MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by firefax | 2025-12-18 20:39:19+00:00
I did this ages ago to build up airline points and take a nice trip to the EU.

Back then, the trick was to get a generic Vanilla Visa or other prepaid credit card. A recent legal ruling meant they had to be run as a debit card for... reasons... I forget them.

But a lot of grocery stores would sell you a money order up to 500 bucks for under a dollar with a debit card (not a credit card).

So you'd call up the issuer and have them issue it a PIN. Then you'd run it as a debit card and buy a 500 dollar money order.

Subtract ~$5 for the GC and ~$1 for the MO and you could manufacter about 500 bucks in spend. And the best part? You could take that money order to your bank, deposit it, get the funds immediately, pay off your balance, then rebuy.

In one afternoon I earned enough points for a first class flight to a fancy European city, and eternal side eye from the grocery store clerks who were convinced I was up to something put couldn't put their finger on what.
by azangru | 2025-12-18 20:39:19+00:00
> One language has 2 jobs, and the other language 13k jobs. I doubt you'd think for more than a second.

The Hacker News website runs on Lisp. How many jobs do you see on the market that ask for Lisp? And yet, for what it is, this site is amazing! I don't see them rushing to migrate to a python backend and a react-based frontend, no matter how many jobs there are for those.
by nradov | 2025-12-18 20:39:36+00:00
There are plenty of examples from history where the winners simply wiped out the losers. In ancient times the usual practice was to kill all the men, take the women and children as slaves, and destroy all the cultural artifacts. Probably thousands of societies or cultures worldwide were utterly erased in that way, maybe leaving only some shards of pottery. We are perhaps a little more civilized about such things now, and show restraint for political or moral purposes rather than setting out to commit genocide.
by order-matters | 2025-12-18 20:39:48+00:00
TBH I think Information Systems Engineering and Computer Engineering can just eat software engineers lunch at this point. the entire need for a separate engineering discipline on software was for low level coding. Custom hardware chips are easier to make for simple things and not a lot of need in low level coding anymore for more complex things means the focus is shifting back to either hardware choices or higher level system management

I'd argue the only places left you really need low level coding fall under computer science. If you are a computer or systems engineer who needs to work with a lot of code then youll benefit from having exposure to computer science, but an actual engineering discipline for just software seems silly now. Not to mention pretty much all engineers at this point are configuring software tools on their own to some degree

I think it's similar to how there used to be horse doctors as a separate profession from vets when horses were much more prominent in everyday life, but now they are all vets again and some of them specialize in horses
by drnick1 | 2025-12-18 20:39:51+00:00
As long as the firmware is proprietary and cannot be inspected or modified, the only reliable way to avoid snooping by tech industry is not to connect any "smart" device to the Internet. Use the TV as a dumb monitor for a PC under your control (running Linux). If streaming service X will not run on Linux because DRM is not implemented or enforceable on a free device, do without it, or find alternative sources for the content (hint: Linux ISOs).
by hinkley | 2025-12-18 20:39:57+00:00
It’s clear to me now that I need to set up my home machine the way I set up BYOD when I was contracting last. I need a separate account for all of my development.

I have a friend who at one point had five monitors and 2 computers (actually it might be 3) on his desk and maybe he’s the one doing it right. He keeps his personal stuff and his programming/work stuff completely separate.
by rorytbyrne | 2025-12-18 20:40:56+00:00
I disagree. We haven't chosen quantity over quality, we have decided that journals should not be the arbiters of quality. I think these new incentives are exactly what we want:

1. Journals want to publish lots of articles, so they are incentivised to provide a better publishing experience to authors (i.e. better tech, post-PDF science, etc) - Good.

2. Journals will stop prioritising quality, which means they will relinquish their "prestige" factor and potentially end the reign of glam-journals - Good.

3. Journals will stop prioritising quality, which means we can move to post-publication peer-review unimpeded - Good.
by immibis | 2025-12-18 20:41:06+00:00
That's his right. In capitalism, company owners have the power (which they delegate to managers) to fuck up the company as much as they see fit. On the upside, it means it's their responsibility and not yours.

Once you've said it's going to cause horrible problems, and they say do it anyway, and you have a paper trail of this and it's backed up onto your own storage medium, then you just do it and bring popcorn. If you think it'll bankrupt the company, then you have nothing to lose since you have no right to stop a company going bankrupt, so you might as well email your manager's manager's manager first and see if your manager gets fired.
by miki123211 | 2025-12-18 20:41:12+00:00
> the gap between legitimate use of gift cards and fraudulent use of gift cards is just not very large.

And many legitimate uses of gift cards may actually have been fraudulent somewhere up the chain.

Imagine a scammer which sells their cards to real users (perhaps through one or more less-than-scrupulous intermediaries willing to buy them in crypto without asking too many questions). If the victim comes to their senses and somehow gets those cards reported and blocked as fraudulent, unsuspecting users will get into trouble.
by YouAreWRONGtoo | 2025-12-18 20:41:25+00:00
I don't understand why anyone would want to publish anything, but perhaps that's because I don't need a "reputation".

I also don't understand why anyone would ever want to get a PhD, which is just a manner of exchanging almost free labor for a nearly worthless piece of paper. It's like a participation trophy at this point for people that are not homo economici.
by coderenegade | 2025-12-18 20:41:35+00:00
It boggles my mind that you think this stuff is being pushed by the right. Expansion of government and surveillance is a hallmark of the left, and indeed this latest wave of surveillance is being pushed by progressive governments in Western Europe and Australia.

Governments of both flavours are ignoring the voting public, for various reasons, e.g. they are signatory to agreements that no longer work for the public but are difficult to break, the public is increasingly economically irrelevant compared to businesses, and, of course, the greedy self-interest of the politicians themselves.

I agree with you on the third paragraph, but it's also the reason that I believe the US will be okay compared to other Western democracies (an opinion I'm not sure you would share, judging by your post). The Constitution is already a thing, and is on its own a declaration that certain rights derive from a higher authority than government. The second amendment in particular is under siege (again, by the left), but does equalize things in a way that many of its opponents are reluctant to admit.
by jpbryan | 2025-12-18 20:41:35+00:00
I actually wrote a detailed breakdown of why Google Docs doesn't meet lawyers' needs!

https://theredline.versionstory.com/p/why-lawyers-will-never...

The short answer is Google Docs:

- Requires all-or-nothing adoption which is a non-starter for law-firms

- Does not support commit atomicity

- Does not store a comprehensive history of the document
by vessenes | 2025-12-18 20:41:48+00:00
Hey! Love the Gemma series. Question that came to mind reading the announcement post - the proposal there is that you can use this as a local backbone and have it treat a larger model as a 'tool call' when more reasoning is needed.

In my mind we want a very smart layer frontier model orchestrating, but not slowing everything down by doing every little thing; this seems like the opposite - a very fast layer that can be like "wait a minute, I'm too dumb for this, need some help".

My question is - does the Gemma team use any evaluation around this particular 'call a (wiser) friend' strategy? How are you thinking about this? Is this architecture flow more an accommodation to the product goal - fast local inference - or do you guys think it could be optimal?
by cycomanic | 2025-12-18 20:41:49+00:00
Your quotes around the missing do a lot of work here. From the FAQ:

> PEN America defines a school book ban as any action taken against a book based on its content and as a result of parent or community challenges, administrative decisions, or in response to direct or threatened action by lawmakers or other governmental officials, that leads to a book being either completely removed from availability to students, or where access to a book is restricted or diminished. Diminished access is a form of censorship and has educational implications that extend beyond a title’s removal. Accessibility forms the core of PEN America’s definition of a school book ban and emphasizes the multiple ways book bans infringe on the rights of students, professional educators, and authors. It is important to recognize that books available in schools, whether in a school or classroom library, or as part of a curriculum, were selected by librarians and educators as part of the educational offerings to students. Book bans occur when those choices are overridden by school boards, administrators, teachers, or politicians, on the basis of a particular book’s content.

In particular it's when the decisions of the professionals are being overruled for political purposes.

It is particularly clear when reading the list, many of these books are children/young adults books which have won highest national and international awards, but somehow they are "age inappropriate"?
by canyon289 | 2025-12-18 20:41:55+00:00
Yes a separate model is performing ASR in this case. Gemma270m (base, function, and others) are not multimodal out of the box.

That being said if someone in the community wanted to use other encoders like siglip and plug them into Gemma270m to make it multimodal that'd be a great way to have fun over break and build up an AI Eegineer resume :)
by multisport | 2025-12-18 20:42:05+00:00
decided to make a new account to post:

Mintlify security is the worse I have even encountered in a modern SaaS company.

They will leak your data, code, assets, etc. They will know they did this. You will tell them, they will acknowledge that they knew it happened, and didn't tell you.

Your docs site will go down, and you will need to page their engineers to tell them its down. This will be a surprise to them.
by noirscape | 2025-12-18 20:42:08+00:00
I'd say it's probably worse in terms of scope. The audience for some AI-powered documentation platform will ultimately be fairly small (mostly corporations).

Anubis is promoting itself as a sort of Cloudflare-esque service to mitigate AI scraping. They also aren't just an open source project relying on gracious donations, there's a paid whitelabel version of the project.

If anything, Anubis probably should be held to a higher standard, given many more vulnerable people (as in, vulnerable against having XSS on their site cause significant issues with having to fish their site out of spam filters and/or bandwidth exhaustion hitting their wallet) are reliant on it compared to big corporations. Same reason that a bug in some random GitHub project somewhere probably has an impact of near zero, but a critical security bug in nginx means that there's shit on the fan. When you write software that has a massive audience, you're going to have to be held to higher standards (if not legally, at least socially).

Not that Anubis' handling of this seems to be bad or anything; both XSS attacks were mitigated, but "won't somebody think of the poor FOSS project" isn't really the right answer here.
by theshrike79 | 2025-12-18 20:42:13+00:00
I've had calls with Principal Architects who couldn't code themselves out of a wet paper bag.

And according to the company experience chart, they should've been a "thought leader" and "able to instruct senior engineers"

My title? Backend Programmer (20 years of experience). Our unit didn't care about titles because there was a "budget" for title upgrades per business unit and guess which team grabbed all of them =)
by james2doyle | 2025-12-18 20:42:27+00:00
I have found MCPs helpful. Recently, I used one to migrate a site from WordPress to Sanity. I pasted in the markdown from the original site and told it to create documents that matched my schemas. This was much quicker and more flexible than whipping up a singular migration tool. The Sanity MCP uses oAuth so I also didn’t need to do anything in order to connect to my protected dataset. Just log in. I’ll definitely be using this method in the future for different migrations.
by nis0s | 2025-12-18 20:42:35+00:00
It’s a little different for guns, they’re more tightly controlled and there’s often paper trail of their purchase and licensing of owners, so your example doesn’t apply.

I think there’s also the issue that you’re more likely to be murdered by someone you know than a random person. At the very least, matching bullet marks from shots fired from his associates guns to any casings found at the scene is just due diligence.
by homebrewer | 2025-12-18 20:42:36+00:00
No idea about most Linux users, but here's what little we know for sure:

Arch pkgstats (opt-in): ~64% FF, ~41% Chromium, ~17% Chrome

https://pkgstats.archlinux.de/fun/Browsers/current

Debian popcon (opt-in): 2.2% Firefox, ~10.3% Chromium

https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=firefox

https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=chromium

Flathub installs: 10kk Firefox, 10kk Chrome, 1.8kk Chromium

https://flathub.org/en/apps/org.mozilla.firefox

https://flathub.org/en/apps/com.google.Chrome

https://flathub.org/en/apps/org.chromium.Chromium

snapcraft statistics isn't public, afaik.
by adw | 2025-12-18 20:42:39+00:00
Skills are just prompt conventions; the exact form may change but the substance is reasonable. MCP, eh, it’s pretty bad, I can see it vanishing.

The agent loop architectural pattern (and that’s the relevant bit) is going to continue to matter. There will be new patterns for sure, but tool calling plus while loop (which is all an “agent” is) is powerful and highly general.
by popalchemist | 2025-12-18 20:43:04+00:00
You've clearly never built a product. One product alone requires a CEO. More than one, much more so.

And anyway you're factually wrong. They produce much more than what you listed, many of their undertakings are contributions to open-source, the development of web standards, underlying technologies that browsers (not just Firefox) use to render the web, etc.

You're being childish and somewhat absurdly so. Mozilla and Firefox are a large part of the reason the modern web is usable (in the technical sense - usability for the deaf and blind, screen readers, etc)
by xmodem | 2025-12-18 20:43:05+00:00
Your post sent me down a rabbit hole reading about the history of computers playing chess. Notable to me is that AI advocates were claiming that a computer would be able to beat the best human chess players within 10 years as far back as the 1950s. It was so long ago they had to clarify they were talking about digital computers.

Today I learned that AI advocates being overly optimistic about its trajectory is actually not a new phenomenon - it's been happening for more than twice my lifetime.
by rainonmoon | 2025-12-18 20:43:12+00:00
You're pretty much on the money. Reflected XSS requires social engineering to really target anyone without other primitives. Unfortunately this report is not very clear about the tangible impacts or limitations of what they could do with this particular XSS either. Saying that every Mintlify customer was "vulnerable to account takeover with a single malicious link" strikes me as specious to say the least. Still, can't fault kids for getting excited about recognition and a payout.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-12-18 20:43:14+00:00
> How does that have anything to do with discoversbility and people’s unwillingness to pay money for mobile apps?

It's rooted in the same source. Their rent-seeking creates a distribution monopoly to those customers, which they try to keep a strangle hold on because otherwise people would use alternatives to avoid the large cut, but then once they exist those same tentacles squeeze people in other ways too. Moreover, the effect is cumulative, so those costs layer on top of the revenue loss and exacerbate each other.

> In the US, any developer has been able to link out to their own payment scheme for awhile now without paying Apple a dime.

This is something that was forced on them by the law and then they do everything possible to make it an inconvenience. For example, where is the Paypal or Stripe app that already has the user's payment info and allows other apps to use that for in-app purchases without entering it or signing in again?

> the same that every other marketplace has

Epic Games Store is 0% up to a million dollars and 12% after instead of 15% and 30%, isn't it?
by themafia | 2025-12-18 20:43:22+00:00
> I am really surprised to see Texas did this.

I think this comes from strictly looking at the world in left/right terms. Texas is a pretty libertarian state. This is probably the entire reason the founders ensconced the states into the union the way they did.

This country is a _spectrum_ of ideas. It's not bipolar. Only the moneyed interests behind political parties want you to think this way.
by 9rx | 2025-12-18 20:44:03+00:00
> If you reach "senior" after only two years and "principle" after 5, what is left for the next 20 years?

There is nothing left. Not everyone puts in the same dedication towards the craft, of course. It very well might take someone 30 years to reach "principle" (and maybe even never). But 5 years to have "seen it all" is more than reasonable for someone who has a keen interest in what they are doing. It is not like a job dependent on the season, where you only get one each year. In computing, you can see many different scenarios play out in milliseconds. It doesn't need years to go from no experience to having "seen it all".

That is why many in this industry seek management roles as a next step. It opens a new place to find scenarios one has never seen before; to get the start the process all over again.
by sapphicsnail | 2025-12-18 20:44:06+00:00
> The enormous public interest generated by garish reconstructions is surely because of and not in spite of their ugliness. It is hard to believe that this is entirely accidental. One possibility is that the reconstructors are engaged in a kind of trolling.

It's towards the end of the article. He doesn't directly mention culture war stuff but he does talk about it being "iconoclastic." I think it's a reasonable interpretation of what he was saying.
by kelnos | 2025-12-18 20:44:33+00:00
No, that doesn't make sense at all. You've paid for consistent terms for that Y period of time. Not cancelling the subscription when it's up for renewal is an implicit agreement to any new terms. And I'm sure if you'd read those terms in the first place, you'd come to the same understanding.

(And it's not even that: the X you're charged is subject to change upon renewal!)

I'm not arguing that this is a good or bad thing, just pointing out the reality of every single subscription agreement I've signed up for online.
by canyon289 | 2025-12-18 20:44:39+00:00
Its already on the phone! Check out the demo videos and colab that show you how to load this model onto a device relatively easily.

On this project I was lucky enough to work with the Google AI Edge team who have deep expertise in edge deployments on device. Check out this app they built which loads in the Gemma 270m models and runs them on your phone.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.ai....

You also can finetune your own models and load them onto device with the same workflow. Scroll to the bottom to see the instructions and a screenshot example https://ai.google.dev/gemma/docs/mobile-actions
by andai | 2025-12-18 20:44:41+00:00
If you look at benchmarks, the Claude models score significantly higher intelligence per token. I'm not sure how that works exactly, but they are offset from the entire rest of the chart on that metric. It seems they need less tokens to get the same result. (I can't speak for how that affects performance on very difficult tasks though, since most of mine are pretty straightforward.)

So if you look at the total cost of running the benchmark, it's surprisingly similar to other models -- the higher price per token is offset by the significantly fewer tokens required to complete a task.

See "Cost to Run Artificial Analysis Index" and "Intelligence vs Output Tokens" here

https://artificialanalysis.ai/

...With the obligatory caveat that benchmarks are largely irrelevant for actual real world tasks and you need to test the thing on your actual task to see how well it does!
by glenstein | 2025-12-18 20:44:43+00:00
Thank you for directly addressing my point! I disagree but I respect your prioritization of of substance. I agree that notionally there's a difference but (1) they never said they "ran the numbers", (2) there are other good reasons for having access to that data that don't involve selling out, and (3) this all hinges on squinting and interpreting and projecting, and splitting the difference on linguistic interpretation is about as weak as circumstantial evidence can possibly get.

Real argument: "they said they're doing "privacy preserving" ads, look at this post where they announce it". Real argument "they say they're putting AI in the browser, I don't like that. Here's the statement!" Real argument: " they purchased Anonym and are dabbling in adtech, here's the news article announcing the acquisition!"

Not real argument: "They said they didn't want to take money to kill ad blockers but if you squint maybe it kinda implies they considered it, at least if you don't consider other reasons they might be aware of that figure." At best it's like 0.001% circumstantial evidence that has to be reconciled with their history of opposing the Manifest changes. If reading tea leaves matters so much, then certainly their more explicit statements need to matter too.

The thing that's unfortunate here is I would like to think this goes without saying, but ordinary standards of charitable interpretation are so far in the rear view mirror that I don't know that people comfortable making these accusations would even recognize charitable interpretation as a shared value. Not in the sense of bending over backwards to apologize or make excuses, but in the ordinary Daniel Dennett sense of a built-in best practice to minimize one's own biases.
by jborak | 2025-12-18 20:44:54+00:00
I run Packetriot: https://packetriot.com, which is an alternative to ngrok. It's been in operation for 6-ish years and reached $500/month in year two. It doesn't replace my salary (yet) but that's what I'm working toward. Thankful to have thousands of users and some big companies using our services or self-hosting our server.

This is a fun space to work in but there's lot of small competitors and opensource alternatives. In the first few years it was sometimes demotivating, but at some point I began seeing competitors bow out and Packetriot kept getting better and better each year.

This year I published a lot of updates across the platform. Our UX is better with a new web-based UI for our client and all of the features of the platform can be managed in the client UI. No more going back forth between the client and user portal.

I'm planning on releasing a community edition of our server in 2026 so that anyone can use our network server for free, for personal use or to evaluate for commercial use.