MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by don-code | 2025-12-17 03:44:30+00:00
Sadly, you don't even need to engage directly with these companies to be affected. Case in point: e-mail.

I host my own e-mail. Valid SPF, not on any spam blacklists, good reputation score on my static IP.

At the beginning of November, I lost the ability to send e-mail to Gmail - it was all rejected as, quote, "possibly spammy". Double checked SPF and DMARC... Double checked documentation... Spent time setting up DKIM on my mail server, even though I sent nowhere near enough mail to merit it. Nothing got through for two weeks.

Google Postmaster Tools were totally unhelpful, telling me _that_ I was being blocked, but not _why_ I was being blocked. There is a community support forum where I posted - it hasn't seen a response since I posted in November. There was also a support portal where I could, in theory, contact a human. I sent something in there, and am still awaiting a reply.

Now remember, Gmail isn't just for @gmail.com addresses. Gmail hosts my accountant's domain. Gmail hosts the domain for a club that I'm part of. Gmail hosts friends who also have their own domains. Gmail hosts... well, probably a solid half of the Internet's e-mail.

My only way out of this nightmare was to reach out to a contact at Google, who - having an @google.com e-mail - was also unable to receive e-mail from me, and made the case to the right folks internally that I couldn't send important messages to him. A few days later, I could magically send e-mail to Google again.

Do I have any idea what I did? No. Do I have any idea what they resolved? Also no. Can I prevent it in the future? Who knows!
by topspin | 2025-12-17 03:45:17+00:00
In Lansing, it was below freezing and windy most of the day. If I noticed 100 people standing around on the pavement for hours in that, I'd probably imagine they deserved at least some regard for their concerns. But then, I'm not a Michigan politician that needs to get gamer Johnny out of my basement and on to a cushy non-profit no-show kickback job, courtesy of whatever big tech outfit wants a data center.
by vee-kay | 2025-12-17 03:45:32+00:00
English is of Germanic/European origin only. UK is a neighbour of Europe, and was even part of EU for years. Most of USA & Canada are comprised of descendants of UK & European immigrants. USA and Canada are English-majority nations, that were colonised by British and Europeans. So all these nations have the majorly common shared language: English.

But Mandarin is not of Tibetan or Nepalese origin. In fact, their origin is Bharat/India.

China is NOT a neighbour of Tibet, and Nepal. Their closest neighbour, and the one whom they share most of their culture & traditions with, is India.

Tibet and Nepal were subjugated by China, they never welcomed China. China invaded and seized the peaceful Tibet, and systematically dismantled the Tibetan learning centres and cultural centres. Tibetan monks were exiled or executed by China to destroy the Tibetan culture.

Chinese Maoists caused the massacre of the Nepalese royal family, and seized the government after a brutal violent civil war.

China/CCP is using Mandarin (forcibly taught in Tibetan and Nepalese schools) as a weapon to destabilize and destroy the native cultures, language and traditions of Tibet and Nepal. This is why Hindi is no longer the secondary language taught in Nepal schools, even though it makes better economic sense for Nepalese to learn Hindi, due to lots of Indian tourists and cross-border trade with India.

So your arguments don't sway anyone who knows what evils China is doing in these ancient Himalayan lands.
by QuadrupleA | 2025-12-17 03:46:12+00:00
I don't think formal verification really addresses most day-to-day programming problems:

* A user interface is confusing, or the English around it is unclear * An API you rely on changes, is deprecated, etc. * Users use something in unexpected ways * Updates forced by vendors or open source projects cause things to break * The customer isn't clear what they want * Complex behavior between interconnected systems, out of the purview of the formal language (OS + database + network + developer + VM + browser + user + web server)

For some mathematically pure task, sure, it's great. Or a low-level library like a regular expression parser or a compression codec. But I don't think that represents a lot of what most of us are tasked with, and those low-level "mathematically pure" libraries are generally pretty well handled by now.
by dommakravosec | 2025-12-17 03:46:23+00:00
I was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease a year ago at the age of 67. For several months I had noticed tremors in my right hand and the shaking of my right foot when I was sitting. My normally beautiful cursive writing was now small, cramped printing. And I tended to lose my balance. The neurologist had me walk down the hall and said I didn't swing my right arm. I had never noticed! I was in denial for a while, as there is no history in my family of parents and five older siblings, but I had to accept I had classic symptoms. I was taking amantadine and carbidopa/levodopa and was about to start physical therapy to strengthen muscles. I used different supplements that didn't work, so last July, I tried the PD-5 protocol—the best decision ever! My tremors eased, my energy returned, and I sleep soundly. I feel like a new woman, and I can walk and exercise again. I got the PD-5 from limitlesshealthcenter. com
Show HN: Obsidenc – a Rust-based paranoid-grade encryption utility
by markrai | 2025-12-17 03:46:57+00:00
obsidenc uses XChaCha20-Poly1305 with per-chunk authentication tags, so tampering is detected immediately. The Argon2id key derivation adapts to available memory (512 MiB to 2 GiB), adjusting iterations to maintain security on constrained systems per RFC 9106.

Sensitive data is locked in RAM (mlock/VirtualLock) to prevent swap exposure, and the zeroize crate clears secrets when done. Decryption verifies authentication before exposing plaintext and streams data to minimize memory exposure.

The parser strictly validates container format, uses constant-time comparisons, and rejects malformed inputs. Zip-bomb protection caps file counts at one million and path lengths at 4KB. Decryption uses staging directories with atomic rename on success, preventing partial extractions. Automatic cleanup runs on failure.

You can combine a password with an optional keyfile (up to 4 MiB). On Unix, the tool checks that keyfiles aren't world-readable. Keys are derived via HKDF with distinct domain strings, preventing reuse between encryption and nonce generation.

The design prioritizes security: no compression to avoid side-channels, symlink rejection, permission sanitization on extract, and a 20-character minimum password.
by mmooss | 2025-12-17 03:47:53+00:00
> They have for decades been wasting their time and money on everything BUT Firefox

They invest the vast majority of their resources in Firefox. And they have had some incredible successes: Rust, Let's Encrypt ...

> How can somebody like Mitchell Baker be making millions of dollars a year while simultaneously seeing Firefox market share drop to damn near zero?

Maybe there was no realistic way to do better. Maybe thanks to Baker, Mozilla still exists.

With Firefox market share plummeting, and little prospect for competing with Google on a free commodity product, Mozilla needed and needs to find other products and not just watch the ship go down.

What's your solution? Do you really think they could make Firefox so good that the non-technical public would go through the effort of dropping Chrome, despite Google's enormous marketing advantage?
by deaux | 2025-12-17 03:48:29+00:00
Disagree. Whether I'm entirely fabricating data that claims A by writing numbers into an Excel sheet, or whether I'm doing a survey that measures B and then claim it means A, isn't materially different in outcome. The outcomes are just as bad, and that's what people care about. Maybe you as a researcher care that the former is more immoral, but to everyone else it doesn't matter.
by mlmonkey | 2025-12-17 03:48:45+00:00
You are describing Searle's "Chinese Room argument"[1] to some extent.

It's been discussed a lot recently, but anyone who has interacted with LLMs at a deeper level will tell you that there is something there; not sure if you'd call it "intelligence" or what. There is plenty of evidence to the contrary too. I guess this is a long-winded way of saying "we don't really know what's going on"...

[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/
Show HN: Better Gmail Tabs – turn search queries into tabs for fast email load
by jharohit | 2025-12-17 03:49:06+00:00
Github repo: https://github.com/jharohit/better-gmail-tabs

Given how we use widescreen aspect ratios today, a tab interface has been significantly more faster to separate out emails quickly!

~~~~~

Key Features:

- Custom Tabs: Create tabs for any Gmail label or search query.

- Seamless Integration: Tabs appear directly in the Gmail interface for quick access.

- Customization: Rename tabs and change their text/background colors to organize your workflow visually.

- Automatic Coloring: New tabs are automatically assigned unique, complementary color combinations (random background with high-contrast text) so you don't have to manually pick colors every time.

- Context Menu: Right-click any tab to rename, recolor, or delete it. Admin Panel: Click the settings gear icon to manage all your tabs in one place.

- Smart Navigation: Automatically detects if you are viewing a label or a search result when creating a tab.

- Export & Import: Backup your tab configurations or share them across devices using JSON files.

~~~~~~~~~

I was using a similar one called Gmail Tabs by CloudHQ but they charge now $2 per month (How dare they! But honestly shoutout to them for doing it first \m/).

So like all geeks I used Gemini 3.0 AI Vibe Code to redo it in ~4 hours (initial build) and launched on Google Chrome Store! Also added tons of features like local backup/restore with json, automated tab colors, ultrafast response due to localized css and no remote load, etc - things I wished the CloudHQ guys had!

If you get a lot of emails like me, please try it and let me know how it is. OR any features you want - project is open source so you can add yourself! I will try to merge back once every two weeks and launch on webstore.

OR let me know if you need anything on https://x.com/@jharohit

P.S. I got excited to do this also because I did another extension last year to just click "save" in Google AIStudio (when they didn't automatically save AIStudio chats!!). 4.5 Star Rating, 2.3k installs, 8k page views, 1.7k Weekly Active Users (as of Dec 2025). They have since fixed this but somehow I still have active users..
by bsindicatr69 | 2025-12-17 03:50:39+00:00
> "Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished." — Lao Tzu

Ok, while I’m into this sort of thing, and there are other way of saying this that I agree with- this is inaccurate. Some animals, insects, etc. do sometime hurry. Scare any animal or insect and it will hurry.
by jhancock | 2025-12-17 03:51:04+00:00
The high level description for Tokyo's management could apply to Shanghai. Replace Tokyo's "elected mayor/assembly" with "party member administrators". Each Shanghai district has its own management structure.

The vague description "run by the central government as a province rather than a city" is uninformative.

Lived in Shanghai 10 years. The city is well run for something of its magnitude. Mostly competent leadership and cultural alignment.
by jdub | 2025-12-17 03:51:20+00:00
To simplify for a moment, consider asking an LLM to come up with tests for a function. The tests pass. But did it come up with exhaustive tests? Did it understand the full intent of the function? How would it know? How would the operator know? (Even if it's wrangling simpler iterative prop/fuzz/etc testing systems underneath...)

Verification is substantially more challenging.

Currently, even for an expert in the domains of the software to be verified and the process of verification, defining a specification (even partial) is both difficult and tedious. Try reading/comparing the specifications of e.g. a pure crypto function, then a storage or clustering algorithm, then seL4.

(It's possible that brute force specification generation, iteration, and simplification by an LLM might help. It's possible an LLM could help eat away complexity from the other direction, unifying methods and languages, optimising provers, etc.)
by RickS | 2025-12-17 03:51:36+00:00
As someone who has spent an unreasonable amount of time mucking around in this exact swamp, here are some things worth knowing:

* HEPA is the extreme edge of a much larger scale called MERV, which rates filtration performance.

* You'd be surprised how few contamination threat models _mandate_ HEPA. If you're doing petri dish work, contaminants you care about are probably in the 1 to 3 micron range or larger.

* This means you can get adequate results from lesser filters, which has massive implications for cost (because filters are cheaper) and ergonomics (because the same dollar buys a bigger filter, which is less cramped to work in).

* Laminar filters are only laminar under specific circumstances, which include both pressure and distance. Too much or too little force and the output will be turbulent (non-laminar). Fans need be adjusted to get this pressure right, across the entire face of the filter.

* As you get farther away from the filter, air falls back into too-low speeds and becomes turbulent again. The lids in the "clean" test for this post are farther away than I'd put them.

* As the filter traps more particles, it becomes harder to push air through, so optimal fan pressure varies for every filter across time.

* The pressures we're talking about here are very small. It's normal for correctly pressurized airflow to be undetectable to a bare hand. Easy to overshoot.

* In theory, you can test this with an anemometer. In practice, I've not found a cheap one that will so much as _turn the prop_ under such a light load.

* A cheap but inexact test of laminar flow is a vertically held lighter's flame being pushed to a flickerless ~45deg angle.

* When working in front of a hood, movement technique matters. If you put a dirty hand in between your hood and your dish, you're still blowing contaminants onto the workpiece, you're just doing it in a straight line.

* Or a turbulent line: obstacles like the end of the acrylic sheet can cause air to whip around the edge and become turbulent.

* Gordotek has a video that's probably of interest here[0], where he shows a cheap filter blowing zero PPM, as measured by a swanky lab particle meter that costs more than most people's rent. He received an enormous amount of heat from keyboard warriors that said this is BS and doesn't work. Notably, the number of haters who came with particle sensor readings of their own is also zero PPM.

* A laser PM2.5 sensor with 99%+ accuracy in the ranges we care about (1+ micron) can be had for under $50. This moves your measurement -> result interval from days to seconds, making it feasible to test more parts of the filter.

* Owning such a sensor, I've seen a duct fan taped to a trash bag taped to an unfinned MERV16 blow every bit as clean as a real-deal university lab HEPA filter in the 1+ micron range.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lInfdAVvBts
by bgwalter | 2025-12-17 03:51:37+00:00
Open source has three main purposes, in decreasing order of importance:

1) Ensuring that there is no malicious code and enabling you to build it yourself.

2) Making modifications for yourself (Stallman's printer is the famous example).

3) Using other people's code in your own projects.

Item 3) is wildly over-propagandized as the sole reason for open source. Hard forks have traditionally led to massive flame wars.

We are now being told by corporations and their "AI" shills that we should diligently publish everything for free so the IP thieves can profit more easily. There is no reason to oblige them. Hiding test suites in order to make translations more difficult is a great first step.
by rsync | 2025-12-17 03:52:18+00:00
"... and paint QR codes on the ground at those spots ..."

This is what "Oh By Codes"[1] are for.

Instead of trying to paint a QR code, which is difficult, you can just chalk a 6 character code.

Further, you can create them on the fly without using a special tool - just a textarea on a simple webpage.

You can encode up to 4096 characters or a single URL redirect.

[1] https://0x.co
by vessenes | 2025-12-17 03:52:24+00:00
Couple quick points from the read - cool, btw! It's not trivial that Simon poked the LLM to get something up and running and working ASAP - that's always been a good engineering behavior in my opinion - building on a working core - but I have found it's extra helpful/needed when it comes to LLM coding - this brings the compiler and tests "in the loop" for the LLM, and helps keep it on the rails - otherwise you may find you get 1,000s of lines of code that don't work or are just sort of a goose chase, or all gilding of lilies.

As is mentioned in the comments, I think the real story here is two fold - one, we're getting longer uninterrupted productive work out of frontier models - yay - and a formal test suite has just gotten vastly more useful in the last few months. I'd love to see more of these made.
by hatefulheart | 2025-12-17 03:52:30+00:00
Your tone is kind of ridiculous.

It’s insane this has to be pointed out to you but here we go.

Hammers are the best, they can drive nails, break down walls and serve as a weapon. From now on the military will, plumber to paratrooper, use nothing but hammers because their combined experience of using hammers will enable us to make better hammers for them to do their tasks with.
by move-on-by | 2025-12-17 03:54:25+00:00
For me, the complaint isn’t the AI itself, but the updated privacy policy that was rolled out prior to the AI features. Regardless of me using the AI features or not, I must agree to their updated privacy policy.

According to the privacy policy changes, they are selling data (per the legal definition of selling data) to data partners. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/firefox-deletes-...
by ThailandJohn | 2025-12-17 03:54:50+00:00
Hey! Yes I did. I started with treesitter tbh. And for go, rust, bash and hcl? I still do. In my naive beginnings, i really had no idea how complex things "were supposed to be", so i was never really deterred for it and kept building it piece by piece and very quickly? (Because I wanted "everything"). I hit hard limitations with treesitter, not only for "taint resolution" but overall what I could check, what I could do...

It "starts with symbols", you get the basic starter kit but then quickly it became "this proves it exists" but "not what it does". Which meant taint couldn't work properly because you want to track assigments, function call arguments etc to see how the data actually flows. Same thing with the rules engine. Without tracking object literals? xss detection becomes very shallow with tons of false positives because treesitter wont be able to tell you property assigments or call methods.

And it feels like it keeps going like that for infinity with various aspects and things I wanted know and track. So all in all? Moving away from treesitter and taking on the "mountain" allowed me (after losing weeks of sanity lol) to incrementally build out virtually anything i wanted to extract or check....It does sadly leave some "money on the table" for other languages, take rust as an example? Due to treesitter the taint engine is limited to no cross module resolution and type checking. So that's why :)
by alpha_squared | 2025-12-17 03:54:56+00:00
They're neither smart nor dumb and I think that trying to measure them along that scale is a fool's errand. They're combinatorial regurgitation machines. The fact that we keep pointing to that as an approximation of intelligence says more about us than it, namely that we don't understand intelligence and that we look for ourselves in other things to define intelligence. This is why when experts use these things within their domain of expertise they're underwhelmed, but when used outside of those domains they become halfway useful.

Trying to create new terminology ("genius", "superintelligence", etc.) seems to only shift goal posts and define new ways of approximation.

Personally, I'll believe a system is intelligent when it presents something novel and new and challenges our understanding of the world as we know it (not as I personally do because I don't have the corpus of the internet in my head).
by tjpnz | 2025-12-17 03:55:21+00:00
How about doubling down on your strengths? Privacy, customizability, open standards, defacto stewardship of the open web - to name but a few. What do any of them have to do with AI? Here's a hint: none of them.

I'm so tired of this bullshit. I can live with tweaking flags to remove the AI "features" in Firefox but I'm not going to use a fucking AI or "Agentic" browser. That's not what I or a significant chunk of your users want.
by montroser | 2025-12-17 03:57:32+00:00
We've been doing this at work a bunch with great success. The most impressive moment to me was when the model we were training did a type of overfitting, and rather than just claiming victory (as it all too often) this time Claude went and just added a bunch more robust, human-grade examples to our training data and hold out set, and kept iterating until the model effectively learned the actual crux of what we were trying to teach it.
by canyp | 2025-12-17 03:57:43+00:00
> but I even remember some IHV saying that this level of control isn’t always a good thing.

Because that control is only as good as you can master it, and not all game developers do well on that front. Just check out enhanced barriers in DX12 and all of the rules around them as an example. You almost need to train as a lawyer to digest that clusterfuck.

> The hardware (and its driver) could then decide what’s optimal and how to turn that into pixels on the screen.

We should go in the other direction: have a goddamn ISA you can target across architectures, like an x86 for GPUs (though ideally not that encumbered by licenses), and let people write code against it. Get rid of all the proprietary driver stack while you're at it.
by futuraperdita | 2025-12-17 03:57:54+00:00
> you're going to see people figure out how to be the digital Amish and run what they need locally and live without the benefits of the rest.

I've been a large proponent of what LLMs and the transformative nature of them, but for a lot of people running these companies, it's clear that it isn't about the technology and instead about control. I've even lost some trust in my Apple products throughout this as it feels more like a matter of time that they bend to this more than they have, especially with the shakeup.

I think it's OK if people want to use these systems - but if they don't, we'll let the market speak for itself. For now, I'm out.
by fy20 | 2025-12-17 03:58:02+00:00
I live in a post-Soviet city with district heating, and I'm not really sure it's worth it. Our network is government run, and they don't do a bad job, but it is more expensive per kWh (8c) than if you were to heat with gas or an electric heat pump (both 6c).

The heat source of the network is gas or various oil fuels, so it makes sense that it's cheaper to do it yourself - gas infrastructure is very optimised, and there are very little network losses in comparison. I think it only makes sense if the network has a cheap energy source, for example by using waste energy from industrial processes or utility-scale geothermal.
by MattRix | 2025-12-17 03:58:08+00:00
Why not? Surely it would feel better giving up the money knowing that everyone as wealthy as him had to give up the same amount. At a certain level, wealth is mostly used for comparative purposes anyway, so even less of the utility of his money would be lost in that situation.

On top of that, the impact of one wealthy person giving up some of their money is minor, but when you combine all wealthy people, the effect would be dramatic.