MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fao_ | 2025-12-17 17:38:19+00:00
Wonderful article showing the uselessness of this technology, IMO.

> I just realised the situation is even worse. If I have 35 sentences of circumstance leading up to a single sentence of conclusion, the LLM mechanism will — simply because of how the attention mechanism works with the volume of those 35 — find the ’35’ less relevant sentences more important than the single key one. So, in a case like that it will actively suppress the key sentence.

> I first tried to let ChatGPT one of my key posts (the one about the role convictions play in humans with an addendum about human ‘wetware’). ChatGPT made a total mess of it. What it said had little to do with the original post, and where it did, it said the opposite of what the post said.

> For fun, I asked Gemini as well. Gemini didn’t make a mistake and actually produced something that is a very short summary of the post, but it is extremely short so it leaves most out. So, I asked Gemini to expand a little, but as soon as I did that, it fabricated something that is not in the original article (quite the opposite), i.e.: “It discusses the importance of advisors having strong convictions and being able to communicate them clearly.” Nope. Not there.

Why, after reading something like this, should I think of this technology as useful for this task? It seems like the exact opposite. And this is what I see with most LLM reviews. The author will mention spending hours trying to get the LLM to do a thing, or "it made xyz, but it was so buggy that I found it difficult to edit it after, and contained lots of redundant parts", or "it incorrectly did xyz". And every time I read stuff like that I think — wow, if a junior dev did that the number of times the AI did, they'd be fired on the spot.

See also, something like https://boston.conman.org/2025/12/02.1 where (IIRC) the author comes away with a semi-positive conclusion, but if you look at the list near the end, most of these things are something that any person would get fired for, and are things that are not positive for industrial software engineering and design. LLMs appear to do a "lot", but still confabulates and repeats itself incessantly, making it worthless to depend on for practical purposes unless you want to spend hours chasing your own tail over something it hallucinated. I don't see why this isn't the case. I thought we were trying to reduce the error rate in professional software development, not increase it.
by OkayPhysicist | 2025-12-17 17:38:22+00:00
It costs the CEO of Mozilla nothing to make hard, convicted statements that all their users agree with. If it was me, the quote would be something like "but then they'd need to find a new CEO, because I'd be in prison for what I'd do to anyone who even suggested it".

Literally the only people who talk about Mozilla, or read things about what Mozilla is up to, are unusually motivated power users who really, really care about ad blocking and privacy. They may still have other users, but those people are coasting on momentum from when their grandkid installed Firefox on their computer years ago. They're not reading interviews with the new CEO. Yet Mozilla seems to consistently fail utterly at messaging to their only engaged users.

It's not even that they're doing evil shit, they're just absolutely terrible at proclaiming that they are committed to not doing evil shit.
by mrguyorama | 2025-12-17 17:38:41+00:00
No. No upsides.

Again, what can an LLM possibly do to help? Summarize the page I'm already reading? I don't want a summary, that's dumb. People who think their time is so precious they have to optimize a five minute read into a ten cent API call and one minute read of possibly wrong output are just silly. You aren't "freeing up time", you are selling your reality.

Buy stuff for me? Why? Buying shit online is so easy most people do it on the toilet. I've bought things on the internet while blackout drunk. I also have a particular view of "Value" that no LLM will ever replicate, and not only do I have no interest in giving someone else access to my checkbook, I certainly do not want to give it to a third party who could make money off that relationship.

How would I no longer need browser extensions? You're saying the LLM would reliably block ads and that functionality will be managed by the single human being who has reliably done that for decades like uBlock origin? How will LLMs replace my gesture based navigation that all these hyper-productivity focused fools don't even seem to know exists? It certainly won't replace my corporate required password manager.

>You would be able to seamlessly communicate with the Polish internet subculture, or with Gen Alpha, all without feeling the physical pain

Come on, get over yourself.

> With an AGI-level AI

So Mozilla, who isn't even allowed to spend $6 million on a CEO is somehow magically going to invent super AI that runs locally? Get a grip.
by judah | 2025-12-17 17:38:49+00:00
Not exactly. Here's the quote[0]:

> "He says he could begin to block ad blockers in Firefox and estimates that’d bring in another $150 million, but he doesn’t want to do that. It feels off-mission."

The article doesn't give an exact quote from Enzor-DeMeo.

[0]: https://www.theverge.com/tech/845216/mozilla-ceo-anthony-enz...
by t23414321 | 2025-12-17 17:38:57+00:00
That would be (progressive??) XBL. (!)

(- it's kind of behavior extension on tag level, yet has JS - and it's orthogonal, like CSS or XSLT (BTW. see that hack: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41245159), unlike JS which is.. untamed and invasive; i.e. there is video (any) tag but you could (+)DIY not touching the document - like custom playing with MPlayer or VLC as a plugin there for all AV formats or sorting filtering editing whatever, all aside custompacks? :)

- or, what about the other way, like a firewall ??
by thecupisblue | 2025-12-17 17:38:59+00:00
Yes, but the 3.0 Flash is cheaper, faster and better than 2.5 Pro.

So if 2.5 Pro was good for your usecase, you just got a better model for about 1/3rd of the price, but might hurt the wallet a bit more if you use 2.5 Flash currently and want an upgrade - which is fair tbh.
by privalyse | 2025-12-17 17:39:07+00:00
Hi HN, I’m the creator of Privalyse. Looks like HN is back up now — happy to answer questions.

To make the output concrete, here’s an example from scanning an intentionally bad-practice demo app:

https://github.com/Privalyse/privalyse-cli/blob/main/example...

The goal is to surface privacy/security risks (PII, secrets, GDPR-relevant issues) in a way that’s readable for developers and non-security folks, rather than raw logs.
by jqpabc123 | 2025-12-17 17:39:39+00:00
But that misunderstands how research and innovation in tech work.

This assumes current AI is *normal* "tech". It is not.

Normal tech is deterministic. It is compute dependent.

Current AI is probabilistic. It is data/storage dependent. To significantly improve requires cataloging ever more specialized data. This data can no longer be easily and cheaply obtained simply by scraping the web.
by jfindper | 2025-12-17 17:39:57+00:00
>[...] said in an interview that he'd consider blocking uBlock Origin [...]

God, people are so weird. Why make stuff up?

No, in fact, he said the opposite. He said he doesn't want to do that because it feels "off-mission".

Whether he changes his tune in the future or not is up for debate, but come on. Lets not skip right to the pitchfork stage just yet.
by nativeit | 2025-12-17 17:40:27+00:00
I’ve never understood why Firefox doesn’t just make an extension with first-party support, instead of bloating their browser with gimmicks that a large cohort of users don’t want, and that probably shouldn’t be included by default at this point anyway. Or, shit, they came up with “Focus” for a “privacy browser”, do that and leave Firefox alone. Better yet, implement any of the litany of fixes and features your users actually requested.
by pessimizer | 2025-12-17 17:40:34+00:00
> - They were ahead of the game with extensions. Then everyone copied them.

They were ahead of the game with extensions, then they destroyed their own extensions. They copied everyone else, not the other way around.

> - They were ahead of the game with tabs. Then everyone copied them.

They were ahead of the game with tabs. Then while destroying their extensions they made vertical tabs harder, while still leaving it as a charitable contribution by the community instead of an internal project, and slow-walked it for a decade. I still have to do weird CSS to make them look right, because they decided to have an opinionated sidebar for no particular reason.

> - They are still the best browser to use for an ad free internet experience.

This, again, is not their fault. It's because of a man who they don't pay, who has had to battle with them on multiple occasions. Their only contribution is not accepting a Chrome standard completely. Imagine wanting to be given credit for not exactly copying your neighbor, after an enormous amount of pressure was brought to bear. It's my belief that Google decided that Firefox wouldn't kill ad blocking in the end, because it would have looked horrible in antitrust court. Now that's over (Obama judges don't believe in antitrust), and you can expect Firefox to kill it soon enough.

> Because to me, they seem to be constantly trying to make FireFox better. It's just hit or miss.

Nah. They kept telling me, while ignoring everyone's complaints about their actual experiences, that the most important thing was to reduce startup time for some unknown reason.
by jr-throw | 2025-12-17 17:40:54+00:00
I recently pair-worked with two junior developers (on their first job, but still with like 2+ years with the company) in order to transfer the know-how of something.

I realized that they are shockingly bad at most basic things. Still their PR:s look really good (on the surface). I assume they use AI to write most of the code.

What they do excel in is a) cultural fit for the company and b) providing long-term context to the AIs for what needs to be done. They are essentially human filters between product/customers and the AI. They QA the AI models' output (to some extent).
by RevEng | 2025-12-17 17:41:04+00:00
This is exactly where I find myself. I've been asked several times to take on management, but I have no interest in it. I got to be a principal after 18 years of experience by being good at engineering, not management. Like you said, I can and do help with leadership through mentorship, offering guidance and advice, giving presentations on technical topics, and leading technical projects.
by glenstein | 2025-12-17 17:41:05+00:00
Same. I mean, I'm sure there have been cases where I've switched to Chrome for certain things. I just got a custom viewfinder for my partner for Christmas, is showing a bunch of photos of the cruise that we went on. And they have an online editor for it, but the editor seemed to be glitching when using Firefox. So I moved to Chrome. Later I realized I was just misunderstanding and it actually just worked fine in Firefox.

And I'm able to access my bank, my credit cards, my utility bills, in Firefox without issue. So I'm not sure what people are talking about.

One thing I am familiar with though in the aftermath of gamergate was a bunch of motivated reasoning to complain about games and insist that they had design flaws or bugs, when really? The bugs weren't real but were kind of just a different way of saying We Don't Like This Game. And so reports of perceived bugs in some cases are as much a social phenomenon as they are a sincere representation of software functionality.

I don't want to say there's no bugs but for every one person's unsubstantiated anecdote, I seem to be able to find two people able to reproduce a functional version of the experience without issue. And just to zoom in on the bank login issue in particular, I use a credit union with an old decrepit HTTP site that was recently updated to a slightly less old and decrepit HTTP site. Plaid is unable to successfully log in, but the web interface works perfectly fine on Firefox mobile.
by gustavopezzi | 2025-12-17 17:41:20+00:00
I also started teaching on Udemy in 2019 and even though the number of students was high, I quickly noticed that income was low and most enrolled students did not even start the courses they purchased (let alone complete them). I also decided to invest time and money in my own website/school and that was probably the best decision I've ever made. Also, I'm not sure most people know that Udemy was never profitable up until 2025. Before going public, Udemy had never been profitable despite good revenue growth. As of mid-2021 (around its IPO filing), the company had accumulated significant losses (hundreds of millions of dollars) and explicitly noted it had not generated a profit in its SEC filing. After its October 2021 IPO, Udemy continued to report net losses most quarters and years, even as revenue grew. Losses persisted through 2023 and into 2024. Finally, in 2025 they saw profits for the first time since its IPO.
by belter | 2025-12-17 17:41:29+00:00
Udemy course ratings have always felt absurd to me.

The few times I spent a few bucks, out of curiosity, on some technical courses with near perfect scores, was horrified to find the instructor could barely speak English, audio seemed to have been recorded out an internet cafe in some 3rd world country, and explanations were shallow or confusing.

The surprise was not that a $5 to $25 course was bad. The surprise was the mismatch with the numeric rating, reviews and student testimonies, compared to actual course content. I can only imagine, most reviews are fake and the rating system has issues.
by Chandangalani | 2025-12-17 17:41:37+00:00
I built UAAL after repeatedly seeing AI systems in fintech make automated decisions that were impossible to defend during audits.

Logs and explanations help after the fact, but they don’t prevent unauthorized or non-compliant actions from executing in the first place.

UAAL is a fintech-first AI governance control plane that runs inline with FastAPI services. It authorizes AI or agent actions in real time using policy, risk, and optional human approval. If a decision executes, immutable evidence is recorded; if required proof is missing, the action is blocked.

It’s packaged as a standard Python library and installs via pip:

pip install uaal-core

Happy to get feedback from folks running AI systems in regulated environments.
by nateglims | 2025-12-17 17:41:42+00:00
> To be fair, it's not entirely their own fault. Competition is strong, especially from Google and Apple. Even with perfect decisions, they likely would still have lost big since their peak. The market for alternative Browsers isn't as big any more as it used to be.

Their peak in share was also pre-chrome. They've basically been losing the battle slowly for over a decade.
by Nextgrid | 2025-12-17 17:42:10+00:00
It's backpedaling but I don't think it's planning ahead to prevent a developer shortage - rather it's pandering to the market's increasing skepticism around AI and that ultimately the promised moonshot of AI obsoleting all knowledge work didn't actually arrive (at least not in the near future).

It's similar to all those people who were hyping up blockchain/crypto/NFTs/web3 as the future, and now that it all came to pass they adapted to the next grift (currently it's AI). He is now toning down his messaging in preparation of a cooldown of the AI hype to appear rational and relevant to whatever comes next.
by rvz | 2025-12-17 17:42:10+00:00
Now with AI, I expect junior developers to learn much quicker and progress to senior very quickly. I'd now rather hire at least 1 of each to begin with, both "junior" and a "senior" developer and then additionally hire more juniors to quickly turn them into a "senior".

We do not need to hire anymore outside senior developers who need to be trained on the codebase with AI, given that the junior developers catch up so quickly they already replaced the need to hire a senior developer.

Therefore replacing them with AI agents was quite premature if not completely silly. In fact it makes more sense to hire far less senior developers and to instead turn juniors directly into senior developers to save lots of money and time to onboard.

Problem solved.
by umanwizard | 2025-12-17 17:42:44+00:00
How is it any harder than using C? Sure, the C standard library gives you random numbers, but it doesn't, for example, give you any containers (hash maps, vectors etc.) which are needed even more often.

> Generate a random number.

Well, obviously, I would use cargo and pull in the `rand` package, because I'm not an anti-dependencies ideologue. Cargo makes it easier to depend on third-party code; that's the whole point. But the OP explicitly doesn't want that, so presumably he'd write his own RNG from scratch, or download a tarball of the `rand` package and build it manually without cargo. None of this is any harder in Rust than it would be in C or C++.
by sltkr | 2025-12-17 17:43:06+00:00
So you agree: for you, it's more important that the Mozilla CEO shares your political views, than that Mozilla makes a quality product.

That's exactly what the parent post is talking about. When Mozilla started prioritizing political correctness over software quality, software quality predictably declined. That's why they are struggling now: they reduced their user base to the tiny group of political extremists that will put up with an inferior product for the sake of political signaling.

By the way, Eich didn't “come out” as anything. His private donation (a mere $1000) was exposed by people who wanted to cancel him for his political views. It wasn't Eich who forced the issue, it was his political opponents, who do not tolerate any viewpoint diversity. Eich's views weren't even fringe or extreme at the time: Proposition 8 passed with support from the majority of Californian voters.
by renewiltord | 2025-12-17 17:43:09+00:00
There are two straightforward arguments against that (implied) position[0]:

First, it's entirely possible that you act against their interest while claiming to care for them. The majority of old Americans currently advocate for policies that will drain the next generation while enriching the aged. This is unconscionable theft from our succeeding generations. It is fairly typical of people to act kind in person while advocating for harmful policies. If this explains you then it doesn't matter that you don't express that you want the worst for them if you nonetheless support policies that vampirize them to fund your retirement in your old age.

Secondly, all disenfranchisement will have false positives. There are 17 year olds that are sensible enough to vote. They still cannot. That is the nature of selecting a line: true nature has a fractal edge and no rule that will fit in a rulebook can capture it all.

0: Which I think can be reasonably interpreted as "the fact that I love my relatives' children and my friends' children means that I do have a vested interest in the future".
by ericmay | 2025-12-17 17:43:10+00:00
Allies isn't being used in terms of Alliance here. I don't know the full list but most of the countries on that list, and perhaps all, are already allies. There's nothing to further ally about.

What this is, is a cooperation framework toward a shared purpose. None of those countries are abandoning or being abandoned by the United States as an ally, nor are any of those countries creating new alliances with each other.

I know there's this gut reaction on the Internet to act like the rest of the world is banding together and leaving the United States because of President Trump or something, but it's just not the case. At the end of the day, the only country in the world that has military and industrial power to defend against Russia or China today is the United States. That's not a slight at Japan, or France, or anything like that, but an acknowledgment of reality.

President Trump's administration has been, in my view, haphazard and stupid in how it has treated out allies and partners in many ways. In some ways they've been correct though too, and it's important to not overreact to news headlines.
by gnerd00 | 2025-12-17 17:43:27+00:00
first response from me "let me mention how the real business world actually works" .. let's add a more nuanced slice to that however

Since desktop computers became popular, there have been thousands of small to mid-size companies that could benefit from software systems.. A thousand thousand "consultants" marched off to their nearest accountant, retailer, small manufacturer or attorney office, to show off the new desktop software and claim ability to make new, custom solutions.

We know now, this did not work out for a lot of small to mid-size business and/or consultants. Few could build a custom database application that is "good enough" .. not for lack of trying.. but pace of platforms, competitive features, stupid attention getting features.. all of that, outpaced small consultants .. the result is giant consolidation of basic Office software, not thousands of small systems custom built for small companies.

What now, in 2025? "junior" devs do what? design and build? no. Cookie-cutter procedures at AWS lock-in services far, far outpace small and interesting designs of software.. Automation of AWS actions is going to be very much in demand.. is that a "junior dev" ? or what?

This is a niche insight and not claiming to be the whole story.. but.. ps- insert your own story with "phones" instead of desktop software for another angle
by jitl | 2025-12-17 17:43:30+00:00
I went to "Hardened Images Catalog" and searched for pgbouncer, not found (https://hub.docker.com/hardened-images/catalog?search=pgboun...)

There's a "Make a request" button, but it links to this 404-ing GitHub URL: https://github.com/docker-hardened-images/discussion/issues

oh well. hope its good stuff otherwise.
by kevin061 | 2025-12-17 17:43:31+00:00
If you think about your blog as "content" and you want to become a blogger superstar with a million visits, then no, it makes no sense.

The way I approach my blogging is: 1. Establishing my domain expertise in public (with timestamps) 2. (Very important) things I find interesting and I learn, so I can refer to them later 3. Practicing writing and explaining your thoughts, this specifically will become invaluable in the age of AI 4. Practicing the art of writing in itself, learning grammar, building your vocabulary 5. Especially if you self-host, like I do, explore different systems. Dynamic blogs with Wordpress, a minimal Python web app you wrote yourself, or perhaps static site generators? You will learn a lot about web services, HTML, CSS, HTTP, and more regardless
by godelski | 2025-12-17 17:44:33+00:00
Do you use Firefox?

If not, why not?

Do normal people use Firefox?

I've successfully migrated my girlfriend, parents, and several friends. Half those friends don't even know how to program. So yes, normal people can use Firefox and they really don't notice the difference.

> Chrome/Google have already won the browser wars

It isn't over till its over. It's trivial to make a stand in this fight. It is beyond me why a large portion of HN users aren't using FF or one of its derivatives. Of all people they should be more likely to understand what's at stake here...
by newpavlov | 2025-12-17 17:44:54+00:00
I generally agree with this opinion and would love to see a proper well documented low-level API for working with GPU. But it would probably result in different "GPU ISAs" for different vendors and maybe even for different GPU generations from one vendor. The bloated firmwares and drivers operating on a higher abstraction level allow to hide a lot of internal implementation details from end users.

In such world most of software would still probably use something like Vulkan/DX/WebGPU to abstract over such ISAs, like we use today Java/JavaScript/Python to "abstract" over CPU ISA. And we also likely to have an NVIDIA monopoly similar to x86.