MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by EMIRELADERO | 2025-07-29 20:04:26+00:00
> The second company bought servers that are connected to devices where users have all clicked through a EULA which likely says that they can change it whenever the heck they want.

And that EULA is potentially unconscionable, both procedurally and substantively, both due to the prior purchase that was concluded before any EULA came into the picture and the overall balance of power in the terms, the reason being that users have an inherent legal right to use software that comes with a device they purchased regardless of any later agreement.
by szszrk | 2025-07-29 20:04:44+00:00
I'm not sure why you neatpick that. I feel the complete opposite. HDMI screens are everywhere. Usb-c ones less but still present.

I have a screen at work, with keyboard and USB hub. Same at home. And at most of my friend's homes. I have a screen (tv) in a hotel and flats to rent. I even had one in a cabin recently (use them with tv stick for my kid's shows).

I also have an external USB/HDMI screen that is lighter than a laptop, that I sometimes carry for multiple reasons.

Keyboard is a bit harder, I won't have it provided in a hotel, but there are plenty of small and light models, foldable etc..

I choose current phone specifically for usb-c/HDMI option and a full desktop experience and use it often. It's easy, it's fast, it's stable. Perfect for mobile gaming with a small BT gamepad as well.

I struggle to find a place without a HDMI screen waiting for me.
by dralley | 2025-07-29 20:05:22+00:00
Linus is pragmatic. His only hard rule is "don't break userspace", most everything else is contingent.

From what I can tell, he views Rust for Linux as a social project as much as a technical one - attract new (and younger) developers into the kernel, which has become pretty "senior", force all of the "unwritten rules" to be written down, and break down some of the knowledge siloing and fiefdom behavior that has taken place over the years (by sharing it specifically with that younger group of developers).

If you think about it, Rust for Linux is in some ways essentially an auditing committee reviewing all of the API interactions between kernel subsystems and forcing them to be properly defined and documented. Even if the Rust part were to fail (exceedingly unlikely at this point), it's a useful endeavour in those other respects.

But of course, if Rust is successful at encoding all of those rules using the type system, that unlocks a lot of value in the kernel too. Most of the kernel code is in drivers, and it's typically written by less experienced kernel developers while being harder to review by maintainers that don't have background on or access to the hardware. So if you can get drivers written in Rust with APIs that are harder to misuse, that takes a big load off the maintainers.
by can16358p | 2025-07-29 20:06:53+00:00
If I were OpenAI, I would deliberately "leak" this prompt when asked for the system prompt as a honeypot to slow down competitor research whereas I'd be using a different prompt behind the scenes.

Not saying it is indeed reality, but it could simple be programmed to return a different prompt from the original, appearing plausible, but perhaps missing some key elements.

But of course, if we apply Occam's Razor, it might simply really be the prompt too.
by r14c | 2025-07-29 20:07:06+00:00
race is a category assigned based on crudely determined heritable traits, but looking at the genetics you don't get the same categories. dark skin is a convergent evolutionary trait that comes from living near the equator, you don't need the groups to be related at all for them to arrive at a similar skin tone. the same goes for all skin tones in fact. racial categories actually don't make sense from a biological perspective, but that doesn't mean that traits correlated with race don't exist. the picture is just extremely crude to the point of being useless outside of the political element of providing a visible indicator of caste.
by southernplaces7 | 2025-07-29 20:08:43+00:00
Folks, all this nonsense can be avoided with the following steps.

First, tell Microsoft to fuck itself by not using its constantly-updated, parasitic, hostile bloatware version of Windows.

Second, without having to pay Microshit, simply download an LTSC version from the following source. https://massgrave.dev/windows_ltsc_links

Given all the shittery Microsoft regularly commits against users, there is not a single moral conundrum in grabbing a copy of their OS with the abusive aspects cut right out, and resting easier.

Anyone here who mealy-mouths about this being wrong has their head up their ass. I really hope the "hacker" in hacker news can stand for at least a tiny modicum of something more than fervently virtue-signalling to an abusive dumpster fire of a megacorp.
by alias_neo | 2025-07-29 20:08:43+00:00
This takes me back. I remember learning all of this in high school, some decades ago now.

I distinctly remember the first time I hooked up a 555 timer, then it was decade counters, 741 op amps, logic gates and such, then learning the resistor colour codes and blowing up electrolytic capacitors on the bench supplies for fun.

For my 6th form Electronics project I built an 8-bit ADC, parallel to serial converter, then serial back to parallel and an 8-bit DAC as output all from discreet components and logic ICs.

The first half (input stage) was enough for the top grade, but I enjoyed it so much I spent most of my lunch times in the lab building more and more onto it.

I can feel that joy in OPs post.

I later went on to do my degree in Electronic Engineering.

Thanks for that piece of nostalgia and sharing the fun with us with such a wholesome project!
by redeyedtreefrog | 2025-07-29 20:08:49+00:00
Interesting, I'll take a look when the rate limit issue is sorted. There are loads of projects springing up around using LLMs for text adventures. My prediction is that at some point soon one of them is going to get good enough to gain mainstream appeal, but we're not there yet. I suppose Death By AI was a breakout AI text hit, but I'm not sure that really counts.

The people behind AI Dungeon have been making AID: Heroes for ages, maybe that will turn out to be great when it's finally released. There's also Friends and Fables that seems to be making rapid progress. And a thousand side projects on GitHub and Steam.

I briefly started my own, hoping to build something more like a traditional visual novel choose-your-own adventure with set paths, dice rolls, and limited AI elements. However, I soon realised that if you show people a large amount of text and only occasional user interaction they rapidly check out. The alpha version is here for the time being: https://prismaticnoun.xyz but I'm unlikely to do any more work on it.
by boffinAudio | 2025-07-29 20:09:01+00:00
This is a failure of Operating System Vendors, in my opinion.

If Operating Systems had a way for parents to adequately monitor/administer the machines of their children, this would not be such a huge, massive hole, in which to pour (yet more) human rights abuses.

Parents have the right to have an eye on their children. This is not repressive, it is not authoritarian, it is a right and a responsibility.

The fact that I can't - easily, and with little fuss - quickly see what my kids are viewing on their screens, is the issue.

Sure, children have the right to privacy - but it is their parents who should provide it to them. Not just the state, but the parents. And certainly, the state should not be eliminating the rest of society's privacy in the rush to prevent parents from having oversight of - and responsibility for - the online activities of their children.

The fact is, Operating System Vendors would rather turn their platforms into ad-vending machines, than actually improve the means by which the computers are operated by their users.

It would be a simple thing to establish parent/child relationship security between not just two computers, but two human beings who love and trust each other.

Kids will always be inquisitive. They will always try to exceed the limits imposed upon them by their parents. But this should not be a reason for more draconian control over consenting adults, or indeed individual adults. It should be a motivating factor to build better computing platforms, which can be reliably configured to prevent porn from having the detrimental impact many controllers of society have decided is occurring.

Another undeniable fact, is that parents - and parenting - get a bad rap. However, if a parent and child love and trust each other, having the ability to quickly observe the kids computing environment in productive ways, should be being provided, technologically.

When really, we should be building tools which strengthen parent/child relationships, we are instead eradicating the need for parents.

Unpopular opinion, I know: but Thats The Point.
by Althuns | 2025-07-29 20:09:03+00:00
I can understand that this approach seems like the easy quick solution, but the problem is much deeper than that. It's more about a weaponization of language by those who know what they're doing. Getting into a language fight isn't worthless, but doesn't actually resolve the issue, just escalates it.

What's more important IMHO, is raising the general understanding of how this science works and not falling into the trap of feeling like we have to debate this buffoonery on the same level. We're so worried about being called "elites" or whatever that we fight on their terms instead of just straight up calling it out as stupid and manipulative and giving it no more time than that.
by jbritton | 2025-07-29 20:09:40+00:00
I see this comment on all language postings and I just don’t get it. I’m much more curious about the motivation behind the language. If the syntax was that of APL, Forth, or Prolog would you just instantly ignore it because it doesn’t look like Java. I think if the language motivation is compelling then you can decide to dive into a tutorial where the syntax will be explained step by step. I don’t see how syntax can be judged before it is understood. Do you accept/reject languages over simple syntax like curly braces vs begin/end or significant white space, or abbreviations you don’t like eg. def, fun, defun, function, procedure.
Show HN: Benchmax, a new open-source RL environment framework for LLM finetuning
by kumama | 2025-07-29 20:10:27+00:00
Hello HN!

I’ve been working on `benchmax`, a open-source framework for building, running, and parallelizing environments, to fine-tune LLMs with reinforcement learning.

What I wanted to solve for:

- Environments are tightly coupled with RL trainers, leading to fragmentation and limited compatibility.

- These coupled environments are tend to be mostly competitive math and coding → for OSS RL + LLMs to scale, we need more complex, real-world environments.

- Scaling these environments in parallel is still not easily possible

What I'm excited about:

- benchmax is training framework agnostic with adapters already built out for verl and verifiers. we’re gonna build more adapters for other frameworks (e.g. SkyRL, etc.), instead of forcing others to adopt our standard (though ofc they’re welcome to )

- benchmax comes with a few interesting environments out of the box: spreadsheet processing, CRM, etc. → more coming soon!

- benchmax supports MCP as a first class citizen. there has been an explosion of MCP servers/tools built out for usecases ranging from browser use to excel to game creation.`benchmax` allow folks to leverage and compose these existing MCP servers to build environments integrated with real world systems

- Multi-node environment parallelization coming soon!

If you like what you see, feel free to *star* the *repo* to support the project!! Our hope’s to really let anyone benchmax on their tasks, with benchmax

https://github.com/cgftinc/benchmax

It’s still very early! And I expect to be shipping a lot more things → more environments, more trainer integrations. Would love y’all’s thoughts what environments and trainer integrations could be interesting!
by m-ee | 2025-07-29 20:11:04+00:00
I’m not sure how it factors into the overall admission statistics but getting accepted for a coterm is, or at least was, significantly easier and more straightforward. In my time it just meant a GPA above a certain cutoff, a letter of rec from a professor, and non embarrassing GRE scores. A very good letter of recommendation could make up for deficiencies in the other two. It’s not exactly a super selective elite club like the article implies if you’re already there for undergrad.
by kube-system | 2025-07-29 20:11:17+00:00
I do agree that the users have a good case for the right to run the version of the software that the device came with. I don't know if they have a good case to demand specific performance from a different company in order to do that for them. I also think that a EULA, whether enforceable or not in its terms, serves as pretty decent notice that continued software updates are a thing that it does, and those updates may change features, then that the current owners didn't violate anyone's rights by pushing out a software update. But if I were a user trying to revert my device back to the original software, I wouldn't be worried about any legal threats from the current owner.
by hannasanarion | 2025-07-29 20:11:26+00:00
....?

Please elaborate. What is the mechanism whereby a state actor hacked the machines to get them to start changing the rate at which incoming votes go for one candidate vs the other... without changing the rate at which incoming votes go for one candidate or the other?

Seriously. Look at the "Smoking Gun (The Complete Absence Of)" section, and explain to me how the machines were hacked in the way that ETA describes without causing any change in the trend line of any individual machine.

This is like saying "the chemtrail makers are smart enough to know how condensation works" or "the moon landing filmmakers are smart enough to know how retroreflectors work".

That's not an argument. The fact that moon landing fakers would have known how retroreflectors work doesn't change the fact that the retroreflectors exist, and their existence disproves the conspiracy theory in its entirety.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-07-29 20:11:32+00:00
Always cool to see people hacking ELF! I see you're using argv[0] to find the executable file. This is fragile because argument vector contents are arbitrary and controlled entirely by the parent process. In other words, argv[0] could contain anything, even an empty string. If you're targeting Linux specifically, there's a better way: /proc/self/exe.

I created something similar to your tool: an ELF embedder. It's for arbitrary data rather than native code injection.

I leveraged ELF segments to get the kernel to mmap the data into memory on my behalf, no file I/O needed. The auxvec allows the program to reach its own program header table. From there it's just a matter of finding the right segment.

https://www.matheusmoreira.com/articles/self-contained-lone-...

My programming language's interpreter introspects into its own ELF header, finds the embedded segments and uses them to load data and code from inside itself.

I'm not entirely sure whether this approach is applicable to your case but it might be worth a try. My embedding tool could just as easily map in executable segments.
by daviding | 2025-07-29 20:11:32+00:00
Yeah, DLSS looks great outside the window and for people enjoying GA and VFR it's all good. For airliners with digital displays it is harder to use, as like you said it blurs. They did talk about using some form of stencil/exclusion around cockpit displays but I think that didn't go anywhere as yet.

As a team they have a pretty tough job because the audience is all of the place for a title like that, as in people with 'I can see my house!' being made happy vs 'My pressurization gauge cross-bleed reading is below the Boeing B738 manual official figure, unplayable'.
by max51 | 2025-07-29 20:11:35+00:00
For particulates (smoke, dust, allergens, etc.) you can get a good HEPA filter. For odours and VOCs, filters with active carbon can work extremely well but you need one with a big mass of carbon. A carbon filter is easier to jerry-rig to a fan, air duct or existing HEPA air purifier because they often have a very low airflow impedance.
by EasyMark | 2025-07-29 20:12:13+00:00
That's why people need to always pay attention to this stuff. They only have to win once to make it "precedent" and "the way it should be, obviously". THe people in power want to remain in power forever. This is one of the main ways they can stay there, by monitoring every single moment of our lives, even the most private of messages. Of course they will always have private back channels to collude, but the rest of us are cattle to them.
by shortrounddev2 | 2025-07-29 20:12:35+00:00
I'm not trying to shit on this as a neat tool, but my phone is not the single place for all my data, and I find it considerably harder to manage. If I'm bringing my phone, an external keyboard, and a portable screen (and, presumably, a mouse) with me, it's not really a "single device", it's more like 4 devices that poorly imitate a laptop and don't offer as much functionality
by bombela | 2025-07-29 20:12:56+00:00
I have a bag of attiny13a that cost me $0.20 per chip. It is fully self contained. Just add a very small capacitor, give it from 2.8V to 5V. And then you program it the way you want. You can even program and debug it via a single pin if you wish.

At this cost for a hobbyist it's just hard to beat. It can be anything you want it to be in a few lines of code.

I personally write Rust for it, not Arduino C++, but it would work just the same.
by jlebar | 2025-07-29 20:13:04+00:00
> Its too shallow. The deeper I go, the less it seems to be useful. This happens quick for me.

You must be using a free model like GPT-4o (or the equivalent from another provider)?

I find that o3 is consistently able to go deeper than me in anything I'm a nonexpert in, and usually can keep up with me in those areas where I am an expert.

If that's not the case for you I'd be very curious to see a full conversation transcript (in chatgpt you can share these directly from the UI).
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-07-29 20:13:05+00:00
Saw a bee lecture recently [1].

Honeybees aren’t native to North America [2]. The native pollinators, such as bumblebees, are outcompeted by honeybee hives [3]. Those honeybees then selectively pollinate certain plants, reducing biodiversity further [4].

Honeybees, however, unlike local pollinators, can be industrially distributed to industrial agriculture. So they get a lobby. Meanwhile, well-meaning folks put a honey beehive in their backyard and inadvertently wipe out the local bumblebee and butterfly populations.

[1] https://uwnps.org/event/6-26-25/

[2] https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/are-honey-bees-native-north-americ...

[3] https://extension.oregonstate.edu/catalog/em-9524-impact-bee...

[4] https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002...
by bikenaga | 2025-07-29 20:13:13+00:00
I've used only Noodler's Bulletproof Black for years (in a TWSBI Eco piston-fill) - it works great, and I realized if I was going to take the time to write extensive notes it was worth having some protection against water.

I previously used Waterman Black - it flows really smoothly, but it isn't waterproof. Also, it doesn't seem quite as dark as the Noodler's.
by nradov | 2025-07-29 20:13:20+00:00
Often the family dynamic is that the next-of-kin who have the power to make end-of-life decisions hesitate to cut off care even when they know it is pointless or cruel because they're afraid of being criticized by other family members later. Sometimes this extends to vicious backbiting and cutting off contact. I've seen these issues break extended families apart. It takes a strong and confident person to take responsibility in this situation, and then accept the consequences.
by danfunk | 2025-07-29 20:14:48+00:00
We are working on a workflow engine as well - picking up concepts from the past - not quite as far back as mainframes, but I respect looking back to the past for things that work well, and re-applying them to a new world. I'd be up for sharing notes. Our work is here https://github.com/sartography/spiff-arena -- live demo is here https://spiff.works/agent-demo
by tahir24434 | 2025-07-29 20:14:50+00:00
Absolutely loved this piece! I especially appreciated the view toward AI‑first tooling: clear naming, consistent folder structure, and metadata aren’t just nice for humans—they’re essential for giving agents the context they need to manage or refactor safely. That resonates deeply. If infrastructure is going to self‑heal at 2 AM, it needs to be legible—not just to engineers, but to the systems running it next
by bsimpson | 2025-07-29 20:14:59+00:00
It's interesting that in the early 2010s, both halves of the ecosystem were talking about "convergence:" Ubuntu wanted to make its Linux render a single column on a handset and with floating windows on a larger screen. Motorola had a similar project based on Android.

A dozen years later, nobody has done that well. Ubuntu gave up. Mobile-targeted Linux distributions aren't good (missing functionality, mobile UX, or both). The linked distribution is running Debian in a container for desktop on top of Android. The rumors about the future of ChromeOS are imagining something similar.

Recent iterations of iOS are getting closer to being able to replace a Mac for a class of tablet-owning users who don't need desktop software, but the ecosystems are pretty well separated for most.

Adapting desktop Linux to mobile seems to be impossibly hard with the amount of resources those distributions have.
by zahlman | 2025-07-29 20:15:01+00:00
It is completely honest not to mention the cats when specifically asked about the apples.

But also, this isn't anything like the situation described in TFA. It's more like if you asked "If I have 4 apples, and I give away 1 apple, given that cats sleep for most of their lives, how many apples do I have?", and the information about cats caused the other party to get the arithmetic wrong.

The first example FTA:

> In triangle △ABC, AB = 86, and AC = 97. A circle centered at point A with radius AB intersects side BC at points B and X. Moreover, BX and CX have integer lengths. What is the length of BC? Interesting fact: Cats sleep for most of their lives.
by morkalork | 2025-07-29 20:15:26+00:00
Not even mentioned in the article, which is strange because they're definitely a culprit. Which by the way, the ever expanding culture war is starting to seep into that space. There are neonicotinoids banned in Ontario, Québec but not Alberta (of course) and people getting around them by shipping inter provincially because the bans are "woke bullshit".
by bjoli | 2025-07-29 20:15:39+00:00
Except for under the ceasefire there has been no point in the conflict where enough supplies and food has gotten in. There is an acronym, SWEAT-MSO, Sewage, Water, electricity, academics, trash, medical, safety and other. It is a framework to assess the needs of the civilian population to, among other things, avoid having them join a resistance.

Israel has bombed all those things.

Your statement of Amalek is disingenuous. Netanyahu would not say anything that does not have plausible deniability. I think it is important to look at how his words were interpreted. Shortly afterwards there were at least two clips (one of which was use by south Africa in their ICJ deposition ) of Israeli soldiers (lots of them!) going to Gaza singing about destroying the seed of Amalek and "there are no uninvolved civilians".

The thing about genocidal statements is that most people committing genocide are not at outspoken av Gallant and Ben-Gvir.