MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mittensc | 2026-01-29 17:08:47+00:00
> Mozilla is focused on deploying its roughly $1.4 billion worth of reserves to support “mission driven” organizations, according to a new report.

> The nonprofit, also the parent of Firefox, is investing in artificial intelligence startups that are working on safety and governance issues in AI.

Why?, they want to go bankrupt?, do they like burning money?

I would understand investing in AI Tech... Brilliant if they use Mozilla contributors.

I would understand but investing in other startups... with due diligence and something that might make a difference

> that are working on safety and governance issues in AI.

what... why... what the hell... that's governments job, not mozillas...
by Archelaos | 2026-01-29 17:09:27+00:00
The downvotes seem to indicate that the HN community is less informed and more prejudiced than I expected. For some background information: here is a Scientific American article from 2015 on the topic: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-europeans-bet... Quote: "Overall, the consensus among meteorologists and other scientists is that the European model is better overall in forecasting weather."
by 1970-01-01 | 2026-01-29 17:09:45+00:00
It means you should not use it for anything important, because it can be decrypted by the public with little effort. If you look back, it has been this way for quite awhile. My gripe is with the clickbait title 'Break Me If You Can'

https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/cve-2016-2183
by grayhatter | 2026-01-29 17:09:46+00:00
Leaked is not the correct word here. Generally as it's used, it implies some intent to disclose, the information for it's own purposes. You would call a disclosure to the war thunder forums a leak, because the intent was to use that information to win an argument. You wouldn't call Leaving boxes of classified information in a wearhouse where you'd normally read them a leak. (At least not as a verb). Likewise you wouldn't call it a leak if you mistakenly abandoned them in a park.

That said, IIRC For Official Use Only is the lowest level of classification (note not classified) it's not even NOFORN. It's even multiple levels below Sensitive But Unclassified.

So, who cares?

Much more significant is he failed the SCI/full poly... that means you lied about something. Yes I know polys don't work, but the point of the poly is to try to ensure you've disclosed everything that could be used against you, which ideally means no one could flip you or manipulate you. The functional part is to determine if you have anxiety about things you might try to hide, because that fear can be used against you. No fear/anxiety, or nothing you're trying to hide means you're harder to manipulate.

That feels bad even ignoring the whole hostile spys kinda thing.
by anon291 | 2026-01-29 17:09:48+00:00
Actually no. Linux pretty closely follows the ACPI standard. The issue is that ACPI implementors specifically work around bugs in Windows, which does not follow the standard well and has its own quirks. Thus, in order to make Linux 'work' with the broken hardware, they'd have to add bugs. Again, we see the issue with Microsoft dominance. A serious OS would implement the standard as written, not demand that others follow its bugginess.
by jermaustin1 | 2026-01-29 17:10:17+00:00
Same, I want to believe that this is all a ruse and that the are smart and just really good at playing dumb, but there are just too MANY of them.

It's sycophancy plain and simple. Surround yourself with only yes-men, it ends up becoming less and less competent as the ones who stand up and say no are replaced.

Even if they know better, they can't do better because they know there is no loyalty to nay-sayers.
by cucumber3732842 | 2026-01-29 17:10:30+00:00
What's unconscionable is that people feel entitled to cherry pick stuff like this and then use it as fodder for shameless moral posturing. The damn near next sentence says this was not the case with her, it clearly wasn't her job, it was what she wanted to spend her life doing.

I don't wonder why public discourse is the way that it is.
by lazarus01 | 2026-01-29 17:10:31+00:00
I’ve personally found meditation, exercise and healthy food intake are more effective for self regulation and coping with tough emotions over medication and supplements.

Each human being is unique, as is the recipe for sustained positive metal health.

I think it’s helpful to consider and experiment with different ideas and strategies.

I strongly disagree there is one single solution that can provide significant lift for a large population.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-01-29 17:11:13+00:00
I'm not a cryptographer but to me "broken" seems to imply that the core algorithm itself can be attacked. If merely applying it in certain ways as part of some larger system can fail then aren't most (possibly all) ciphers broken? It's entirely possible to do all sorts of stupid things.

Granted, a 2^32 block limit is pretty severe by modern standards.
by bachmeier | 2026-01-29 17:11:19+00:00
It wouldn't have to be used in very many places to justify a 377k investment. A few big European banks alone would be worth it. Their website says "we invest globally in the open software components that underpin Germany's and Europe's competitiveness and ability to innovate". The fact that Scala is used at a university could also be classified as innovation. This is a minor amount of money if you're going to compare it with a STEM or medical research grant.
by leber | 2026-01-29 17:12:03+00:00
awesome work :)
some open questions i have:
- what are titans and giants?

- "micro-brains" and "learning" is always showing 0 for me..but on the "neural" section it shows some tiny ups on the brain graph, ...saying at the same time in the bigger box under the graph that 22% have micro-brains, while showing 0 in all other places for that number

- "Timeline" seems not to work, always showing "Timeline data will appear as the simulation progresses." also after 150k ticks

- regarding seasons: whats the meaning of "(2s)" for the conditions? Im assuming its a kind of countdown?

- indicator "Food" always seems to show 100%
by strogonoff | 2026-01-29 17:12:20+00:00
I doubt many people believe that LLMs are conscious[0], but if they did—a belief in sentient/conscious LLMs really implies that using LLMs the way we do at scale (doing things equivalent to torture, mass killing, etc.) may qualify as abuse of sentient beings, which would bring down the whole industry.

The reason is that there is no working definition of “consciousness” or “sentience” that does not imply “human-like”, which in turn implies ability to feel and suffer, and what we do with LLMs would generally be considered something that would make beings with human-like sentience and consciousness suffer.

[0] Some definitely do, though; or at least they behave with LLMs in a way one would behave with a conscious being.
by fragmede | 2026-01-29 17:12:21+00:00
FWIW, I emailed auntanns.com to ask what a combination personal assistant and housekeeper would cost:

> Thank you for inquiring about our services. I'd love to discuss with you further regarding the person you are seeking. Personal assistants do not do housekeeping and housekeepers do not have the P.A skillset to pay bills and make appts etc unless they are an executive level housekeeper. Rates for executive housekeepers range between $60-$65/hr and a minimum of 20+ hours per week, plus PTO, paid sick days and many also seek a health stipend.
by s_dev | 2026-01-29 17:12:25+00:00
Colourful terminals are so useful. I have mine colour coded according to the working directory depending on the project. So I can see which terminal is associated with which project even if there are twenty terminals open. The scripts are even in my servers so when I ssh in to them it changes colour as well.

https://michael.mior.ca/blog/coloured-ssh-terminals/
by kreetx | 2026-01-29 17:12:36+00:00
Police (and people in general) react to what appears. They can't stop time, strip-search Pretti, find nothing, then continue.

I could also say "there is no excuse for you to not understand why ICE did what they did". No point in these judgements, they don't help your argument.

The entire protest isn't a plain protest. They could do their whistling and marching on a public square, yet they walk and whistle along with law enforcement. (I guess the new way to rob a bank would just be to walk in there with the guards, but say that you're protesting and talk about the letters of constitution?)
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-01-29 17:12:42+00:00
> this government is headed by appointed nephews of appointed nephews

I was in New Delhi during Trump’s Greenland tirade. The hot take in the governing circles was analogising to the Sino-Soviet split.

I’m now wondering if Imperial Russia, the one the Japanese beat and which fizzled apart against the Kaiser, is also an apt analogy.
by Arrowmaster | 2026-01-29 17:12:48+00:00
I hate the Aptfile format after looking at it.

The ppa directive hints that this is intended for Ubuntu because otherwise installing PPAs is a great way to break a non Ubuntu distro.

The deb directive uses the old and soon to be deprecated .list file extension. DEB822 format is the replacement.

The key directive adds the key as globally trusted for all repos instead of locking it to a specific repo as recommended by Debian. I think this is required under the new DEB822 repo format.
by 827a | 2026-01-29 17:12:49+00:00
My favorite conspiracy theory I've heard gain surprising traction in some circles is that the world population is closer to 5B, not 8B. I think the theory goes that there's so much miscounting in third-world countries, combined with perverse incentives at every level to seem bigger than you actually are in second-world countries, that the final =SUM(B1:B195) Excel formula "they" run to get the world population is based on so many nested and poorly reported =SUM() formulas that the number is far more inaccurate than just "slightly".
by w-m | 2026-01-29 17:13:19+00:00
A clearly defined/testable long-horizon task: demonstrating the capability of planning and executing projects that overrun current llm's context windows by several orders of magnitude.

Single-issue coding benchmarks are getting saturated, and I'm wondering when we'll get to a point where coding agents will be able to tackle some long-running projects. Greenfield projects are hard to benchmark. So creating code or porting code from one language to another for an established project with a good test suite should make for an interesting benchmark, no?
by mdjt | 2026-01-29 17:13:49+00:00
Having read through the comments I think this is pretty bad take. The vast majority of the criticism seems pretty reasonable to me. By any metric you would use on any other company, Tesla is overvalued. It trades largely on hype/missed promises. It’s bitcoin but with regular earning reports. Your inability to read critical thought and not scramble to claim mental derangement because those doing the criticizing don’t agree full heartedly with your supreme leader is pretty funny to me.
by usefulcat | 2026-01-29 17:13:56+00:00
Whataboutism is almost never a compelling argument, and this case is no exception.

ETA:

To elaborate a bit: based on your response, it seems like you don't think my question is a valid one.

If you don't think it's a valid question, I'm curious to know why not.

If you do think it's a valid question, I'm curious to know your answer.
by pseudalopex | 2026-01-29 17:14:15+00:00
Growing and investing in Firefox remains our biggest priority. Mozilla Corporation’s leading aim is to grow as a meaningful, differentiated browser, trusted by over 200mil people. In 2025 the team made great progress shipping tab groups, vertical tabs, smart tabs, many sidebar integrations with AI companies and more. Mozilla Corp welcomed Anthony Enzor-DeMeo, the first technologist to serve as CEO in over 15 years. In 2026 there will be a focus on building tools and features for those who want AI, and for those who do not. We are the only browser who does this - and likely the only one that will.[1]

[1] https://stateof.mozilla.org/tools/#corp
by pixl97 | 2026-01-29 17:14:17+00:00
Where I work we are looking at a lot of our documentation and implementations where AI has a hard time when doing it.

This almost always correlates with customers having similar issues in getting things working.

This has lead us to rewrite a lot of documentation to be more consistent and clear. In addition we set out series of examples from simple to complex. This shows as less tickets later, and more complex implementations being setup by customers without the need for support.
by sh3rl0ck | 2026-01-29 17:14:19+00:00
Yeah, I feel Anthropic is just very deliberately theatrical about the way they present their technology and company and even how they price them. Dario's conviction seems too over dramatic to be real to me, but while there's a chance he's drinking his own kool-aid, they just know how to present it as a premium experience, and their developer adoption helps with that.
by nippoo | 2026-01-29 17:14:55+00:00
By the same ticket, you really also don't want elemental sodium in your ear. Don't let the fact it's commonly found in sodium chloride alongside chlorine (something else you don't want in your pocket!) lull you into a false sense of security.

Sodium is actually more reactive than lithium and explodes on contact with water. There's a few things that make the battery chemistry less likely to undergo thermal runaway, but sodium is not a safe metal...
by ericmay | 2026-01-29 17:15:07+00:00
> and there's now an entire western hemisphere no longer interested in maintaining that

Well the USD is one of the world's reserve currencies, not the only one, though of course it's the dominant one. A reserve currency is just a currency that central banks or other significant financial institutions hold "in reserve" for liquidity purposes and so on. Even if the USD was no longer the dominant one, which isn't necessarily great, it hasn't seemed to have been that big of a problem for the EU.

I also don't think there's an entire western hemisphere that is no longer interested in maintain "that". Despite online noise, and a few symbolic selling of treasuries, nothing has really changed. You have to remember that politicians, including EU politicians talk a different game to the public than they do when they're sitting in rooms together at Davos or wherever. There are other considerations. How good for the EU will it be if the US collapses into financial ruin (it won't)? Who is going to backstop their militaries against Russia or other bad actors? The EU can say well we're going to go sell all these treasuries, well they become worth less and less and collapse the global economy. All you hear about on the Internet is the US's dirty laundry. It's the same thing with China and their military and economy. Most people can't speak about their failures because they're not aware, we only talk about the United States (and EU and others of course) and those failures and we don't speak in terms of incentives and actions and reactions.

"China has hypersonic missiles the US Navy is doomed!" is often parroted - yet who can speak intelligently to what the United States has done to negate or address that concern? Very few. Why is that? Well we're all reading the same articles about China's capabilities - it's propaganda.

I also don't see the USD going anywhere, anytime soon since the US military enforces the petrodollar system. But sure let's talk about some Swedish pension fund selling $50bn (7% of Elon Musk's net worth - screw that guy) worth of treasuries and call that the death of the United States economy.

Please don't take this as a defense of objectively bone-headed things the United States is doing either, I'm just pointing out that it's much more complicated than what your comment seems to suggest.
by AnotherGoodName | 2026-01-29 17:15:39+00:00
Not to the same extent. Microservices aren't actually about making things better for developers in any way. It's simply a way to address a scaling issue.

Eg. Facebook (i've worked at Meta and Google amongst others so a good way to compare extremes) is entirely a monolith. You type a line of code, hit refresh and you see it, running fully in the context of everything else your dev server does. It's still statically typed so a type error is seen quickly in the full context of everything that the server can do and in general there's just no impetus to move to microservices since the deployment of the monolith takes no time. Every server running Facebook runs the exact same image. That's not to say Hack is a perfect language or anything. It's basically PHP made to look and act like Java which isn't great, but the fact is you never ever think of how the code runs and interacts in context of the microservice environment. You don't need to. Everyone who's worked at Meta and Google has the opinion that Meta moves faster and this is part of the reason.

Some companies have architectures that can't deploy like this. This is the reason you move to microservices. It's not at all a developer velocity win. It's just needed if you have frameworks that don't allow you to run and deploy "all the code ever written in the company" in a reasonable way. You need to break it up in modular pieces that have defined boundaries so that you only run the parts you need as you develop (defined boundaries are a dev win sure but that can be done without microservices).

Google has gotten to the point where things are getting really fined grained and honesty chaotic. Moving to a portion of code to its own microservice is basically a promo bait 6 month project, often done without justification other than "everything should be its own microservice". In my time at Google i never heard "what benefit do we get if this is a microservice?" it's just assumed to always be a good thing. 50 interacting microservices to go through in a trace is at the point where the only place I've seen such a thing is Google.
by breuleux | 2026-01-29 17:15:40+00:00
> Simplicity comes from strong definitions

Sure, you can put it this way, with the caveat that reality at large isn't strongly definable.

You can sort of see this with good engineering: half of it is strongly defining a system simple enough to be reasoned about and built up, the other half is making damn sure that the rest of reality can't intrude, violate your assumptions and ruin it all.
by zipy124 | 2026-01-29 17:15:42+00:00
Well, the usual millionaires fleeing data for the Uk is the Henley & Partners report[0] (a wealth management firm, which is not a reputable source for these statistics, they simply want to attract clients, so its advertising). That reports 16,500 millionaires leaving the UK in 2025.

This report has been critisiced, with the data likely compeltely or partially fabricated [1]. [2] provides a graph for millionaires by year (note covid data unreliable) and you can see the number remains steady, so therefore if there was net migration it must be made up for by new millionaires anyway. In fact [3] (with UBS data) suggests the number of millionaires went up by 20% between 2017 and 2025 in the uk, despite 2% migration.

[0]: https://www.ftadviser.com/content/e80ff28f-97fb-4e85-811f-c0...

[1]: https://taxpolicy.org.uk/2025/07/27/henley-partners-milliona...

[2]: https://taxjustice.net/press/millionaire-exodus-did-not-occu...

[3]: https://taxjustice.net/press/millionaire-exodus-claim-backtr...
by xyzsparetimexyz | 2026-01-29 17:15:43+00:00
I feel like this isn't adequately accounting for the fact that existing software is becoming easier to refactor as well. If someone wants a 3d modelling program but is unsatisfied with the performance of some operation in Blender, are they going to vibe code a new modelling program or are they going to just vibe refactor the operation in Blender.
by observationist | 2026-01-29 17:15:55+00:00
It's bizarre that someone would choose to use the public, 4o bot over the ChatGPT Pro level bot available in the properly siloed and compliant Azure hosted ChatGPT already available to them at that time. The government can use segregated secure systems set up specifically for government use and sensitive documents.

It looks like he requested and got permission to work with "For Unofficial Use Only" documents on ChatGPT 4o - the bureaucracy allowed it - and nobody bothered to intervene. The incompetence and ignorance both are ridiculous.

Fortunately, nothing important was involved - it was "classified because everything gets classified" bureaucratic type classification, but if you're CISA leadership, you've gotta be on the ball, you can't do newbie bullshit like this.
by thewebguyd | 2026-01-29 17:16:20+00:00
> Wouldn’t be surprised if macOS starts locking down CLI tools towards an App Store model too.

The day that happens is the day Apple sees a mass exodus of developers to Linux, I don't think they'd be that stupid. They enjoy enough goodwill right now as the platform of choice (vs. Windows for those that don't want to run desktop Linux), I can't imagine they'd casually just throw that away.
by mike_hearn | 2026-01-29 17:16:37+00:00
Businesses have a long history of funding research with long time horizons. Look at quantum computing.

Whether that's basic or applied, well who really cares? The distinction is an academic invention because there's no definition of what basic research means and how it's different to applied. Was the transformer algorithm basic research? It's certainly become a fundamental general algorithm, but read the paper and it was designed to help Google Translate.
by cmrx64 | 2026-01-29 17:16:42+00:00
aodv works great and is “actual mesh.” the ‘overlays’ scale in practice and are topology agnostic, the hierarchical bgp mesh underneath isn’t altering the message or memory complexity, we can talk about them as algorithms. there are 10ks node meshes in the real world that use batman, geography-contrained hub and spoke, etc. guifi has 37k nodes in its heterogenous mesh with a batman fork, freifunk (originator of batman) around 40k.

edit to add: what is observed in practice is that gossip protocols can’t coordinate peers without centralizing. this is natural, and an artifact of the logarithmics in the routing protocols. the appropriate thing to do is model routing as a revocable proof system, and information theory explains the centralizing dynamics (problem I worked on 2018-2019) https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/1478 proves the global lower bound is linear (in route updates, when applied to routing, naively quadratic if distributed), and the trick routing protocols add to the game is locality, which yields the logarithmic advantage that when multiplied across the entire network is substantially subquadratic.
by sh3rl0ck | 2026-01-29 17:16:48+00:00
My problem with AI support agents is that instead of being good classifiers for my problem, they're even more non deterministic now in terms of grievance or query redressal. If a listed option is not available, I'd rather talk to a human who'd know or have the ability to find out, instead of an LLM which would just make something up with no grounding.
by koverstreet | 2026-01-29 17:17:04+00:00
Yeah, that's not a good environment for this kind of engineering. You need long term stability for a project like this, slow incremental development with a long term plan, and that's antithetical to VC culture.

On the other hand, Rust code and the culture of writing Rust leads to far more modularity, so maybe some useful stuff will come of it even if the startup fails.

I have been excited to see real work on databases in Rust, there are massive opportunities there.
by gus_massa | 2026-01-29 17:17:13+00:00
> the results showed that mice remained tumor-free for over 200 days after treatment.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/suppl/10.1073/pnas.2523039122/suppl... See page 25

In mice, N=12.

1 survived 200 days without cancer and was euthanized for 'ocular ulcers'.

5 survived 50-150 days, without cancer but were euthanized for other health problems

6 survived 50-150 days, and still had a smaller tumor and were euthanized for other health problems

My take away: Interesting, but the press article is overselling the result by a lot.