MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by twoodfin | 2025-12-16 14:22:05+00:00
The Robinson-Patman Act is terrible law. It’s been routinely violated (unknowingly in most cases) for decades across effectively every sector of the economy & enforced vanishingly rarely.

If it were to be enforced uniformly and aggressively it would be devastating: Every negotiation between a supplier and a purchaser at every level is potentially a federal crime!

If it were to be enforced capriciously, it would put unchecked power over everyday commerce—again at every level—into the hands of the FTC and its political masters.

No thanks. Repeal it so we can stop hearing about this “one neat trick to roll back neoliberalism!”
by codeflo | 2025-12-16 14:22:31+00:00
That's a good point, entropy is only a heuristic for the thing you actually want to optimize, worst-case guesses (though it's probably a very good heuristic).

> Basically, using the entropy produces a game tree that minimises the number of steps needed in expectation

It might be even worse than that for problems of this kind in general. You're essentially using a greedy strategy: you optimize early information gain.

It's clear that this doesn't optimize the worst-case, but it might not optimize the expected number of steps either.

I don't see why it couldn't be the case that an expected-steps-optimal strategy gains less information early on, and thus produces larger sets of possible solutions, but through some quirk those larger sets are easier to separate later.
by alberth | 2025-12-16 14:23:06+00:00
Dumb question: who’s Firefox target user?

Chrome is able to capture the mass consumer market, due to Google’s dark pattern to nag you to install Chrome anytime you’re on a Google property.

Edge target enterprise Fortune 500 user, who is required to use Microsoft/Office 365 at work (and its deep security permission ties to SharePoint).

Safari has Mac/iOS audience via being the default on those platform (and deep platform integration).

Brave (based on Chromium), and LibreWolf (based on Firefox) has even carved out those user who value privacy.

---

What’s Firefox target user?

Long ago, Firefox was the better IE, and it had great plugins for web developers. But that was before Chrome existed and Google capturing the mass market. And the developers needed to follow its users.

So what target user is left for a Firefox?

Note: not trolling. I loved Firefox. I just don’t genuine understand who it’s for anymore.
by ceejayoz | 2025-12-16 14:23:13+00:00
Anything can be an act of war.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_Jenkins%27_Ear

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_War_(1859)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_War

Or we just make them up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_Powell%27s_presentation_...

No, the Netherlands won't consider this to be anything of the sort.
by intrasight | 2025-12-16 14:23:28+00:00
I had a scare combined with an insight last week. I was looking for documentation on power BI - specifically the M language. I found the Microsoft documentation but found it to be much more sparse than I hadremembered It only had the function names and the argument names and almost no explanation.

I thought "what a perfect way for Microsoft to force copilot upon us". They can make it necessary by being the only "documentation" of their software.
by boringg | 2025-12-16 14:23:36+00:00
I agree - I noticed this as well. Also feels like it such an upsetting story that someone was motivated to really to the bottom of it. They also probably knew that if the story got traction people would be running down there own checks.

I mean it does feel like that should be standard operation for journalism on bigger stories but I think our expectations from journalists have really fallen over the last 5 years with all the slop coming in.
by DiabloD3 | 2025-12-16 14:24:11+00:00
Opus is the most used codec on the planet, currently.

Can't really get more popular than that.

I think you meant to say, "why didn't it get more popular for _pirates_"? Because pirates are purists and prefer lossless codecs (ie, FLAC), and even when they wish to use lossy, Opus being locked to 48khz (to reduce implementation overhead for low power SoCs) kind of pisses them off, even though Opus's reference impl includes a perceptually lossless resampler (ie, equivalent to SoX VHQ, the gold standard, and better than the one in Speex).

Examples of users: Discord, Whatsapp, Jitsi, Mumble, Teamspeak, Soundcloud, Vimeo, Youtube (but not Youtube Music), in-game voice chat on both the PS4/5 era PSN network and the Xbone/XSX era Xbox network, the new Switch 2 in-game voice chat, games that use Steam's in-game voice chat (ie, TF2), all browsers (required to impl webm and webrtc), most apps on Android that have their own sound files (incl. base apps in Android itself). Windows and OSX also have native OOTB support for Opus. Some "actual" VoIP platforms use Opus. Some phone calls routed over the LTE phone network use Opus.

It is also standardized by the IETF as RFC 6716, and most for-audio SoCs support Opus natively as part of their platform SDKs.

You're not going to find anything more popular than this.
by Yizahi | 2025-12-16 14:24:39+00:00
Lift costs are not quite dropping like that lately. Starship is not yet production ready (and you need to fully pack it with payloads, to achieve those numbers). What we saw is cutting off most of the artificial margins of the old launches and arriving to some economic equilibrium with sane margins. Regardless of the launch price the space based stuff will be much more expensive than planet based, the only question if it will be optimistically "only" x10 times more expensive, or pessimistically x100 times more expensive.

I don't get this "inevitable" conclusion. What is even a purpose of the space datacenter in the first place? What would justify paying an order of magnitude more than conventional competitors? Especially if the server in question in question is a dumb number cruncher like a stack of GPUs? I may understand putting some black NSA data up there or drug cartel accounting backup, but to multiply some LLM numbers you really have zero need of extraterritorial lawless DC. There is no business incentive for that.
by vacuity | 2025-12-16 14:24:39+00:00
I like to be flexible with policies, so while I think "capabilities" should be the core model, using ACL mechanisms under the hood is valid. If the capability mechanism is very minimal, people can build mechanisms and policies on top that are specialized for different use cases. It's not about "capabilities vs. ACLs"; it's "use the right tool for the job".

So while resource revocation in general is a hard problem, anyone can come up and implement their clever scheme in my imagined world.
by Antibabelic | 2025-12-16 14:24:53+00:00
Everything is inevitable. If it happened, then it couldn't have happened otherwise. "Your computer sending screenshots to microsoft so they can train AIs on it" was inevitable, because that's what incentives pushed them to do. Vocal opposition and boycotting might become a different kind of incentive, but in most cases it doesn't work. The fact of the matter is that corporations are powerful, shareholders are powerful, the collective mass of indifferent consumers are powerful, while you are powerless.
by _heimdall | 2025-12-16 14:25:02+00:00
Looks like I don't have access to the full paper, but I would be extremely skeptical of any claims with such accuracy or certainty.

The healthcare industry in the US is massive and already full of corruption and inefficiency. Even if we are to assume giving politicians and bureaucracy more control over the system will reduce both issues, we can't predict how successful that will be.

Similar claims were made regarding the hopes for ACA reducing costs and here we are.
by smallmancontrov | 2025-12-16 14:25:14+00:00
True. We could have taxed and spent enough to spread the wealth around. We chose not to, and now the proverbial children who weren't embraced by the village are burning it down to feel its warmth.

I'm not against calling reserve currency status a privilege so long as you are crystal clear on the point that it was a privilege for America but a curse for most Americans.
by sumtechguy | 2025-12-16 14:25:43+00:00
ARM does not have a 'ibm pc clone' moment. There is no one, that anyone wants to rally behind. The market is fragmented in an interesting way but a way that is hard for people to target. This fragmentation has existed since the start of microprocessor was started. There were hundreds of different x86, 6502, SH, MIPS, ARM style computers as well. Even the 'ibm pc' was even one of them, but everyone just kinda said 'that one'. All of those standards you said exist in some ARM boards. It is a really mixed bag. Out of all of the ARM systems RasberryPI came closest to a standard.

QCOM in this case probably could make a standard ARM PC. The problem will be QCOM corporate structure will probably strangle it. They will want to create a patent license stream. The interesting bits would be behind NDAs. It is their bread and butter.

The reality is no one wants to be IBM in the IBM/PC clone market. Basically the ones who did the expensive work to make the board but everyone just copies it.
by tolerance | 2025-12-16 14:25:56+00:00
This is high quality blog post!

I’m all for a good argument that appears to challenge the notion of technological determinism.

> Every choice is both a political statement and a tradeoff based on the energy we can spend on the consequences of that choice.

Frequently I’ve been opposed to this sort of sentiment. Maybe it’s me, the author’s argument, or a combination of both, but I’m beginning to better understand how this idea works. I think that the problem is that there are too many political statements to compare your own against these days and many of them are made implicit except among the most vocal and ostensibly informed.
by afavour | 2025-12-16 14:25:59+00:00
Mozilla (in its previous form) has long been doomed. Mobile cemented it, I think. Browsers are part of the operating system and getting users to switch from the default is an incredible uphill climb. Especially when browsers are essentially utilities, there are so few unique compelling features.

That lack of connection to tech giants is a strength in the trust angle. And I think they’re right to be thinking about AI: people are using it and there does need to be an alternative to tech giants/VC funded monsters

Will they be successful? The odds are stacked against them. But if they’re not going to even try then what purpose will they serve any more?
by mattstir | 2025-12-16 14:26:05+00:00
IntelliCode was first released in 2018, well before the current AI landscape where running each model costs a neighborhood's worth of power. Indeed, it runs using a small local model that costs essentially nothing in comparison to the rest of the machine running it.

In fact, the intent here is exactly the opposite of what you're hoping for (less AI badgering). They're trying to get people to actually use Copilot after recently missing internal adoption goals on all the AI products they're trying to shove down people's throats. The badgering is only going to get worse, and they're going to continue removing functioning, free features to do so. You should not be glad that Microsoft is killing a free lightweight product for a bloated, ecologically harmful and economically wasteful one.
by gorjusborg | 2025-12-16 14:26:14+00:00
> One of my New Year's resolutions is to learn Neovim properly.

I'm decades in at this point and still learning. Just keep in mind you don't need to know everything before getting a massive benefit out of it.

My top features:

- Fingers do not leave the home row (only good if you are a touch typer, but if you aren't, do it, it is worth it)

- Terminal based (so you can use it over ssh when needed, or pipe data into it during scripting sessions)

- Starts fast

- Navigating and editing with text objects (though this took me a while to work into my workflow)

- Regular expressions w/ ex commands

- Filtering text with cli commands via ex

- Editable macros

If you haven't gone through `vimtutor`, I recommend that as an early step.
by wat10000 | 2025-12-16 14:26:29+00:00
Only a touch of judgment? I must have been too subtle, then.

I’m not convinced that most animals have humdrum days. It’s hard to judge the “natural” state of an animal when I’m a terrifying predator, but even when I’m pretty sure they aren’t aware of my presence, their lives seem pretty stressful. The prey animals seem to be constantly worried about attacks, and the predators are always hungry.
by halilbugol | 2025-12-16 14:26:50+00:00
One design question we went back and forth on was where to draw the line between deterministic rules (regex, allowlists) and LLM-based semantic checks.

Regex is fast and predictable but misses context; LLMs add context but introduce latency and cost. We ended up using a hybrid approach, but I’m curious how others are handling this trade-off in production.
by gwbas1c | 2025-12-16 14:27:19+00:00
I do think AI involvement in programming is inevitable; but at this time a lot of the resistance is because AI programming currently is not the best tool for many jobs.

To better the analogy: I have a wood stove in my living room, and when it's exceptionally cold, I enjoy using it. I don't "enjoy" stacking wood in the fall, but I'm a lazy nerd, so I appreciate the exercise. That being said, my house has central heating via a modern heat pump, and I won't go back to using wood as my primary heat source. Burning wood is purely for pleasure, and an insurance policy in case of a power outage or malfunction.

What does this have to do with AI programming? I like to think that early central heating systems were unreliable, and often it was just easier to light a fire. But, it hasn't been like that in most of our lifetimes. I suspect that within a decade, AI programming will be "good enough" for most of what we do, and programming without it will be like burning wood: Something we do for pleasure, and something that we need to do for the occasional cases where AI doesn't work.
by TitaRusell | 2025-12-16 14:27:21+00:00
Yes. Chavez was democratically elected. Maduro is not an alien he was born in Venezuela.

Why did Venezuela become what it is today? Every citizen is responsible for what their country turned into.

Ofcourse I do not expect anyone in the Venezuelan diaspora do any kind of introspection or soul-searching.

Venezuela was a beautiful South American Switzerland and it is all the fault of the evil Cubans.
by encyclopedism | 2025-12-16 14:27:37+00:00
This is the inevitability of unfettered capitalism. The pressure is towards generating wealth, with the intended hope that the side effect will be that this produces net 'good' for society. It has worked (to varying degrees) and has enabled the modern world. But it may well be running out of steam.

I do not think that the current philosophical world view will enable a different path. We've had resets or potential resets, COVID being a huge opportunity, but I think neither the public nor the political class had the strength to seize the moment.

We live in a world where we know the price of everything and the value of nothing. It will take dramatic change to put 'value' back where it belongs and relegate price farther down the ladder.
by pluc | 2025-12-16 14:27:46+00:00
> AI should always be a choice — something people can easily turn off.

One sentence later:

> It will evolve into a modern AI browser

One more sentence later:

> In the next three years, that means investing in AI that reflects the Mozilla Manifesto

I mean if you wanted to concretely see how much ignoring their users is in their DNA.

What a daring approach. Truly worth the millions he's gonna earn.
by input_sh | 2025-12-16 14:27:55+00:00
> TU/e and ICT cooperative SURF are also looking for replacements for Microsoft and Google. However, a fully-fledged European alternative is not yet available...

The only possible alternative to the entirety of Microsoft/Google is a European monopoly that is similar in scale. Indeed, such a monopoly does not exist (nor should it). People go to Microsoft and Google because they're already spending money on one product of theirs and there happens to be this completely different product of theirs which you also need as a business user. Sooner or later you end up using 20 completely different products that are "well-integrated" because at no point did you look for an alternative to any of those use cases.

Your job is not to go from 100% reliance on Google/Microsoft to 0% reliance, that'll never happen. Your job is to look at their offerings in isolation and reduce your reliance one product at a time. And yes, paying for 20 products from 20 companies is gonna cost you more when each of them needs to be profitable separately, only monopolies can afford to offer some product at a permanent loss.
by gorgoiler | 2025-12-16 14:27:57+00:00
I also phrased this badly. Cambrian explosions by definition happen in very short time frames (“overnight”), but the conditions required to set off the explosion take a long time to brew and are few and far between.

We’re two decades into the smartphone era and my hope is that we’re still in the DEC / VAX / S370 stage, with the “IBM-PC” stage just around the corner still to come.
by zamadatix | 2025-12-16 14:28:20+00:00
You don't really want company wide consensus on every point in the RFC. That should be reserved between the author(s) and their immediate teams. Setting/allowing the expectation that any comment made will be reviewed and responded to until everyone is in agreement about it is going to make things miserable for everyone and improve nothing.

I.e. that culture of pragmatism needs to be defined as part of the expectations process, not an unspoken promise between coworkers. No process is perfect but a footgun process is easy to make anyways.
by axC0r30x | 2025-12-16 14:28:38+00:00
I think your reply feels like what I got from the piece;

Effort would be the extra strength applied past what is needed to get a reasonable grip. It is “effort” when you squeeze hard enough to bend the lid.

I see other comments talking about dropping a cup if you don’t hold it tight enough but the idea is the baseline is “hold the cup tight enough to have it secure in your hand under normal reasonable conditions” but our default state may be “grip it hard enough all the time so a coworker couldn’t muscle it out of your hands” or “if a door opened in your face and hit it you still hold the cup” and that is the effort - the above and beyond that you don’t need to always apply which can screw up our baseline.

Like the message is we need to be mindful of not going full throttle on everything when low or medium energy / focus / brain activation / muscle activation will do.
Anyone else not getting replies from Cloudflare for P3 support tickets?
by dogsbody | 2025-12-16 14:28:52+00:00
* Case 01846144 opened 2025-11-20 & no response since 2025-11-25 * Case 01873472 opened 2025-12-08 & no reply

I guess I could change the priority tp a P1 but the site isn't down, their interface just doesn't work.

We have an enterprise account and are paying them good money for zero support.

I imagine that they have an internal directive to currently ignore all P3 tickets in favour of org wide efforts to work on their big outage problems!
by p2detar | 2025-12-16 14:28:53+00:00
With exception to Ubuntu and maybe Office your list is mostly enterprise-incomplete. Big corp cares about Active Directory, Teams, Azure and most of all Exchange (M365). Microsoft have managed to carefully pack all of these around Microsoft Entra and most IT admins in big corps are keen to get on-board with that.

We lost a big customer yesterday to Microsoft. They offered them much more than we could and there were also internal politics where I believe most of that customer's IT pushed towards that decision. I think the culture around alternatives, especially European-made or maybe European-supported is lacking. This has to change.

edit: typo
by huijzer | 2025-12-16 14:29:20+00:00
I've spent many hours researching this topic, and the paper is incorrect for multiple reasons and one of which being that it is using a straw man argument.

> This hypothesis posits that foods associated with an increased urinary acid excretion are deleterious for the skeleton, leading to osteoporosis and enhanced fragility fracture risk.

That the second part of this hypothesis could be true is actually super easy to prove from a purely chemical perspective. When the pH of the blood drops, cells such as bones and muscle cells will release buffering ions such as phosphate from bone and proteins from muscle cells. As long as the minerals from the bones are not replaced, the bones will weaken.

The straw man in this claim is that the pH discussion usually talks about what foods change the body's overall pH balance in what direction; not just the urine.
by 1970-01-01 | 2025-12-16 14:29:21+00:00
The only answer is for them to go back to "plan A" and do their own things. Stop copying Chrome. Stop looking at Safari and Edge. Stop the rapid release nonsense. Go back to the fundamentals of speed, security, and stability on desktops and leave the rest to plugins. Once desktop is back on track, they should begin fixing mobile. When both are great, do nothing else except bugfix and performance fixes. We want this and nothing more.
by kryllic | 2025-12-16 14:30:05+00:00
You likely won't find a business office working exclusively with the Apple office suite of tools, despite how comparable their features are. No one ever got fired for suggesting Microsoft, and in the business world, the safest choice (read: one that ensures an individual's job security) is often the one people go to. Google also has its own suite of tools, and I would argue the choice is really between them and Microsoft, with Apple not receiving much attention. Proton is also creating their own office suite of tools, their version of Sheets was just released not too long ago [1] but I have a feeling they will be as ostracized in the business world as Apple is.

---

1. https://proton.me/drive/sheets
by qbane | 2025-12-16 14:30:15+00:00
I wrote my first SPSC circular buffer implementation in TS upon reading the previous post on futex [0] from the same author. It was more intricate than it had seemed, until I finally sat down and wrote my own code.

[0]: https://h4x0r.org/futex/ discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44951563
by miki_oomiri | 2025-12-16 14:30:22+00:00
If I were the CEO, I would:

- focus 100% on Firefox Desktop & Mobile - just a fast solid minimalist browser (no AI, no BS) - other features should be addons - privacy centric - builtin, first-class, adblocker - run on donations - partner with Kagi - layoff 80% of the non-tech employees

I worked for them for many years, I guarantee you that Mozilla will be fine without all the non-sense people, just put engineers in charge.
by empath75 | 2025-12-16 14:30:54+00:00
I couldn't get this to work with the default model because it's overloaded, but I tried flash-lite, which at least gave me a response, but it only presents an actual UI 1/3rd of the time that I tried the suggested questions in the demo, and otherwise it attempts to ask me a question which doesn't present a ui at all or even do anything in the app -- i had to look at the logs to see what it was trying to do.