Hacker News: gkbrk

New comment by gkbrk in "Mozilla to launch free built-in VPN in upcoming Firefox 149"

gkbrk — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 12:48:37 +0000

When you use a FOSS product more, the person that wrote the code doesn't end up spending more money. When you use a free service more, someone is paying for that usage and resources.

New comment by gkbrk in "Show HN: Hacker News archive (47M+ items, 11.6GB) as Parquet, updated every 5m"

gkbrk — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 17:51:20 +0000

My Hacker News items table in ClickHouse has 47,428,860 items, and it's 5.82 GB compressed and 18.18 GB uncompressed. What makes Parquet compression worse here, when both formats are columnar?

New comment by gkbrk in "10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips"

gkbrk — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 12:02:40 +0000

Browser killing the tab way before it happens

New comment by gkbrk in "I don't know how you get here from “predict the next word”"

gkbrk — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 09:05:18 +0000

A microphone + ADC is hearing though, that's the whole reason we even produce microphones. So that our electronics can hear sound.

New comment by gkbrk in "Firefox 148 Launches with AI Kill Switch Feature and More Enhancements"

gkbrk — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 19:32:18 +0000

Firefox has YouTube integration of course.

Here's a Firefox file [1] specifically for integrating YouTube videos into their picture-in-picture system. Your random video website won't get this treatment of course, need to be a popular one.

Here's a piece of C++ code [2] in the Firefox engine that specifically rewrites old YouTube embeds from their old HTML embed snippet to the new one. Again, your own video website will never be so deeply integrated into Firefox because it's not a top 10 website.

Firefox Readability mode makes pages more readable by removing useless stuff like videos. Unless it's a YouTube [3] or other top-N popular video website of course. YouTube videos are given special treatment because it's popular and having small integrations like this make the user experience better.

[1]: https://github.com/mozilla-firefox/firefox/blob/1f43fe5ffadd...

[2]: https://github.com/mozilla-firefox/firefox/blob/1f43fe5ffadd...

[3]: https://github.com/mozilla-firefox/firefox/blob/1f43fe5ffadd...

New comment by gkbrk in "Firefox 148 Launches with AI Kill Switch Feature and More Enhancements"

gkbrk — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 12:16:50 +0000

> considering popular opinion there is absolutely no reason to enable it by default

You need to update your priors. The popular opinion is there is a reason to enable it by default. ChatGPT is the #5 most popular website in the world, more popular than Wikipedia, Reddit or Twitter. The vast majority of users want to use AI.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-visited_websites

New comment by gkbrk in "Firefox 148 Launches with AI Kill Switch Feature and More Enhancements"

gkbrk — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 09:39:25 +0000

The way users use Facebook and LLMs are so massively different, it almost seems like a bad faith argument to equate them.

Facebook is mostly scrolling the timeline and passive consumption. It doesn't benefit from being on the side because the content you interact with on Facebook is completely separate from the content on your other tabs.

In contrast, LLMs have ongoing conversations that the user can come back to, and each conversation might relate to multiple tabs that the user is working on. On top of that, it's a very common occurrence that the user has questions about, or a task to be done using the content of the current page. This makes LLM and chatbot integration much more useful than a Facebook integration.

Also if you have the Facebook Messenger installed, Firefox already gives you an integration to share things with your Facebook contacts.

New comment by gkbrk in "Firefox 148 Launches with AI Kill Switch Feature and More Enhancements"

gkbrk — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 08:46:46 +0000

Because people like chat bot sidebars.

My code editor has a built-in chat bot sidebar that I use every day. It's not a huge stretch that people who use chatbot sidebars in other applications would also want one in their browser.

ChatGPT is the #6 most popular website in the world, why wouldn't a browser want tighter integration with such a popular kind of service?

New comment by gkbrk in "Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI"

gkbrk — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 17:00:54 +0000

Somehow people manage to run it without this magical release

New comment by gkbrk in "MuMu Player (NetEase) silently runs 17 reconnaissance commands every 30 minutes"

gkbrk — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 05:57:58 +0000

They don't pick the keywords uniformly randomly from a list of all keywords though. They think they randomly picked something that popped up in their mind, but those keywords are either

- stuff they saw online recently — ads or otherwise, which put the keywords in their mind

- or stuff they were already interested in recently

Not hard to imagine targeting algorithms picking up on either of these

New comment by gkbrk in "Qwen3.5: Towards Native Multimodal Agents"

gkbrk — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 09:49:30 +0000

That's not because 4o is good at things, that's because it's pretty much the most sycophantic model and people easily fall for a model incorrectly agreeing with them then a model correctly calling them out.

New comment by gkbrk in "Ask HN: Is there a no-LLM license yet?"

gkbrk — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 10:26:17 +0000

Not just companies, people too. It will have trouble getting into Linux distro repos. And a lot of devs/users avoid non-open-source projects especially if they went looking for solutions on Github.

New comment by gkbrk in "Anthropic raises $30B in Series G funding at $380B post-money valuation"

gkbrk — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 04:47:40 +0000

Theranos didn't get out-competed by the fat cat. They defrauded their investors, got caught, the founder went to jail and the company died.

Shrinking a language detection model to under 10 KB

gkbrk — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 12:52:40 +0000

Article URL: https://david-gilbertson.medium.com/shrinking-a-language-detection-model-to-under-10-kb-b729bc25fd28

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46809527

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by gkbrk in "Pandas 3.0"

gkbrk — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 12:19:18 +0000

> we know how those go

They get forked and stay open source? At least this is what happens to all the popular ones. You can't really un-open-source a project if users want to keep it open-source.

New comment by gkbrk in "I made my own Git"

gkbrk — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 18:11:47 +0000

CodeCrafters has an amazing "Build your own Git" [1] tutorial too. Jon Gjengset has a nice video [2] doing this challenge live with Rust.

[1]: https://app.codecrafters.io/courses/git/overview

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0VotuGzD_w

New comment by gkbrk in "Waiting for dawn in search: Search index, Google rulings and impact on Kagi"

gkbrk — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 09:58:55 +0000

I think Brave Search does something similar with their Web Discovery Project, but I don't think it indexes full web pages from users.

https://support.brave.app/hc/en-us/articles/4409406835469-Wh...

New comment by gkbrk in "Brave overhauled its Rust adblock engine with FlatBuffers, cutting memory 75%"

gkbrk — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 09:52:43 +0000

Almost all of Mozilla's money comes from Google, an ad company. Mozilla wouldn't want to bite the hand that feeds them.

New comment by gkbrk in "I switched from VSCode to Zed"

gkbrk — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 19:54:23 +0000

If you can call the left image [1] "supporting 1080p" I guess Zed supports it. But it looks like VS Code and other editors somehow support it better without getting blurry.

Keep in mind that Zed developers [2] consider blurry fonts on low DPI displays a Priority 1 issue, and a reproducible bug that is commonly encountered.

I'm sure if there was no blurry font issue with Zed, they would just close this bug report.

[1]: https://ibb.co/zVS0Qz6z

[2]: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/7992

New comment by gkbrk in "I switched from VSCode to Zed"

gkbrk — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 15:06:07 +0000

1080p is the most popular screen resolution by far, and on regular monitors 1080p is "low DPI".

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey