MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by avastel | 2025-05-20 07:32:34+00:00
Author here. A few weeks ago, someone posted a link on Reddit to an open-source CAPTCHA solver made for Binance’s slider challenge. It’s written in Python and works without using a browser. Just a custom HTTP client, some image matching, and basic reverse engineering.

I was curious and decided to dig into it. I wrote a long breakdown of how it works, how it solves the challenge, and what this says about how bots are built today. Many bots use headless browsers, but this one doesn’t, and it still gets through.

One of the main takeaways is how effective this kind of non-browser approach can be when CAPTCHA is deployed in isolation, without other layers like continuous behavioral checks.

Happy to discuss or answer questions.
by snvzz | 2025-05-20 07:32:35+00:00
>IPCs are slow and the gains are limited compared to the strategies all broadly used kernels already use.

The problem you are describing is a characteristic of 1st generation microkernels, and was solved by Jochen Liedtke in the mid 90s, introducing 2nd generation microkernels.

seL4 is a 3rd generation microkernel.

>I don’t know what "modern" microkernel means.

To get up to date, a good resource is Gernot Heiser's blog[0], read from oldest to newest.

0. https://microkerneldude.org/
by akimbostrawman | 2025-05-20 07:33:06+00:00
Wdym "could"? SMS 2FA has been on the down turn for a decade with technically sane and better alternatives such as TOTP and hardware tokens replacing it.

Just because some greedy and incompetent companies still use SMS for 2FA does not mean the concept of "what you know + what you have" as authentication is inherently bad or about ads. It's still about improving security.
by lifthrasiir | 2025-05-20 07:33:26+00:00
I think the GP is meant to say that it is somehow a functioning country (contrary to what clueless westerners believe), but that doesn't mean that it is [EDIT: was "isn't"] in the good state. Just that the belief is too strong to be true.

Added 2025-05-20T08:40: I realized what happened, double negations ruined the comment. I'm very much aware that DPRK has serious human rights problem and economic issues (after all, I am South Korean), and it also makes use of a western curiosity for business, but they are often exaggerated to the completely impossible extent.
by pona-a | 2025-05-20 07:33:43+00:00
I think something similar can be done on the world-wide scale with MTUS (Multinational Time Use Study) data [0], with some creative interpolation. From what I gathered, OP's simulation is more of a live Fermi estimate, so it would be interesting to see the same done with greater precision.

[0] https://www.timeuse.org/mtus
by ben_w | 2025-05-20 07:34:46+00:00
> Just as an example, my wife's only handbag is a balenciaga bag that she's had for 12+ years, she's been using it to carry back food from restaurants, put anything she needs in it, etc... and it's still in good shape. In the end, her bag has cost her so far 60 usd/year.

Some time in 2017/2018, I was in Decathlon and needed a bag for the other stuff I bought. Picked up a cheap rucksack for a single digit number of Euros, possibly €2 but it was ages ago now and I can't remember exactly.

It's still going fine, around 1/200th the price per year of your example.
by arghwhat | 2025-05-20 07:35:22+00:00
SSH is ubiquitous, lightweight, and now works for all machines equally.

SSH is integrated with everything and can be used to manage, transfer files/mount remote folders, forward ports in either direction, or proxy any network traffic through the remote end for debugging/access. You can open a remote folder directly in vscode, Zed or similar over SSH.

RDP to a standard Windows server (this was previously called "core" - having a desktop environment is a non-default add-on now) is silly as you're RDP'ing to solely see a cmd.exe window that asks you to use console-based configuration (sconfig.exe).

RDP to a windows server with "Desktop Experience" is silly because it is comparatively sluggish, streaming a (likely unaccelerated) video feed of heavier GUI applications vs. sending just a few text strings back and forth during editing.

Not to mention that containerized windows has no graphical stack and requires a text-centric workflow.
by CraigJPerry | 2025-05-20 07:35:30+00:00
we're about to find out. This is our collective current trajectory.

I am pretty convinced that a useful skill set for the next few years is being capable at managing[2] these AI tools in their various guises.

[2] - like literally leading your AI's, performance evaluating them, the whole shebang - just being good at making AI work toward business outcomes
by Reubend | 2025-05-20 07:35:48+00:00
Hey Francesco, this is very cool, and I'm sure this was a fun project to work on.

If you're interested in improving the performance here, using a method like TrueSkill would likely yield much better predictions than the XGBoostClassifier you're using now. It provides a robust method for modelling the game at the player level, so that the model can change its predictions as different players get swapped out. As you can imagine, roster changes make a huge impact on overall team performance, and the sample size of NBA data here isn't really big enough for gradient boosting to be effective when the teams themselves change. Bayesian methods are nice for this sort of thing.

In terms of where to take things next, it could also be cool to see some kind of "what if" scenario generator. How would the Dallas Mavericks' probability of winning have changed if they hadn't traded away Luka Dončić? How would the Indiana Pacers' chances of winning the season change if they weren't playing the Nicks in the Eastern conference finals?
by Oxodao | 2025-05-20 07:36:21+00:00
The issue is not the readability, it's that you don't handle how your stuff is sent. Using php as a template language, it starts to send everything until it reaches a Php tag to be executed.

That's why people taught each other that "you absolutely need to make session_start at the beggining of your file". No you don't, but since afterward the content starts to be sent the headers are already too.

I'm not saying you absolutely need to use a framework, but you should have only one echo in your requests.

I've never said the syntax you're saying is bad, I mean pretty much any templating language such has Twig uses this kind of stuff. The issue I have with this is how it works behind the scenes
by lqet | 2025-05-20 07:36:40+00:00
Really great posts, with fascinating pictures.

If anyone is interested in a beautiful rail adventure with much, much less risk, I highly recommend the round trip <Western Europe> -> Zagreb -> Belgrade -> Bar -> Kotor -> Dubrovnik -> Split -> Zagreb -> <Western Europe>. This makes for a really nice 4 week trip. (The Bar -> Split leg is done via bus.)

When we started this trip in early summer 2015, we expected it to be a nice and relaxed adventure - and it would've been, the landscape simply was beautiful! But then the refugee crisis happened. We saw trains in Belgrade and Zagreb that were so full that people were basically glued flat to the windows, we walked through the enormous refugee camp in Bristol Park near the old main station in Belgrade, we had to fight for tickets while train employees were simply ignoring us because they thought we were refugees trying to sneak into the train, and we had basically all ours trains cancelled on our way back. We got out of Croatia with one of the last busses before Slovenia closed the border for several days and embarked on a very strange 16 hour bus journey from Zagreb to Munich which included being held for hours at the Slovenian border station, and being inspected by German border police in full gear and with MP5s. I remember a female passenger had some problems with her passport, and she was taken away at the Austrian / Slovenian border and we continued without her.
by mmx1 | 2025-05-20 07:37:28+00:00
I don't think it is fair to brush it off under "same bucket; doesn't count." The syscalls are still different and there's quite a bit of nuance. I mean the lines you're drawing are out of superficial convenience and quite arbitrary. In fact, I'd argue macOS/Darwin/XNU are really Mach at their core (virtual memory subsystem, process management and IPC) and BSD syscalls are simply an emulated service on Mach, which is quite different from traditional UNIX. The fact that as a user you think of macOS much more similar to Linux is not really reflective of what happens under the hood. Likewise NT has very little to do with Win32 API in its fundamentals but Win2k feels the same to the user as WinME, but under your framing, you'd same-bucket those.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-05-20 07:37:39+00:00
I don’t remember when NFTs and cryptos helped me draft an email, wrote my meetings minutes for me or allowed me to easily search information previously locked in various documents.

I think there is this weird take amongst some on HN where LLMs are either completely revolutionary and making break through or utterly useless.

The truth is that they are useful already as a productivity tool.
by eschaton | 2025-05-20 07:39:03+00:00
That’s a meme created and spread by pseudo-journalist Declan McCullagh specifically to tar Al Gore in the lead-up to the 2000 election.

Specifically, Gore said in an interview that he “took the initiative in creating the Internet” by introducing the bill to allow commercial traffic on ARPAnet, which McCullagh twisted in an article to “Al Gote claimed he invented the Internet” in order to to smear him.
by directevolve | 2025-05-20 07:39:21+00:00
You can try to pull them out, but they’ll hop back in. At least in my family, having been severely abused as a child appears to have been the major risk factor for growing up into a conspiratorial adult. And no wonder.

However, asking questions is genuinely a good way to interact with these types of people when they are making a scene. It’s not to try and change their mind, though. It’s to restore an air of calm and decency that gives them a chance to reconnect socially with others in the room. But you can’t be a pushover, either, and it’s OK to just walk away, ignore it, etc.

The one thing you shouldn’t do, IMO, is try to change their mind. Your need to do that will be palpable and will fuel the fire.
by modo_mario | 2025-05-20 07:39:53+00:00
The upper class people in scandinavia are having more kids than the middle class.

Housing seems to be a pretty common issue that doesn't prevent people from having kids but if it delays (which it often does) it does the same job of dropping birthrates. I wish people would stop acting like it's only a wealth issue. Like oh if people get more money they no longer want kids....no
by perlgeek | 2025-05-20 07:40:16+00:00
> Where are the AI-driven breakthroughs?

The only thing that seems to live up to the hype is AlphaFold, which predicts protein folding based on amino acid sequences, and of which people say that it actually makes their work significantly easier.

But, disclaimer, this is only from second-hand knowledge, I'm not working in the field.
by JPLeRouzic | 2025-05-20 07:40:44+00:00
For me, the real issue is fecal matter in the source. The local population has doubled in the last 40 years, and there has been a lot of flooding in the area. The proportion of agricultural land is shrinking (-60% in 50 years).

I don't see what Nestlé can do to mitigate this problem.
by snthpy | 2025-05-20 07:41:05+00:00
Thank you. Well expressed. I very much agree with this and have been saying so to friends for years.

The way I look at it is that it's analogous to the way we ourselves function: we're made up of billions of cells which individually just follow simple programs mediated by local interactions with their neighbours as well as some global state mediated by hormones and signals from the nervous system. However collectively they produce what we call intelligence (and even consciousness) which we wouldn't ascribe to any of the component cells and those components aren't aware of the collective organisms goal. Moreover the overall organism can achieve goals and solve problems beyond the scale of the components.

Similarly our institutions, be they corporations, governments, etc... are collective intelligences with us as the parts. These institutions have goals and problems solving capabilities that far surpass our own - no individual could keep all Walmart stores perfectly stocked every day, or design a modern microchip or end-to-end AI platform, etc... . These really are the goals of the organisations, and not the individuals. Take for example the US government, every four years you swap out the individuals in the executive branch yet overall US policy remains largely unchained. Sure, sometimes there is a major shift in direction, but it takes time for that to be translated into shifts in policy and actions as different parts of the system react at different speeds. The bigger point is that the individuals executing the actions get swapped out over time (at different speeds for different parts like cells being replaced at different speeds in our bodies) but the organisation continues to pursue its own goal which only changes slowly over time. Political and financial analysts implicitly acknowledge this when they talk about US or Chinese policy but this often gets personified into the leader.

I think we really need to acknowledge more the existence and reality of organisational goals as independent of the goals of the individuals in those organisations. I was struck by how in the movie The Corporation they point out that corporations often take actions that are contrary to the beliefs of the individuals in them, including the CEO because the CEO is bound by his fiduciary duty to the shareholders. Corporations are legal persons and if you analyse them as persons they are psychopaths, without any human feelings or regard for human cost or externalities unless those are enforced through some legal or pricing mechanism. Yet when corporations or organisations transgress we often hold the individuals accountable. Sometimes the individuals are to blame but often its how the game has been set up that is at fault. For example, in a globally heterogenous tax regime, a multinational corporation will naturally minimise its tax burden, it can't really do otherwise and the executives of the company have a fiduciary duty to shareholders to carry that out.

Therefore we have revise and keep evolving the rules of the game in order to stay compatible with human values and survival.
by oliverdzedou | 2025-05-20 07:41:10+00:00
Many people often say that making an engine from scratch takes too long. But how long does it take to properly learn Unreal or Unity such that you can have an idea and turn it into a game without friction? Presumably, once your engine is finished, you are at that level of expertise instantly, which is a huge time saver. In my opinion, the more experienced of an engineer you are, the more the scales tip in the favor of rolling your own, from a time-spent perspective.

The more unique and niche your game is, the more true this is. Stumbling around Unreal's horrid UI for 3 months just to realize that the thing you want to do is barely even possible due to how general and off-the-shelf the engine is, is not a good experience. On the other hand, if you want to make a hyper-realistic, open-world RPG, then rolling your own is probably not a good idea.

I also believe that even if it's not always the most efficient thing to do, placing limitations on yourself by using a custom-made specialized engine makes the creativity really flow, and your game, even if not the most advanced, will be a lot more unique as a result of that.
by arghwhat | 2025-05-20 07:41:32+00:00
I prefer SSH because it fits into a standard workflow with far larger ecosystem (my file manager and editors can browse SSH directly, traffic can easily be routed over SSH in either direction), and is already what I'd use for the majority of servers and machines.

psremoting would be limited specifically to remote PowerShell on windows, which is comparatively limited. Even if I was purely a Windows admin I'd consider the SSH approach more powerful.
by Padriac | 2025-05-20 07:42:11+00:00
Is a car on the street a private place deserving legal protections? If so then you can do anything in a car and claim it is private but surely that's not true. A passerby or a policeman has the right to look through the glass windows of a car. Perhaps what's going on here is people aren't happy that they have been caught out doing the wrong thing and solicitors smell money. I recommend not using a phone while driving because it can distract your attention and cause an accident which might injure or kill people.
by th0ma5 | 2025-05-20 07:42:34+00:00
Has a point of view, a clear motive, ability to think holistically about things that are hard to digitize, get mad and clean up a bunch of stuff absolutely correctly because they're finally just "sick of all of this shit", or, conservatively isolates legacy code, studying it and creating buffering wrappers for the new system in pieces as the legacy issues are mitigated with a long term strategy. Each move is discussed with their peers. etc etc etc thank you for advocating sanity!
by dmos62 | 2025-05-20 07:42:52+00:00
What led you to say that the author did not have users' interests at heart? What led you to imply that there's something wrong with reimplementing something or having fun or whatever it is you disliked you so much? What leads you think that a person working on something delivered with Windows 11 deserves less respect than a person working on a less used system? Or, do you consider what you said neutral, well argued criticism?
by palata | 2025-05-20 07:43:03+00:00
> accept responsibility

When was the last time a CEO went to jail because of illegal activities committed by the company? There is no responsibility.

If the "responsibility" is "you become rich, and if you get fired we give you a huge bonus on top", then I'm pretty sure anyone would be happy to take it.

Being a CEO is like being a politician. You need to convince others that they need you even if they don't, or you're incompetent, or you serve other interests. It's not what it takes to "lead a company", it's what it takes to "get the highly-paid job".
by bayindirh | 2025-05-20 07:43:26+00:00
People like to talk like GPL is evil, but it's underpinning more of the world than many people see.

And thanks to no ABI/API stability guarantees, Linux can innovate and doesn't care about what others might say. Considering Linux is developed mostly by companies today, the standard upkeep of a driver is not a burden unless you want to shove planned obsolescence down the throats of the consumers (cough Win11 TPM requirements cough).
by pjmlp | 2025-05-20 07:44:05+00:00
The question was,

> What languages are people still writing mainframe code in?

so I naturally answered with the ones I know about.

> RPG was never a big thing on mainframes for instance.

It certainly was in Portugal, back in its heyday.

> Same with NEWP, I've never heard of it.

Systems programming language for Burroughs B5000, evolution from ESPOL its original one, nowadays sold a Unisys MCP.

> And Java is pretty important on the platform these days and not an attempt from the past. It's been pushed pretty hard for at least 20 years and is kept well up to date with newer Java standards.

The attempt from the past was converting JVM bytecodes to TIMI on the fly, this approach was dropped in favour of the regular JIT.

For the rest regarding "like WSL", I was trying to simplify, not giving an conference talk on UNIX support across micro and mainframes, and its evolution.
by coolvision | 2025-05-20 07:45:54+00:00
This is very misleading, just look at the data: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unicorn_startup_compan... Yes, it's different for different countries, and some EU countries are less startup friently. But countries like Norway or Estonia have ~1 unicorn per 1M people, just 50% of US (~2)
by Y_Y | 2025-05-20 07:46:09+00:00
Fair point. The context of that quote was that he was asked by a journalist for a quick explanation over the phone when the physics Nobel for 1965 was announced.

He did go on to write a very readable little book (from a lecture series) on the subject which has photons wearing little watches and waiting for the hands to line up. I'd say a keen eight-year-old could get something from that.

https://ia600101.us.archive.org/17/items/richard-feynman-pdf...
by tomhow | 2025-05-20 07:47:40+00:00
I'm personally comfortable accepting that people have experiences that aren't explained by mainstream science, and I know at least one person who says they can see auras, a person who is very dear to me. But I also know it's best not to sneer at people who aren't familiar with those experiences, as it serves only to anger and alienate people.

> Anyway cue the downvotes from the overly analytical people here

This breaks these guidelines:

Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.

Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.

Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

I know it can be upsetting to face hostility when sharing experiences and concepts that are deeply meaningful to you, but let's try and avoid taunting people like this. When it's predictable that a comment will attract downvotes, it's an indication that there might be a better way to express things.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by Ray20 | 2025-05-20 07:47:44+00:00
>It doesn't matter what leaks are exposed when it can just be handwaved as "fake news" and enough voters will buy that.

Especially in conditions when you don't have to lie at that.

It's not because voters are so gullible that they are ready to believe any word of a charismatic leader. The loss of trust to the mainstream media and to the scientific community is a natural phenomenon in environment when they only tell lies to push their political agenda.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-05-20 07:48:00+00:00
>First of all, I'm not in a bubble, those don't exist.

Why do you think bubbles don't exist. People's perception of reality is shaped by their own experience within their immediate proximity and network of people.

> Secondly, if your assesment is remotely true, shouldn't every european software engineer be moving to the netherlands to work at these mythical FANG locations? Has that happened?

A lot of EU people used to move to the NL for tech jobs at big US companies like Uber. Obviously the NL can't house every single person from EU as evident from the NL's housing crisis, nor is every EU worker willing to relocate to NL.
by 2muchcoffeeman | 2025-05-20 07:48:06+00:00
I don’t think people are always aware of just how much stuff is built by really terrible people or on the backs of really horrible things.

Sure, some people take art seriously. But throwing it away is super easy. You don’t alter your quality of life much if you burn all your Harry Potter books even if that was a defining part of your childhood. Removing technology from your life on the other hand is hard. Doing something that has little consequence to your life is kinda meaningless in the scheme of things.
by jon-wood | 2025-05-20 07:48:10+00:00
From a starting point of having dabbled in making 2D games in the past it took me a few days of working through tutorials and documentation for producing assets to be the bottleneck in building a game in Unreal. In Godot I was at the point of being able to make terrible games within a few hours. The amount of lifting that modern game engines do for you is phenomenal, and I think anyone claiming they can write an engine from scratch quicker than they can implement a game with an existing engine is deluding themselves.