MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zahlman | 2025-07-31 02:58:58+00:00
> The PyPI package vfunctions is a malicious surveillance package whose routines (webcam capture, file infection, and startup persistence) activate only when explicitly invoked, but the code’s purpose and effect remain malicious.

> PyPI’s security team indicated that vfunctions does not trigger automatically and should be viewed as “bad practice” unless a user or attacker runs its exported functions. We acknowledge this but retain a malware classification because those functions enable full surveillance once invoked.

> However, any script or threat actor that calls its exported functions gains full webcam capture, exfiltration, and self‑replication capabilities, making the package a latent but serious supply chain threat.

... Yes. Anyone who decides to download a package named "vfunctions" with no documentation and no GitHub presence, install it, then write code that imports the library and calls functions with names like `Infect_Files`, may cause serious damage to the local system.

What clearly happened here is that, over three years ago, some kid decided to write a bunch of code for various "pranks" (granted some of them would be more serious than the kid likely intended) and then for whatever reason decided to publish that code (without a license, but with a valid-looking email address).

Insisting on using something like this as an example of "malware" should be embarrassing. PyPI seems to be doing a very good job of keeping out malware with their very limited human resources, and it comes across like this package was only included for "balance" (or to broaden the scope in the title) in a report that mentioned three npm packages.
by tsoukase | 2025-07-31 02:59:07+00:00
Until about the age of 12 banning inappropriate media and people that carry such is the sole responsibility of the parents. Between 12 and 16 there is an interraction with the child and afterwards the teen goes by theirself. The same goes for social relations, education, every life choice.

No silly age IDs and selfies, no unstable and unsafe procedures, no permanent damage.
by echelon | 2025-07-31 02:59:17+00:00
Speaking of Adobe!

Adobe is going to get absolutely trounced by GenAI. They've got so many competitors coming at them from all angles.

Also, innovation capital (engineers at startups) experience outsized rewards at startups when disruption happens. The better engineers will flock to more nimble outfits and reap the benefits.

Adobe is a dinosaur.
by shakna | 2025-07-31 03:01:58+00:00
> Who's in charge here, you or your kids?

As a parent you're not in charge of a teenager. You're there to guide them, and try to protect them from their bad choices, but they have reached a point where they are beginning to control their self-determinism. They're not a kid anymore.

If you just try to act the authority, try to control everything, then well... You'll either end up in abusive land, or trying to control someone who has learnt to hate you for not treating them as a person who does have their own sense of self.
by ChadNauseam | 2025-07-31 03:02:39+00:00
I don't know how to do it with Claude Code, but I was at a beach vacation for the past few days and I was studying french on my phone with an webapp that I made. Sometimes I'd notice something bug me, and I used cursor's "background agents" tool to ask it to make a change. This is essentially just a website where you can type in your request, and they allocate a VM, check out your repository, then run the cursor LLM agent inside that VM to implement your requested changes, then push it and create a pull request to your repo. Because I have CI/CD setup, I then just merged the change and waited for it to deploy (usually going for a swim in-between).

I realized as I was doing it that I wouldn't be able to tell anyone about it because I would sound like the most obnoxious AI bro ever. But it worked! (For the simple requests I used it on.) The most annoying part was that I had to tell it to run rustfmt every time, because otherwise it would fail CI and I wouldn't be able to merge it. And then it would take forever to install a rust toolchain and figure out how to run clippy and stuff. But it did feel crazy to be able to work on it from the beach. Anyway, I'm apparently not very good at taking vacations, lol
by AnonC | 2025-07-31 03:03:57+00:00
I’d heard of Msty and briefly tried it before. I checked the website again and it looks quite feature rich. I hadn’t known about LM Studio, and I see that it allows commercial use for free (which Matt doesn’t).

How would you compare and contrast between the two? My main use would be to use it as a tool with a chat interface rather than developing applications that talk to models.
by tuesdaynight | 2025-07-31 03:04:06+00:00
I drafted an answer to your questions, but I deleted it because there's nothing that I can say that you would not find searching about the subject and trying to ignore your bias. It's not productive, you know how to find different opinions about it. I would just unproductively repeat things here. It's enough to say that I agree with your starting point but disagree with your conclusions. However, I can talk about the gaslighting part.

>I have found the people who tried to debate these matters with me utterly unconvincing. I would love to be shown that this country is not what I believe it to be but that seems increasingly unlikely.

There's nothing that I can say that you aren't going to ignore, because you are smarter than me and you cannot think that your conclusions are wrong, either because you think you are 100% logical or because you don't see how your emotions are clouding your thoughts. I was exactly like that some years ago, before therapy. I would suggest the same for you, but you will probably consider that gaslighting. Again, you are smart, which makes hard to accept that you are not being rational as you think you are. A good therapist would have the tools to help you realize that.

>And my fears are not at all unfounded. They've prosecuted completely normal people who criticized them in the past. They've gone after teenagers over online comments. I'm taking risks by posting here because of my sense of justice. I'm just too disgusted and disillusioned by what's happening in this country to keep quiet about it.

I know people who spend most of their online time posting about this topic on public social media, some of their posts getting very close to death threats, every day, and nothing happens to them. Some of them works as public legislative servants, what makes them an easy target for censorships. We have elected people posting all day about it, some of them asking for military coups, and nothing ever happens to them. The probability of you getting arrested because of comments on Hacker News are so low that I cannot see that thought as something different of delusion.
by cchance | 2025-07-31 03:04:45+00:00
And again, studies have shown violence in video games does not increase violence in kids as they grow, in fact it tends to be an outlet, so it should be up to parents to control what they see as acceptable for the kid they are raising.

This push for governments to restrict EVERYONE's kids because a group of parents dislike something is insane, if you don't want your kid to play/watch something, the enforce some damn rules on your own kid.
by mvkel | 2025-07-31 03:05:21+00:00
"Tech debt" is a misnomer. It implies that at some point it should be paid down. There are very few examples where dedicating real efforts exclusively to paying down tech debt led to anything beneficial for the customer.

Some of the software we know and love today started with someone writing their very first line of PHP code, or Rails.

Vibe coding is ultimately about getting ideas shipped faster. Code quality is an engineer recruiting/retention strategy.

As we saw with that Tea app (which wasn't even vibe coded), you're only as secure as your weakest firebase store.
by jay_kyburz | 2025-07-31 03:06:12+00:00
OK, for those interested, I have a Ryzen9 2700 with a 12GB RX6750XT and downloaded Gemma3:4b because that was what the app suggested first.

The speed seems fine to me, but the hallucinations are wild, completely wrong on a few things I like to test the commercial offerings on.

For simple questions about the lua language and how to do things in Unity game engine the results look fairly OK.
by duped | 2025-07-31 03:06:32+00:00
Yes, this is easy to test too:

#include <stdio.h> #include <unistd.h> #include <sys/types.h> int main() { pid_t pid = fork(); if (pid == 0) { sleep(1); printf("after parent died!\n"); return 0; } return 0; }

You'll see the message printed out 1 second after the process ends.
by cchance | 2025-07-31 03:08:44+00:00
Exactly, all these groups of parents with their sensitivities offended constantly, are the ones refusing to actually take charge and responsibility for what their children do.

It's parents that don't want to put in the effort to actually monitor what their kid is doing they want to hand a kid an ipad and let the ipad only let them see things they feel are good, but not actually have to monitor what the kid is doing because government ipad content is babysitting/raising their kid for them.
by duped | 2025-07-31 03:09:16+00:00
The graceful shutdown stuff is good, but always piping the output of child processes is not necessarily the right thing to do. Some processes need stdin (what if it's a shell?) and some processes will be checking if stdout is a tty. What you should do (and Rust doesn't make this easy) is allocate a new pty for your child processes if your own stdout is a tty. Some programs default to this (eg: ssh), others make it configurable (eg: docker).

You're also missing the standard techniques for managing and reaping your children, which I don't see mentioned. You don't need to maintain a registry of child processes for example, at least on Linux there are a few things you can do for this without any global state (PR_SET_PDEATHSIG, PR_SET_CHILD_SUBREAPER, PID namespaces). On MacOS you can write a routine to reap children like a linux init() process would. The registry approach is also fragile: what if library code spawns children?

Also, if the terminal is in raw mode then you'll never get ctrl+C. This is really about signal handling. You also can't gracefully shutdown if you get a SIGKILL, which is why PR_SET_PDEATHSIG and PID namespaces are very nice - they guarantee descendants get killed.
by webprofusion | 2025-07-31 03:09:25+00:00
It took me about 20 years of normal employee/contractor office work alongside creating a side project every few years, to eventually find the side project that would take off.

In the end it was a weekend hack to make something simpler that turned into an app release, which a year or so after that turned into a business.

Sometimes people have a great idea, build it and feel entitled to success with it, but it's largely about relevant eyeballs. If enough relevant eyeballs find your thing and use/buy it then it's a success. It's quite easy to launch something that gets lots of views on launch, but there has to be a reason to come back (sticky apps/content).

I've also built several things that could have been good but I lost interest and ironically the thing I work on now is arguably one of the most boring topics conceivable, but perhaps that's why few people do it well.
by kanestreet | 2025-07-31 03:10:06+00:00
^^^ absolutely spot on. There’s a big element of deception going on. I could respect it (and would trust the product more) if they were upfront about their motives and said “yes we are a venture backed startup and we have profit aspirations, but here’s XYZ thing we can promise. Instead it’s all smoke and mirrors … super sus.
by anyfoo | 2025-07-31 03:10:12+00:00
What serendipity. I just bought an old Alpha on eBay, and installed both Tru64 and OpenBSD on it. Tru64 came with CDE, and I was once again admiring how ugly it is, and lamenting with friends at work how this eyesore could replace OpenLook. But CDE kind of "belongs" to Tru64.

Looks like I now get to "enjoy" CDE on the OpenBSD partition as well!
by vatican_banker | 2025-07-31 03:10:13+00:00
Banks care _a lot_ where the data is store, hence most banks are inclined to keep customer data on-prem.

Because data must be on-prem, banks are stuck in legacy infra paradigms. The whole org suffers, innovation is stiffled, yada yada…

An on-prem cloud product (hardware+software) is a game changer for these companies, IMO.

My question to oxide: how easy is to integrate external hardware into the cloud? For example: bunch of GPUs or a bunch of next-gen hardware like SambaNova.
by sito42 | 2025-07-31 03:12:38+00:00
Most scientific "products" are not bound books or pdf. The software, datasets, proofs, algorithms, etc contained within them (or in the dreaded "replication materials") are usually more valuable than the text that scientists write around them. We use the text merely to communicate the contribution and its value to other humans. I suspect AI will outperform the best humans at this communication task very soon. Is the purpose of a dissertation really to demonstrate that a human has the capacity to write effective prose? There are many scientists who are brilliant but are terrible at this task. Do we really wish to shun them and their ideas?

In the future, the best science will be produced by those that wield AI tools most effectively. Academics need to figure out how to assess scientific work within this context. This is not a good solution.
by GCUMstlyHarmls | 2025-07-31 03:13:04+00:00
> It's disgusting that <id-verify-service> is willing to support the consumption of <lewd-video-game>.

<<id-verify-service threatens to pull service from store, lewd-game is removed>

> It's disgusting that <id-verify-service> is willing to support the consumption of <trans-dating-sim-video-game>.

<<...>>
by n_kr | 2025-07-31 03:13:28+00:00
Yes I do that too. The important bit is the model. Rest is almost trivial. I had posted a Show HN here about the script I've been using which is open source now ( https://github.com/n-k/tinycoder ) ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44674856 ).

With a bit of help from ChatGPT etc., it was trivial to make, and I use it everyday now. I may add DDG and github search to it soon too.
by jonjes | 2025-07-31 03:14:12+00:00
Another excellent way to get rid of mosquitos is to attract their predators. Both hummingbirds and bats eat a surprisingly large number of mosquitos. Putting up hummingbird feeders and a bat house took care of it. I've seen only one mosquito in my yard this summer so far, even though I live next to a small wetland. Before the hummingbird feeders, we had lots of mosquitos.
by vinhnx | 2025-07-31 03:19:15+00:00
I have been exploring AI and LLMs. I built my own AI chat bot using Python [1], and then [2] AI SDK from Vercel and OpenAI compatible API endpoints. And eventually build a product around it.

1. VT.ai https://github.com/vinhnx/VT.ai Python

2. VT Chat https://vtchat.io.vn: my own product
by reactordev | 2025-07-31 03:19:20+00:00
Figma is what all the designers are using. If they turn that into a Claude for design and add the ability to complete the wireframes with AI generated code. There’s no need for engineers until after acquisition. Just maintenance.

The difference here is - Adobe tried using a proprietary stack. Figma can spit React. Everyone knows React - even if you use something else. It’s perfect timing with AI coding agents and every, single, UX team using it.
by tumnus | 2025-07-31 03:21:36+00:00
They are certainly similar, but if you're choosing Peanuts as your main example of a comic strip that reuses some standard formatting... you're forgetting that in addition to the art, there's also decades of character and world building. Of course memes serve a similar function in terms of a multiple panel joke structure but there's a profound difference between those two at a core level. Maybe not so much with a Garfield or Beetle Bailey, though!
Show HN: PassiveCraft – AI Converts Social Media into Digital Products
by errabehy | 2025-07-31 03:21:52+00:00
Hi HN,

After months of development, I'm excited to share PassiveCraft, a new AI-powered SaaS platform designed to solve the significant monetization challenge faced by content creators in the global creator economy.

The idea for PassiveCraft came from my own frustrations as an ex-content creator. I experienced firsthand the struggle of converting engaging social media content into sustainable, sellable digital products without extensive technical knowledge or time. Existing solutions often required manual effort, complex integrations, or lacked the intelligence to truly understand and repurpose diverse content formats, leading me to believe that there had to be a better way.

Our goal with PassiveCraft is to empower digital entrepreneurs worldwide by making it incredibly simple to turn their existing social media presence into a direct revenue stream. We've focused heavily on our proprietary AI algorithms and a streamlined user experience to achieve this. For instance, our AI analyzes various content types (text, images, short videos) from platforms(YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram), identifies key value, and intelligently structures it into ready-to-sell digital products like e-books, courses, templates, or premium content bundles. This transformation process aims to minimize manual intervention for creators.

We launched our MVP in June 2025 and are thrilled to have already over 50 active users who are exploring new ways to monetize their content. As a solo founder with a science and engineering background, this project is deeply personal, driven by a vision to democratize digital entrepreneurship.

We're currently in early access and would love to get your feedback. We believe PassiveCraft can significantly streamline the productization process for creators, allowing them to focus more on creation and less on complex sales funnels.

I'm particularly interested in hearing your thoughts on:

Our AI's content analysis capabilities: Do you think the approach of transforming diverse social media content into structured digital products is a compelling solution for creators?

Potential new digital product formats: Beyond e-books and courses, what other types of digital products do you see creators needing automated assistance with?

From a technical perspective: What challenges do you foresee with scaling the AI's processing of large volumes of diverse social media content, and how might we best optimize for performance and cost?

Thanks for taking a look! I'll be here to answer any questions.
by sc077y | 2025-07-31 03:24:23+00:00
In that case, you use copy OR what you can can also do, if you really care about disk usage, is use symbolic links between the drives. have a .venv sym link on drive A (raid 1) point to the uv_cache_dir's venv on drive B (raid 0). I have not tested though what happens when you unmount and sync.
by alliao | 2025-07-31 03:24:38+00:00
IS IT NOW!? last time I visited (long time ago) it was BACS, and the bank clerk told me it takes one day to "properly" register they've received my fund, one day to make sure it transferred and on the third and final day, the other bank can "properly" acknowledge they've received the fund thus why it took 3 FRIGGIN DAYS. I used so much cash back then.
by Jeba_jebarsan | 2025-07-31 03:24:54+00:00
I’m a 21-year-old college student, and 7 days ago I launched Wireframer — a fast, minimal tool to create clean wireframes without needing to touch Figma or React.

I built it because I was frustrated with how slow wireframing can be when I just want to quickly sketch ideas. Wireframer gives you basic blocks, drag-and-drop, and export in seconds. No login needed to try it.

So far:

100+ users

2 paying customers

Built solo in a week

It’s super early, but I’d love your feedback. What features would make this useful to you? Thanks in advance!
by pzo | 2025-07-31 03:25:30+00:00
this is actually positive even for devs. The more users have ollama installed then you can release some desktop ai app for them and don't have to bundle additional models in your own app. Easier to provide to such user free or cheaper subscription because you don't have additional costs. Latest Qwen30B models area really powerful.

Would be even better if there was a installation template that checks if Ollama is installed and if not download it as sub installation first checking user computer specs if enough RAM and fast enough CPU/GPU. Also API to prompt user (ask for permission) to install specific model if haven't been installed.
by CGamesPlay | 2025-07-31 03:25:34+00:00
Child processes are created using, generally, 2 syscalls: fork, then exec. When you fork, all file descriptors the main process has open are copied, and are now open in two places. Then, when the child calls exec (to transform itself into the target program), all file descriptors stay open in the new process (unless a specific fd is explicitly configured otherwise, FD_CLOEXEC).

Standard output are just file descriptors with the number 0, 1, and 2, and you can use the dup2 syscall to assign those numbers to some pipes that you originally created before you fork. Now the standard output of your child process is going to those pipes in your parent process. Or you can close those file descriptors, which will prevent the child process from reading/writing them at all. Or you can do nothing, and the copied file descriptors from the parent still apply.

Conceptually, you think of "spawning a child" as something that is in some kind of container (the parent process), but the underlying mechanics are not like this at all, and processes don't actually exist in a "tree", they just happen to keep a record of their "parent process ID" so the OS knows who to notify when the process dies.
by edwardbernays | 2025-07-31 03:26:05+00:00
Including FOSS software is so wild in this conversation that it's ridiculous. You mean creating a product as a loss leader to get people into an ecosystem, farm social capital, create a sales funnel, or get free labor from the community to provide QA? The creation and release of software is NOWHERE NEAR the same category as "doing actual real scientific research" that it just smells of incredibly bad faith argumentation.

Economic analysis? Another intelligence product that requires essentially no staff, no actual R&D, no equipment besides computers? Brother, you have to be kidding me.

The hardware thing is just companies evolving to a shared standard.

Do you have even a little bit of a clue how hard it is to do good pharmacological research? Toxicological? Biological? Chemical? Physical? You have mentioned intelligence products with 0 investment cost and 0 risk of failure.

This is perhaps one of the most fart-sniffing tech-centric perspectives I have ever been exposed to. Go read some actual research by actual scientists and come back when you can tell me why, for instance, Eli Lilley would ever make their data or internal R&D public.

Jonas Salk did it. He is an extremely rare exception, and his incentive was public health. Notice that his incentive was markedly not financial.

Market entities with a financial incentive, whose entire business model and success is predicated on their unique R&D results, have 0 incentive to release research to the public.
by alliao | 2025-07-31 03:26:12+00:00
make fast sexy again... please growing up I've thoroughly enjoyed seeing workers tapping away at registers where it doesn't have a mouse, all muscle memory and layers and layers of menu accessible by key taps, whether it's airline, clothing store, even some restaurant used to have those dimly lit terminals glowing green or orange with just bunch of text and a well versed operator chatting while getting their work done. the keys were commercial grade mechanical which made pleasing sound.

nowadays it's fancy touch display, requires concentration and often sluggish, and the machine often felt cheap and made cheap sound when tapped on, I don't think the operator are ever enjoying interacting with it and the software's often slow across the network....

I'm all for fast. It shows no matter what, at least somebody cared enough for it to be blazing fast.