | 2025-12-17 19:54:57+00:00
Not the writing style, but the fact that the em-dashes and strange ticks make it indistinguishable from something AI-generated. At least take the time to replace them with something you can produce easily on a physical keyboard.

Edit:

Well, actually - this kind of writing style does feel quite AI-ish:

> It really makes sense, and the best part — customers love it
by the_af | 2025-12-17 19:55:04+00:00
> Incorrect, Raymond Hill authored both extensions, both being forks of HTTP Switchboard.

You're right, let me try to amend my statement: at the point uBlock Origin was forked, Raymond disowned the earlier uBlock, and it had become unrelated to him, hence "not the same author" (even if it was started by him). My point was that Raymond didn't want to become involved in the pay-per-ads-let-through scheme the commenter I was replying to mentioned.
by pcaharrier | 2025-12-17 19:55:09+00:00
Article 2, Section 1 says: "The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America."

Compare with Article 1, Section 1: "All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives" and with Article 3, Section 1: "The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish."

Who holds legislative power? Congress. Who holds judicial power? The Supreme Court (and other courts that Congress establishes). Who holds executive power? The President.

I'm no advocate for the extreme unitary executive theories of folks like John Yoo, but the idea that all executive authority is vested in the president can't be written off as something that some crank came up with in just the last couple of decades.
by twohearted | 2025-12-17 19:55:18+00:00
You can use sqlcipher on the command line along with the global password which can be found here https://x.com/m1guelpf/status/1854959335161401492

I looked at Screenpipe but it doesn't fill me with confidence. The ideal solution would be a device-agnostic self-hosted service for archiving and searching screenshots. Would make data migration super simple. And then the app snapping the screenshots could be almost trivial.
by moregrist | 2025-12-17 19:55:32+00:00
I guess it depends on your code base and whether you find more bugs from return values implicitly changed with the usual arithmetic conversions or from other aspects of C++.

I have not encountered that many issues with the usual arithmetic conversions on return types, at least not in a way that auto would prevent. Clearly your experience is different.

Perhaps we can both agree that it would be nice to force explicit numerical conversions?

You can _almost_ get this by wrapping the arithmetic types in a union with only one member, but that may incur a performance hit, which is often not a viable trade off.

> I'll take "unintelligible compile errors" any day over subtle runtime bugs.

As would the rest of us, but that’s not the choice that auto gives you. auto can cause subtle bugs with class types. It doesn’t necessarily protect you from integer narrowing, either, as you eventually have to give the compiler a concrete non-auto type.
by ryandrake | 2025-12-17 19:55:33+00:00
> Suppose, the next election cycle AOC gets elected, then puts in her cronies who require all stations to air 8 hours of pro-socialism ads every day. And there is nobody at the FCC to say "no".

Don't worry--if that came to pass, the Supreme Court would suddenly reverse itself and decide that the president doesn't actually have that much power over the executive branch. He only has that power when he's an (R).