MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by acheong08 | 2025-12-19 16:49:44+00:00
Took me a month to learn jujutsu. Was initially a skeptic but pulled through. Git was always easy to me. Its model somehow just clicks in my brain. So when I first switched to jj, it made a lot of easy things hard due to the lack of staging (which is often part of my workflow). But now I see the value & it really does make hard things easy. My commit history is much cleaner for one.
by thw_9a83c | 2025-12-19 16:49:49+00:00
> I have no sense of what they stand for

There a nice Mozilla Manifesto explaining the Mozilla mission and their values [1].

Apparently, it's difficult to find a stable, independent, and effective revenue model for an open-source browser that is completely free as a product, should not contain shady ads or product promotions, does not sell user data, and always puts the user first.

This is especially difficult because there are other free browsers with a similar mission that don't need to incur the cost of developing their own web engine.

[1]: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/
by shadowgovt | 2025-12-19 16:49:54+00:00
This is a key insight.

In my day job, I use best practices. If I'm changing a SQL database, I write database migrations.

In my hobby coding? I will never write a database migration. You couldn't force me to at gunpoint. I just hate them, aesthetically. I will come up with the most elaborate and fragile solutions to avoid writing them. It's part of the fun.
by oxag3n | 2025-12-19 16:49:55+00:00
An army of straw men are worse than a single straw man sewn into a good argument fabric. It's just so obvious, which means the argument was never a point.

I'm not going to speculate about the intent and goals of this post and blog, just note that a small sample of posts I've read trigger disagreement for every statement at least for me.

Top comments here also express strong disagreement with multiple statements in the post.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-12-19 16:50:05+00:00
They have a class of attacks which are used for targeted intrusion into foreign entities. Typically espionage or cyberwarfare, so they're not often used (they're aware they might be a one-use attack), but some persist for a long time. Foreign entities also tend not to admit to the attacks when found, so if the vendor is a US entity, often the vendor doesn't find out. We do the same; when our intelligence agencies find out about a US compromise, they often keep mum about it.

I'm not talking about XSS specifically, I mean in general. An XSS isn't usually high-value, but if it affects the right target, it can be very valuable. Imagine an XSS or CSRF vuln in a web interface for firmware for industrial controls used by an enemy state, or a corporation in that state. It might only take 2 or 3 vectors to get to that point and then you have remote control of critical infrastructure.

Oh - and the idea that a vendor will always patch a hole when they find it? Not completely true. I have seen very suspicious things going on at high value vendors (w/their products), and asked questions, and nobody did anything. In my experience, management/devs are often quite willing to ignore potential compromise just to keep focusing on the quarterly goals.
by 0cf8612b2e1e | 2025-12-19 16:50:29+00:00
Heh. It was a luxury purchase at the start of the year when I was only worried about tariffs. Wanted to lock in a new build good for years. Every once in a while I have a machine learning project that needs over 100GB and so it is nice not to have to overthink things. Honestly, I’m kicking myself I did not go all the way with 256GB.
by somenameforme | 2025-12-19 16:50:37+00:00
I'll get back to what you said, but first let me ask you something if you would. Imagine Gender Queer was made into a movie that remained 100% faithful to the source content. What do you think it would be rated? To me it seems obvious that it would, at the absolute bare minimum, be R rated. And of course screening R-rated films at a school is prohibited without explicit parental permission. Imagine books were given a rating and indeed it ended up with an R rating. Would your perspective on it being unavailable at a school library then be any different? I think this is relevant since a standardized content rating system for books will be the long-term outcome of this all if efforts to introduce such material to children continues to persist.

------

Okay, back to what you said. 30% being attracted to the same sex in any way, including bisexuality, is a large shift. People tend to have a mistaken perception of these things due to media misrepresentation. The percent of all people attracted to the same sex, in any way, is around 7% for men, and 15% for women [1], across a study of numerous Western cultures from 2016. And those numbers themselves are significantly higher than the past as well where the numbers tended to be in the ~4% range, though it's probably fair to say that cultural pressures were driving those older numbers to artificially low levels in the same way that I'm arguing that cultural pressures are now driving them to artificially high levels.

Your second source discusses the reason for the bans. It's overwhelmingly due to sexually explicit content, often in the form of a picture book, targeted at children. As for "sexual deviance", I'm certainly not going General Ripper on you, Mandrake. It is the most precise term [2] for what we are discussing as I'm suggesting that the main goal driving this change is simply to be significantly 'not normal.' That is essentially deviance by definition.

[1] - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/301639075_Sexual_Or...

[2] - https://dictionary.apa.org/sexual-deviance
by CamperBob2 | 2025-12-19 16:50:39+00:00
Posting multiple links and asserting that somewhere within one of them the reader will find confirmation of an apparently-absurd statement amounts to an attempted DoS attack on the reader's attention. It's not a sign of good faith. Obviously a model that hallucinates 26% of the time on typical tasks would be of no interest to anyone outside a research environment, so regardless of where the real story is found, it's safe to say it's in there somewhere. It's just not my job to look for it.

On some classes of queries, weak models will hallucinate closer to 100% of the time. One of my favorite informal benchmarks is to throw a metaphorical dart at a map and ask what's special about the smallest town nearby. That's a good trick if you want to observe genuine progress being made in the latest models.

On other tasks, typically the ones that matter, hallucination rates are approaching zero. Not quickly enough for my preference, but the direction is clear enough.
by threethirtytwo | 2025-12-19 16:50:40+00:00
“It’s just math underneath”

This quote is so telling. I’m going to be straight with you and this is my opinion so you’re free to disagree.

From my POV you are out of touch with the ground truth reality of AI and that’s ok because it has all changed so fast. Everything in the universe is math based and in theory even your brain can be fully modelled by mathematics… it’s a pointless quote.

The ground truth reality is that nobody and I mean nobody understands how LLMs work. This isn’t me making shit up, if you know transformers, if you know the industry and if you even listened to the people behind the technology who make these things… they all say we don’t know how AI works.

But we do know some things. We know it’s not a stochastic parrot because in addition to the failures we’ve seen plenty of successes to extremely complicated problems that are too non trivial for anything other than an actual intelligence to solve.

In the coming years reality will change so much that your opinion will flip. You might be so stubborn as to continue calling it a stochastic parrot but by then it will just be lip service. Your current reaction is normal given the paradigm shift happened so fast and so recently.
by graypegg | 2025-12-19 16:50:42+00:00
I can't really defend Mozilla's priorities or business model myself, but I do agree that Firefox users create this massive pessimistic cloud overtop of firefox. From what little I know, the Firefox MPL license isn't restrictive at all, other than forcing you to not re-license existing MPL code. Another corporate sponsor could take on the torch, pay a bunch of ex or current mozilla devs/contributers, and make EarthTurtle or WindBird or something. Not just stripping things out of Firefox, but working on the browser engine/js engine/etc, starting from Firefox today and diverging.

Users tend to talk about mozilla like it's holding firefox hostage or something, but really the main gripe they have is building and maintaining browsers is beyond the scope of an individual. THEY couldn't fork firefox, but it's not impossible for someone with resources and connections to MAKE an entity that does. It just... hasn't happened again. Mozilla is a pretty insane freak-of-nature in the business world, and there's honest frustration about that which grows into "Firefox is doomed".
by striking | 2025-12-19 16:51:12+00:00
I do agree this is where AI shines. If you need a quick rehash of something that's been done a zillion times before or a quick integration between two known good components, AI's great.

But the skills you describe are still skills, reading and researching and doing your own fact finding are still important to practice and be good at. Those things only get more important in situations off the beaten path, where AI doesn't always give you trustworthy answers or do trustworthy work.

I'm still going to nurture some of these skills. If I'm trying to learn, I'll stick to using AI only when I'm truly stuck or no longer having fun.
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-12-19 16:51:15+00:00
> Why do people keep repeating this point?

Probably because like 1/4 of the American economy at this point is held up by surveillance capitalism firms like Meta, Google, Amazon, etc. all of whom's bread and butter is violating privacy on an industrial scale, so saying "TikTok is dangerous because it spies on people" is flagrantly hypocritical.

The fact that the big scary Chinese Government can tweak algorithms to elevate content and potentially sway public opinion is a fair criticism and I would agree with it, if not for the fact that the hypothetical situation being used to justify it is America equally openly funding and supporting an ongoing genocide. That barely qualifies as propaganda, that's literally just pointing out what the United States is doing and why it's ethically indefensible, and we could stop doing it tomorrow and utterly defang the aforementioned propaganda. But we don't.

And, lastly, TikTok is not going away. It's simply going to enrich Americans now, instead of the Chinese. A bit. And I'm sure plenty of that money will find it's way back to the Trump administration because our country is corrupt as all hell.

So forgive me if I've just absolutely not one ounce of patience for this bullshit.
by camwest | 2025-12-19 16:51:19+00:00
For me it's not about difficulty, it's about friction. BJ Fogg's behavioral model B=MAP says Behavior = Motivation × Ability × Prompt. When you increase ability (lower friction), you get more behavior for the same motivation.

AI lowers my writing friction. Same motivation, more output. I write more, I get feedback faster, I iterate more. That's the value for me.
by abhaynayar | 2025-12-19 16:51:19+00:00
maybe not the recruiter but the hiring manager or prospective colleagues who'll interview you later?

not the number of stars, but I like looking what people have done online ie GitHub/blog. I feel like it is a nice thing to talk about.

I know it's an unpopular opinion these days cause everyone wants work life balance and not work beyond the office but it's always nice to see projects you've worked on it does show some interest. also while one can fake GitHub activity it's hard to fake well thought out and cared for projects.

it's easier to fake metrics from your previous jobs like I saved X amount of money for the company or had Y efficiency gains.
by sorcercode | 2025-12-19 16:51:25+00:00
i feel your pain my friend. i really do.

i don't have your skills of actually customizing or changing glyphs in fonts directly but i've customized and used scripts to fix glyph characters available as open type features. I've done this for fonts like:

- [Iosevka](https://kau.sh/blog/build-iosevka-font-mac-os/)

- [IBM Plex Mono](https://kau.sh/blog/freeze-alt-char-open-type-font/)

- [Jetbrains Mono](https://github.com/kaushikgopal/JetBrainsMono-KG) (yes, plenty of customization there)

- [Recursive](https://github.com/kaushikgopal/recursive-code-config)

it really is a sickness. a terrible sickness, if you care deeply about fonts. I know you don't care specifically about recommendations, but inevitably i've found myself gravitating to these fonts:

1. Berkeley Mono (paid)

2. SF Mono (walled)

3. Recursive (truly open and legible)

4. Commit Mono

I love the above fonts, but there's a few characters or quirks that drive me bananas on certain days, so inevitably find myself switching between them.
by mjr00 | 2025-12-19 16:51:48+00:00
> Are you serious? Sam Altman and a legion of Silicon Valley movers and shakers believe otherwise. How do you think they gather the billions to build those data centers. Are they right? Are you right? We don't really know, do we...

The money is never wrong! That's why the $100 billion invested in blockchain companies from 2020 to 2023 worked out so well. Or why Mark Zuckerberg's $50 billion investment in the Metaverse resulted in a world-changing paradigm shift.
by antfarm | 2025-12-19 16:52:12+00:00
I have always found it way easier to write code than to understand code written by someone else. I use Claude for research and architectural discussions, but only allow it to present code snippets, not to change any files. I treat those the same way I treat code from Stack Overflow and manually adapt them to the present coding guidelines and my aesthetics. Not a recipe for 10x, but it gets road blocks out of the way quickly.
by mywittyname | 2025-12-19 16:52:53+00:00
My opinion is that these are not analogous.

Programming takes practice. And if all of your code is generated via LLM, then you're not getting any practice.

It's the same as saying using genAI will make you a bad artist. In the sense that putting hands-to-medium makes you a good artist, that is true. Unless you take deliberate steps to learn, your skills will attrophe.

However, being a good programmer|artist is different from being a successful programmer|artist. GenAI can help you churn out tons of content, and if you can turn that content into income, you'll be successful.

Even before LLMs, successful and capable were orthogonal features for most programmers. We had people who made millions churning out a crud website over a few months, and others that can build game engines, but are stuck in underpaid contracting roles.
by internetter | 2025-12-19 16:53:08+00:00
> Would love to get your thoughts on people who "have" social media vs people who abuse (or whatever you want to call it) social media. Is this like cigarettes, where having an account is too much, or more like sweets that can be enjoyed in moderation?

Erm, I feel most comfortable with an analogy to alcohol, perhaps. It has a high capacity to be abused yet is used in moderation by almost everyone. It’s almost incontestably physically harmful yet I still, of my own accord (as contrasted with nicotine which is addictive), choose to partake because there are benefits which I find valuable. I find social events much more enjoyable after a few drinks.

You can measure all these different harms of social media but I do think there are social benefits which are harder to quantify despite the companies who make the platforms being exploitive. It’s nice to see what my friends are doing. It’s nice to have a new avenue to hold conversations with new and old friends, far and near. I know that at points it’s taken a toll on me but today, despite considering myself to be fairly enlightened to the whole situation, I still continue to partake in social platforms and would likely reluctantly allow my children to do the same (I never really had open dialogue with my parents about social media, alcohol, and all these other vices. I turned out alright but I’d like to be there in that sort of sense for my children if I wind up having them in a way that differs to how my parents were.)
by jmathai | 2025-12-19 16:53:09+00:00
AI doesn't need or care about "high quality" code in the same ways we define it. It needs to understand the system so that it can evolve it to meet evolving requirements. It's not bound by tech debt in the same way humans are.

That being said, what will be critical is understanding business needs and being able to articulate them in a manner that computers (not humans) can translate into software.
by tech_tuna | 2025-12-19 16:53:16+00:00
I love that the dominant narrative with modern AI is "figure out who we can fire" pronto. I don't see a clear pattnern with juniors and seniors and AI. I know some younger engineers who are not embracing AI tools at all.

I'd say that AI tools make good engineers better and more productive and makes bad engineers appear to be more productive but ultimately makes them shoot themselves in the foot more thoroughly and quickly, while also piling up more work for everyone else.
by shadowgovt | 2025-12-19 16:53:19+00:00
My personal goal has been to dig that grave ever since I could hold a shovel.

We've always been in the business of replacing humans in the 3-D's space (dirty, dangerous, dull... And to be clear. data manipulation for its own sake is dull). If we make AI that replaces 90% of what I do at my desk every day... We did it. We realized the dream from the old Tom Swift novels where he comes up with an idea for an invention and hands the idea off to his computer to extrapolate it, or the ship's computer in Star Trek acting like a perfect engineering and analytical assistant to take fuzzy asks from humans and turn them into useful output.
by acdha | 2025-12-19 16:53:25+00:00
Yes, and serious voices have been calling for that since at least the Cambridge Analytica scandal. This is especially true now that the owner of X is openly calling for major political changes in the EU.

This only makes sense. People correctly understood that foreign media organizations are a risk to self-governance and the tech companies which took much of their power should be treated the same way.
by AlotOfReading | 2025-12-19 16:53:36+00:00
What about qmail? No one runs qmail and no one is writing new C with that kind of insanely hyperconservative style using only world-class security experts.

And it still wasn't enough. qmail has seen RCEs [0, 1] because DJB didn't consider integer and buffer overflows in-scope for the application.

[0] https://www.guninski.com/where_do_you_want_billg_to_go_today...

[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/820969/
by tomku | 2025-12-19 16:54:05+00:00
Two years ago there were also hundreds of people constantly panic-posting here about how our jobs would be gone in a month, that learning anything about programming was now a waste of time and the entire profession was already dead, with all other knowledge work guaranteed to follow. People were posting about how they were considering giving up on CS degrees because AI would make them pointless. The people who used language like "stochastic parrots" were regularly mocked by AI enthusiasts, and the AI enthusiasts were then mocked in return for their absurd claims about fast take-off and imminent AGI. It was a cesspool of bad takes coming from basically every angle, strengthening in certainty as they bounced off each other's idiocy.

Your memory of the discourse of that era has apparently been filtered by your brain in order to support the point you want to make. Nobody who thoughtlessly adopted an extreme position at a hinge point where the future was genuinely uncertain came out of that looking particularly good.
by bjord | 2025-12-19 16:54:06+00:00
I'm a kagi fan, but my family members who I've had try orion ran into quite a few issues. Might be worth trying one of these with regular safari:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ublock-origin-lite/id674534269...

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/wipr-2/id1662217862

on android I use firefox with the regular ublock origin extension
by cogman10 | 2025-12-19 16:54:22+00:00
> And that makes it a bad browser for you?

No, I'm just stating why using google as the default engine is user hostile.

> What's your complaint?

Mostly that it's a user hostile move. Is it bad enough to make me personally switch? No. Part of why I use firefox is because I don't like the idea of consolidation for browsers into one renderer.

Organizations can make decisions I don't like and I'll still use their products. I'm allowed to identify those as issues. Mozilla hasn't done something that'd make me boycott their products.

> Do you pay for Firefox?

Yes, I donate to the Mozilla foundation.
by op00to | 2025-12-19 16:54:57+00:00
Why compare a "full-featured", do-everything OS like Ubuntu with something pre-systemd when you're concerned about memory consumption?

I just checked a random debian 12 system (with systemd) running a bunch of services at home, and here's what I see:

$ free -m

total used free shared buff/cache available

Mem: 3791 320 2235 1 1313 3471

Swap: 99 0 99

Seems like usage is pretty much on par with your expectation. The largest consumers are systemd-journal which is storing logs in RAM, and filebeat which is relatively wasteful w/ memory. systemd itself (without the journal buffer log) consumes maybe 20-30 MB.
by jorvi | 2025-12-19 16:55:24+00:00
Not only Eddie, their account control panels and site in general look like something from the 90s, and it seriously hampers their business. I can't recommend them to anyone that isn't highly technical. And even then, as a technical user, why do I manually have to select one of 10-20 servers within a city or region, why am I being asked to manually load balance? Why is there no Wireguard over port 53 or 443?

It makes more sense when you know they're privacy activists first, businessmen second. But Mullvad shows you can be pro privacy and still offer great UX and a sleek site and client.

Btw, if you're managing things in CLI, you could take a look at their Hummingbird Suite. AFAIK it has a killswitch.

What sucks with Proton is that you can't share the VPN account with friends, because it is tied to your Proton account. They should create a vpn.proton.me subdomain that you can create a special managed account on that can only touch the VPN settings.
by threethirtytwo | 2025-12-19 16:55:45+00:00
Yes. If one thing is universal among people is that they can’t fully accept reality at face value if that reality is violating their identity.

What has to happen first is that people need to rebuild their identity before they can accept what is happening and that rebuilding process will take longer then the rate at which AI is outrunning all of us.

What is my role in tech if for the past 20 years I was a code ninja but now AI can do better than me? I can become a delegator or manager to AI, a prompt wizard or some leadership role… but even this is a target for replacement by AI.
by ipdashc | 2025-12-19 16:55:55+00:00
Is this still true? I feel like I haven't heard of any crazy cryptography revelations for a while now. My assumption was that cryptography was a bit of a special case because it was only government/defense entities putting significant work into it, up until the Internet/digital telecommunications became prominent enough that there was great individual and private-sector demand for crypto. (Plus the whole mess with it being export-controlled, obviously)