MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Yizahi | 2025-12-17 11:48:44+00:00
That happens quite often these days. Last week I was filling in a govt form (EU country), submit button didn't work in FF, so I had to resort to using Microsoft Chrome. On my company's training platform videos aren't rendered in FF. Another shitty corporate portal which shows my salary and holidays doesn't work in FF at all, completely. What else... A few smaller payment providers weren't working in FF over past two years. Ghost of the Skype before being finally killed only worked in Chrome clones. Stadia only worked in Chrome (yes, I used it and it was fine).

Also many sites show significant degradation in FF lately. Youtube works like shit in FF, once every 10 page opens it just gets stuck half way with part of the background loaded, like black with black empty frames on top. Or just empty page. No, it never finishes loading from that state, and neither it can reload on F5. But opening a new tab works fine and YT loads normally.

And to finish off this rant, FF has now started corrupting my open tabs after opening FF with saved session. This never happened since this feature was implemented and in 2025 has happened 3 times already. And in mozilla bugtracker all tickets about this are ignored for years now. Meanwhile they are developing some crappy bells and whistles, instead of fixing fundamental bugs.

If not for Chrome monopoly, I would consider switching browsers. Ladybird can't come soon enough. Mozilla has lost touch with reality.
by sam_goody | 2025-12-17 11:50:32+00:00
I have a counterpoint from yesterday.

I looked up a medical term, that is frequently misused (eg. "retarded"), and asked the Gemini to compare it with similar conditions.

Because I have enough of a background in the subject matter, I could tell what it had construed by its mixing the many incorrect references with the much fewer correct references in the training data.

I asked it for sources, and it failed to provide anything useful. But once I am looking at sources, I would be MUCH better off searching and only reading the sources might actually be useful.

I was sitting with a medical professional at the time (who is not also a programmer) and he completely swallowed what Gemini was feeding him. He commented that he appreciates that these summaries let him know when he is not up to date with the latest advances, and he learnt alot from the response.

As an aside, I am not sure I appreciate that Google's profile would now associate me with that particular condition.

Scary!
by bentley | 2025-12-17 11:50:37+00:00
Yes, in American English it depends on which syllable has stress. Compare:

dueled, paralleled, canceled, pedaled, but controlled, compelled, extolled, appalled

levered, snickered, but occurred, deferred

focused, biased, censused, but compressed, embussed, outgassed

worshiped, but entrapped (although even in America kidnapped seems more common than kidnaped—one of Webster’s less successful reforms)
by graemep | 2025-12-17 11:50:48+00:00
They can compete where the alternatives are also US based services.

They can compete in the US.

There are also many people who are more concerned about privacy from businesses than from governments. There are also people who are more concerned about privacy from their own government than a foreign government.

Although the Cloud Act and similar issues with the US are much discussed here, I see no sign it loses American big tech much business.
by ben_w | 2025-12-17 11:52:10+00:00
The docs I upload are ones I'd be OK getting leaked. That also includes code. Even more broadly, it also includes whatever pics I put onto social media, including chat groups like Telegram.

This does mean that, useful as e.g. Claude Code is, for any business with NDA-type obligations, I don't think I could recommend it over a locally hosted model, even though the machine needed to run a decent local model might cost €10k (with current price increases due to demand exceeding supply), that the machine is still slower than what hosts the hosted models, that the rapid rate of improvement means a 3-month delay between SOTA in open-weights and private-weights is enough to matter*.

But until then? If I'm vibe coding a video game I'd give away for free anyway, or copy-editing a blog post that's public anyway, or using it to help with some short stories that I'd never be able to charge money for, or uploading pictures of the plants in my garden right by the public road… that's fine.

* When the music (money for training) stops, it could be just about any provider whose model is best, whatever that is is likely to still get distilled down fairly cheaply and/or some 3-month-old open-weights model is likely to get fine-tuned for each task fairly cheaply; independently of this, without the hyper-scalers the supply chains may shift back from DCs to PCs and make local models much more affordable.
by pron | 2025-12-17 11:52:40+00:00
You can write proofs in TLA+ about things you don't exectute and have them checked by the TLA+ proof assistant. But the most common aspect of that, which pretty much every TLA+ spec contains is nondeterminism, which is basically the ability to describe a system with details you don't know or care about. For example, you can describe "a program that sorts an array" without specifying how and then prove, say, that the median value ends up in the middle. The ability to specify what a program or a subroutine does without specifying how is what separates the expressive power of specification from programming. This extends not only to the program itself but to its environment. For example, it's very common in TLA+ to specify a network that can drop or reorder messages nondeterministically, and then prove that the system doesn't lose data despite that.
by coryrc | 2025-12-17 11:52:42+00:00
Aha, I think I get the confusion. Deep oil penetration is easy. The problem is not filling every pore (void) with resin. I mean, you can do that if you want, look up PEG https://www.rockler.com/polyethylene-glycol-peg-green-wood-s...

But usually you don't want to. The pores and void structures are part of what makes wood, wood. If you managed to fill everything with polymers then what you have is cellulose-fiber-reinforced plastic and not really what people mean when they talk about "wood". (Wood being a tangled, but directed mess of cellulose fibers lightly glued with lignin)

What you're trying to do with finishes is coat the surfaces with just a little more even of a layer of polymer; that includes the pores too, but just their surface and not their volume. Wood had good wicking action and will evenly distribute oil (or water) on its own. If you tried deep frying, you don't have enough time for the oil to evenly distribute.
by ajdude | 2025-12-17 11:54:20+00:00
I'm going to repost/merge a few comments I made about this a while ago:

I dropped firefox 9 months so after they updated their privacy policy and removed "we don't sell your data" from their FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43213612

Mozilla has hired a lot of execs from Meta and bought an ad company, looking through a lot of their privacy policy at the time, a lot of it involves rewriting it to say that they can serve you sponsored suggestions when you're searching for things in their search bar and stuff and sharing out some of that data with third parties etc.

Firefox was bringing in half a billion a year for the last decade, if they would've just invested that money in low risk money market accounts (instead of paying their csuite executives millions of dollars in salary and putting the rest on non-Firefox related related social causes), the company would be able to easily survive off the interest alone.

I've been using Firefox since 2006 and have defended it for decades even when they've made questionable decisions that have gotten everybody upset with them. But this time it wasn't just making stupid decisions to try and fund the company, this time they actuality sold out their own customers.

In public announcement in the above link explaining why they removed "we don't sell your data" from the FAQ, the rationality was that some jurisdictions define selling data weirdly, they cited California's definition as an example but California's definition is exactly what I would consider the definition of selling my personal data.

They're justifying this by saying that they need it to stay alive since they're not going to be getting money from Google anymore, but I argue that you shouldn't sell out your customer base on the very specific reason anyone would choose you. I would rather pay a monthly fee to use Firefox to support them, but even if you gave them $500 million today they would just squander it away like they've done since forever so I really don't have any solution I can think of which frustrates me.

I switched to Orion (and use Safari if a site doesn't work in Orion), which can be a little buggy at times but I'm happy that it's not based on chrome at least.
by WA | 2025-12-17 11:55:32+00:00
Good article! A few thoughts popped into my head while reading:

- My favorite deployment is rsync over SSH and occasionally, I still upload a file over SFTP.

- MongoDB will always AWALYS be in my mind as the buggy database that bought itself into dev minds with lots of money but ultimately was all hype and risky to use from a business perspective. Turns out, especially with the rise of TypeScript that most data has a solid structure anyways and while NoSQL has its places, most projects benefit from good old SQL.

- Slack launched in 2013? Man, time flies.

- I still hardly use Docker and just deploy straight to a VPS running Debian.

- I remember the first years of TypeScript, which were kinda tough. Many projects had no types. I sometimes considered to use one package over another just because they had proper types.

- VSCode is a good thing and if you don't go too crazy with plugins, it works stable and performant. I like it.

- Next.js gives me MongoDB vibes. An over-engineered, way too "magical" framework that hijacked developer minds and is built on the weird assumption that React, a DOM manipulation library, belongs on the server. I never got the appeal and I will just wait this out. Meanwhile, I'm having fun with Hono. Easy to build API-based backends as well as MPAs with server-side HTML generation, runs on Node, Bun, Deno and whatnot, feels lightweight and accessible and gives me a lot of control.
by nasmorn | 2025-12-17 11:55:34+00:00
I think each company should pay a low rate on all money passing through. Let’s say 0.1 to 1%. Building huge pyramids of shell companies has probably no economic benefit and is mostly done to evade some regulation or taxes or liability. The ideas how to abuse this are too numerous to count so the government should not try to but simply disincentivize the use of corporations just a little bit. The cost would be borne by the individuals who have the most elaborate company architectures which is probably synonymous with the biggest tax evaders.
by bluehatbrit | 2025-12-17 11:55:58+00:00
Google pay Mozilla hundreds of millions of dollars each year to place Google as the default browser. It's by far their biggest income stream. In 2023 it was reported as 75% of their revenue.

There's no world in which 75% of your revenue coming from Google doesn't influence what you do. Even if it's not the main driver of all decisions, pissing off Google is a huge risk for them.
by pron | 2025-12-17 11:57:52+00:00
To make this more constructive, I think that today AI tools are useful when they do things you already know how to do and can assess the quality of the output. So if you know how to read and write a formal specification, LLMs can already help translating natural-language descriptions to a formal spec.

It's also possible that LLMs can, by themselves, prove the correctness of some small subroutines, and produce a formal proof that you can check in a proof checker, provided you can at least read and understand the statement of the proposition.

This can certainly make formal verification easier, but not necessarily more mainstream.

But once we extrapolate the existing abilities to something that can reliably verify real large or medium-sized programs for a human who cannot read and understand the propositions (and the necessary simplifying assumptions) that it's hard to see a machine do that and at the same time not able to do everything else.
by gsf_emergency_6 | 2025-12-17 11:58:02+00:00
On what axis was it polarizing.. it was maybe a social media for the well-connected, so.. elitist vs populist?

I've come to appreciate Sixto over Bob Dylan, because he reminds me of some vital "(in)efficacies" that I can see(?) in the participants here :)

Lagniappe (Joan's dad): https://pubs.aip.org/aapt/ajp/article-abstract/28/3/254/1036...
by robbie-c | 2025-12-17 12:00:09+00:00
There's proof of financial dependence, here's a recent report https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2021/mozilla-fdn-202...

In 2021 they got $500M "royalties" (this is their payment from Google) with only $75k revenue from all other sources, including $7.5k donations.
by tonis2 | 2025-12-17 12:00:09+00:00
Getting rid of cruft and simplifying the GPU access, makes it easier to develope software that uses GPU's, like AI's, games ..etc.

Have you taken a look at the codebase of some game-engines, its complete cluster fk, cause some simple tasks just take 800 lines of code, and in the end the drivers don't even use the complexity graphics API's force upon you.

Improved this is not an accomplishment ?
by simiones | 2025-12-17 12:00:57+00:00
It's not impossible that people would pay Firefox that much yearly to keep their current user-base from using ad blockers. However, what is impossible is to imagine Firefox would have anything close to their current user base if people were prevented from using ad blockers. Most likely they would shrink to almost 0 users overnight if they did this. There are very few reasons to use Firefox over Chrome or Safari (or even Edge) other than the much better ad blocking (or any ad blocking, on mobile).
by ofalkaed | 2025-12-17 12:01:40+00:00
Infinite scroll should be outlawed.

Rainbow indentation and opening links in new tabs would be nice although I think rainbow could result in ambiguous colors?. Embedding videos could possibly get me to switch if added, but maybe not, I think the deficiencies of HN are part of what makes it work. Looks good/works good on mobile but not big on the desktop layout, I will probably try it out for abit when browsing on my phone.

Page title is "Create Next App," which is confusing on desktop where I just have tabs with their titles and not thumbnails of the page.
Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (Mid – December 2025)
by paulwilsonn | 2025-12-17 12:02:07+00:00
https://capitalreach.ai/

We’re rebuilding the core of our investor outreach tool.

This month we replaced our old investor list + campaign system with an organization-based model. Instead of individual, messy contact lists, everything is now structured around verified organizations, which makes targeting and scaling a lot saner.

What changed:

10,000+ verified investor organizations

Cleaner data → fewer bounced emails, less manual filtering

Faster campaign setup (less configuration, fewer edge cases)

A foundation that lets us add smarter targeting and sequencing later

This was a breaking change, so we reset existing lists and campaigns. Users just re-onboard, reconnect email, and relaunch — takes ~2–3 minutes.

Still early, but the new structure already feels more reliable than what we had before.

Curious what others here are rebuilding or shipping this month
by madog | 2025-12-17 12:02:43+00:00
It's not entirely, because Github simply does not support inter-version diffs when you have multiple commits. If you force push onto multiple commits there is no way to show a diff between version 2 and version 3 of those commits. How Github lacks such basic (and imo necessary) functionality in 2025 is amazing to me.

Something like linked and dependent PRs in a chain would go someway to replicating Gerrit but again this basic functionality is not available out of the box for whatever reason.
by phantasmish | 2025-12-17 12:03:06+00:00
As a kid I had a bunch in this scale in the ‘90s, purchased in bags of something like 50-100 pieces each from an Everything’s-a-Dollar.

They were among my favorite toys for a long while (and so cheap!). Certainly my favorite “army men”. So detailed, so specific. So many poses. Their size meant a modest living room could host grand, complicated battles. Just great. I’d never seen them for sale since, but I guess that’s because they’d have been in hobbyist shops, not the toy aisle, ordinarily.
by simonw | 2025-12-17 12:03:28+00:00
The biggest value I got from JustHTML here was the API design.

I think that represents the bulk of the human work that went into JustHTML - it's really nice, and lifting that directly is the thing that let me build my library almost hands-off and end up with a good result.

Without that I would have had to think a whole lot more about what I was doing here!
by hopelite | 2025-12-17 12:03:35+00:00
Ignoring the perfect example of selection bias you have there, people have no idea just how much the “immigration” and “refugee” thing is a function of conquering their home countries for the empire and installing them as the governors and apparatchiks of the vassalage.

It’s one of the reasons why the ruling class of the empire loves immigration, it means those people can be used to conquer their home country. That applies to Ethiopians as much as Chinese and Indians, they are tools. It’s more complicated than that, but that’s the gist; immigrants and refugees are tools, just like how slaves are/were tools to the ruling class for other purposes. Today the ruling class puts their tools through education and gives them resources and opportunities and even funds them to make them heads of “NGOs” above and beyond their own people; so that those immigrants can become agents of the empire’s ruling class, to expand the empire into their home countries.

It’s quite an ingenious and diabolical manipulation, but that’s why the ruling class of the empire rules you.

Btw, I know this for a fact. I’ve been in the conversations about these kinds of matters. You didn’t think we support immigration out of the goodness of our heart, did you? It’s so easy to manipulate the peasants, especially when they personally have things to gain.
by jacobp100 | 2025-12-17 12:04:15+00:00
This basically makes a rust server to do the routing, then uses the Boa JS engine to evaluate the JS to handle the route

With this approach, you might be able to do some multithreading to improve the throughput

However, each request is almost guaranteed to be slower because V8 will be faster than Boa

You could also achieve this by spinning up multiple NodeJS instances and putting an nginx server in front to do load balancing - which is pretty standard practice
by grunder_advice | 2025-12-17 12:04:27+00:00
> There was no 'regime', there was a democracy with corruption problems

OK.

> but that was still functional

Clearly not, because Chavez was elected despite having attempted a coup d'etat previously. Clearly not, because the coup d'etat against Chavez failed because the population was overwhelming supporting him.

> populist dismantle the state institutions and turn it into an oligarchy ran by his circle

Which was necessary because previously it was an oligarchy ran by an opposing circle, which lost favor with the people.

> It was never about classism or racism

It's classism, partly fueled by racism, which causes the ruling elite in Latin America to have such disdain for the rest of the population, that they believe they can take control of the country and govern it as if they were some kind of aristocracy, and completely ignore those beneath them, because they aren't of the right class, are not white enough, and don't have enough wealth, to be taken into consideration.
by inesranzo | 2025-12-17 12:04:37+00:00
This is the worst headline that I ever had the misfortune to lay my eyes on.

I cannot unsee this and it is forever now an additional burden of unwanted knowledge on the existing reality of Japan’s declining population and fertility crisis.

Each time there is a glimmer of hope of a trend reversing or going back to normal, a headline like this just unfortunately confirms in some sense what I already know.

Now this news made this situation even worse.

Happy for them, hoping this is a super strange outlier, But holistically unhappy for the course of humanity.

Sad.
by mettamage | 2025-12-17 12:05:00+00:00
Career planning at the moment, tailoring resumes. Currently, it's not tailoring it well enough yet because it's hallucinating too much, so I need to write a specific prompt for that. But I know for work, where I do similar things (text generation with a human in the loop), that I can tackle that problem.

So yea, I definitely, add to the "AI generated" text part but I read over all the texts, and usually they don't get sent out. Ultimately, it's still a lot quicker to do it this way.

For career planning, so far it hasn't beaten my own insights but it came close. For example, it mentioned that I should actually be a developer advocate instead of a software engineer. 2 to 3 years ago I came to that same thought. I ultimately rejected the idea due to how I am but it is a good one to think about.

What I see now, I think the best job for me would be a tech consultant. Or as I'd also like to call it: a data analyst that spots problems and then uses his software engineering or teaching skills to solve that problem. I don't think that job has a good catch all title as it is a pretty generalist job. I'm currently at a company that allows me to do this but the pay is quite low, so I'm looking for a tech company where I could do something similar. Maybe a product manager role? It really depends on the company culture.

What I also noticed it did better: it doesn't reduce me to data engineering anymore. It understands that I aspire to learn everything and anything I can get my hands on. It's my mode of living and Claude understands that.

So nothing too spectacular yet, but it'll come. It requires more prompt/context engineering and fine tuning of certain things. I didn't get around to it yet.
by seec | 2025-12-17 12:05:22+00:00
There is no way to properly make money from fully open protocols. If you do the hard work of research and development, your competitors can just take the work and sell their implementation minus the R&D costs, undercutting you. It's not sustainable.

It's basically what Apple learned during the Macintosh clones era. Churning out countless units of the same stuff isn't that complicated once you have figured out what needs to be copied. Getting the worth-copying state is the hard and expensive part; nobody is going to do it for free.

This can readily be seen in the "free" open-source software world. The vast majority of it is just lower-quality copies of existing software.
by rsynnott | 2025-12-17 12:05:28+00:00
To be clear, it was this 'factory': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transparent_Factory

It never really made sense after the Phaeton, which it was built for, comprehensively failed (expected production 20k/year, demand never went over 10k/year); it has been effectively closed before, and honestly it's kind of surprising it wasn't closed a decade ago.
by RyJones | 2025-12-17 12:05:34+00:00
One my convoys from Tallinn to Kyiv, I make little dog tags https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYSqxFiEeps and coins to hand out to drivers and staff. For work, I used to make poker chips: https://github.com/ryjones/recognition/blob/main/chips.md and coins: https://github.com/ryjones/recognition/blob/main/coins.md . When we did coins, I would custom engrave them for TSC/TOC/TAC members and people in the community I knew I would meet at events. https://youtu.be/0LXsauB5Qao

See also gift boxes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21uGljlJVoI