MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by throw0101d | 2025-07-30 11:02:11+00:00
> Is it more or less surprising for `rm -rf /` to be special?

A few years the POSIX folks declared that the behaviour of `rm -rf /` nuking the entire file system is a bug.

IIRC, one of the Sun Solaris folks (Cantrill? Gregg? Other?) thought the behaviour was dumb and argued successfully that it should not be work that way. Any implementation that does it is not POSIX-compliant.
by quectophoton | 2025-07-30 11:03:41+00:00
> I had Rotring 600 pencil - absolutely loved it, best I’ve ever used.

> But, its tip is very fragile

I came here to say this. I have a rotring 600 mechanical pencil with non-retractable tip, and it bends if you even look at it funny. It can be straightened again if you insert a sewing needle so it was not a big deal, but it was unexpected how easy it bends.

Heck, I have to treat it even more carefully than my smartphone. Not that I treat it rough or anything, but I have to be very conscious of where I leave it, lest it rolls off and falls off a height of a few centimeters.

Other than that I don't regret buying it, it's been a few years and it still feels nice to use.
by voidUpdate | 2025-07-30 11:03:56+00:00
There's a lot in my city that had construction going on for about a month, they barely got anywhere, and now it's been deserted for a while. It's meant to be a new block of flats, and I know that takes a while, but every time I pass it, I think about the stories of Chinese workers erecting a 57 storey building in 19 days (Though I don't know if that includes wiring, plumbing, etc, or if it's just the concrete shell)
by xinayder | 2025-07-30 11:05:13+00:00
This is so interesting. A while back I took an online course about native bee species in Brazil. We have more than 700 different species of stingless bees.

There's a few interesting common species whose response to being threatened are worth mentioning. The jataí (small, wasp-like bees) run away to hide when threatened; the arapuás (small, completely black bees) try to bite you. The mandaçaias have a similar behavior to the jataís.

And one thing I learned as well is that we have a native bee species called "lemon bee", which they are predatory bees that invade hives and release a substance that smells like lemon (hence the name), which intoxicates bees in their hive. The attacked bees either leave their home or die, to which the lemon bees just invade their colonies and steal all the food. They literally make a gas chamber inside the hive.

I am fascinated by the amount of bee diversity we have in Brazil. If anyone's interested to check them out, search for "melipona".
by Jimmy6929 | 2025-07-30 11:06:13+00:00
A couple of months ago, my mate and I built a website for ourselves to use with our Warhammer projects, and we thought it was a pretty cool idea that others might enjoy too.

We just launched it a few days ago and we’re now looking for beta testers who are into 3D printing, hardware projects, Warhammer;), product design, or tabletop games to try it out.

If you’re interested, feel free to check out the website and shoot us an email, we’d love your feedback!
by inglor_cz | 2025-07-30 11:07:21+00:00
They are waves, but they don't behave like the sort of waves we are used to. This is the source of all the confusion.

I have heard description of a tsunami being "a temporary rise in sea level", which describes its behavior much more intuitively. A tsunami that tops a sea wall will flood the entire lower-lying area behind it. A usual wave, even a tall one, will only deposit some splashes of water behind the wall and go away immediately.
by lonelyasacloud | 2025-07-30 11:08:07+00:00
> The issue is, cameras on phones are not for taking a photo of what you see, but a way to share your life, and sharing your life in a more glamorous way is to get liked around people.

Is nothing new.

When film was mass market almost no one developed their own photos (particularly colo(u)r). Instead almost all printing went through bulk labs who optimised for what people wanting to show to their family and friends.

What is different now is if someone cares about post processing to try and present their particular version of reality they can do it easily without the cost and inconvenience of having to setup and run a darkroom.
by mightymosquito | 2025-07-30 11:08:55+00:00
Hey guys,

I am trying to spin up a blog that focuses on how the 0 to 1 journey of startup founders.

I firmly believe that everyone is able to come up with an idea and with the AI tools available building it has also become relatively easier.

However what people really struggle with(including me) is marketing and sales i.e getting their first customers.

The format is simple: we usually do a 1-hour conversation where we go through your validation journey, then I turn that into a blog post. You’ll get to review it before it’s published. It’s a good opportunity for a backlink and some visibility, especially since this will be one of the first few posts.

No charge or anything like that—just aiming to share real stories founders can learn from and take away actionable steps from it.
Show HN: Scryptogram – A game where you unscramble a summary to guess the title
by sea_improvement | 2025-07-30 11:09:16+00:00
Hi HN,

I'm Kyle and I've been working on Scryptogram — a word puzzle game where you’re given five scrambled sentences that describe a person, place, or thing. Your goal is to unscramble the sentences and guess the subject. It’s a mix between trivia and word scrambles.

It’s browser-based and mobile-friendly. In the future I'd like to move to a mobile app, but I'm still figuring out the core game loop and experimenting.

I’d love feedback on puzzle difficulty, ideas for themed puzzle packs or growing my game, and overall whether or not you had fun - all feedback is welcome.

Thanks for checking it out!
by cogman10 | 2025-07-30 11:09:33+00:00
Lots of words.

> Some Palestinians have direct ties to ancient Israelites as well. But the Hebrew occupants were expelled by force, hence the spread out Jewish population.

But dude, this is the only paragraph that matters. Israel is persecuting and stealing land from the descendants of the Hebrews all because they aren't the right race and religion.

The 47 partition and 48 war didn't happen because the Israeli settlers were behaving like doves.

And no, just having the same religion as ancient inhabitants does not magically grant you land. That's insanity as I pointed out.

Exactly the same as if a native American came to my home and demanded that I leave because this was their ancetrial land.

What happened in the 1800s was horrific, just like what's currently happening in Israel. It's not hypocrisy to see past genocides as wrong and identify a current genocide. You don't "get one" just because my ancestors did one. Nor do you "get one" just because your parents/grandparents/or great grandparents were subject to one.

You are always the villain when you murder people to steal their land.
by storgaard | 2025-07-30 11:09:36+00:00
> Let’s not forget the very same year they stopped including the charging brick they started including USB-C to lightning cables in the box, so that their supposedly environmentally friendly practice forced their users to buy a new brick unless they saved previous cables. Why didn’t they switch to USB-C back then? To make users do another transition a few short years later?

Maybe I'm missing something here but how does a transition from having a charging brick to not having one relate to the transition on the other end of the cable going from one port to another?
by reconnecting | 2025-07-30 11:09:46+00:00
Gorgeous FRAMESET website. Somehow I have used <SMALL> a million times, but have never used the <BIG> tag.

However, some HTML features are questionable. For example, HR has inline styles but could looks the same with just height and color HTML attributes.

<body style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 204); color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" alink="#ee0000" link="#0000ee" vlink="#551a8b">

Perhaps, MS FrontPage?
by Noxsis | 2025-07-30 11:10:16+00:00
Hi HN,

The official website of Aditya College Satna, adityacollege.in, was taken offline by a massive DDoS attack launched by Turkish hackers. This overwhelming assault disrupted access to critical educational services, affecting thousands of students and staff.

This incident reveals glaring vulnerabilities in the institution’s cybersecurity defenses and underscores the urgent need for improved protection against such large-scale attacks.
by naikrovek | 2025-07-30 11:11:19+00:00
the true fix here is to have an OS that doesn't let running code do anything it wants without at least asking for permission and then getting the OK from the user. MacOS doesn't allow that. Linux and Windows are much more what I'm talking about.

That's much harder than what Microsoft is doing in this situation, so I understand (kind of) why they're doing this.

Malware overall isn't going to get better, or become less of a problem; it's going to get worse. Every day that these things are delayed, the more damage is done by malware that runs before this kind of OS level security gets implemented.

If this were in place, we could run DLLs all day long and if one of them decides that it needs full disk access or superuser access, you can simply not allow it when prompted. Or, Microsoft could recognize that in the context of a game that this is never ok, and simply not show you the prompt to begin with.

But no, because the OS is so fucking stupid we all have to think about these things. The OS is supposed to handle this level of thing. The OS should run the applications I tell it to run, and protect me from them if they try anything stupid. The OS is supposed to sandbox applications and protect the rest of the system from any malevolence they may contain. Instead we have game teams innovating solutions like this, which are entirely unnecessary if the OS team would do their fucking jobs.
by naikrovek | 2025-07-30 11:12:57+00:00
WSL is a special case, the only case where this is allowed, to my understanding, outside of datacenter-class GPUs. Early in WSL2's life there was a special NVidia driver you had to download from Microsoft which allowed the GPU to be partitioned only by WSL. Now this functionality is built into the normal driver that NVidia distribute and doesn't require a special download.
by nxobject | 2025-07-30 11:14:19+00:00
My very cursory understanding -- at least from Unsloth's recommendations -- is that you have to work very hard to preserve reasoning/instruct capabilities [1]: for example to "preserve" Qwen3's reasoning capabilities (however that's operationalized), they suggest a fine-tuning corpus that's 75% chain of thought to 25% non-reasoning. Is that a significant issue for orgs/projects that currently rely on fine-tuning?

[1] https://docs.unsloth.ai/basics/qwen3-how-to-run-and-fine-tun...
by diggan | 2025-07-30 11:14:53+00:00
> asking them to be terse hampered their ability to give complete and correct answers?

You can kind of guide both the reasoning and "final" answer individually in the system prompts, so you can ask it to revalidate everything during reasoning, explore all potential options and so on, but then steer the final answer to be brief and concise. Of course, depends a lot on the model, some respond to it worse/better than others.
by ozgung | 2025-07-30 11:15:03+00:00
That's what I still 'believe'. Wake-sleep algorithm [1] is a good start for speculation. I think brain needs to be in a different mode to reorganize its weights and to forget unnecessary things to prevent overfitting. In this mode we happen to be unconscious. I also believe dreams are just hallucinations caused by random noise input to the system. The brain converts noise distribution to a meaningful distribution and samples from that. I have zero evidence btw, but I believe these are related.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wake-sleep_algorithm
by theandrewbailey | 2025-07-30 11:15:51+00:00
KVM+QEMU+libvirt seems to be the way to go. What are you going to use instead? VMware?

VMware price hikes? Between 800 and 1,500%: https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/22/euro_cloud_body_ecco_...
by jiggawatts | 2025-07-30 11:17:14+00:00
The most "special" code that I regularly come across is when a developer takes a JPG in blob storage -- already a public HTTPS URL -- then serves that in a "Web API" that converts it to base-64 encoded bytes inside JSON, sends it to client JavaScript, decodes it, and feeds it to an image in code.

Invariably, it's done with full buffering of the blob bytes in memory on both server and client, no streaming.

Bonus points are awarded for the use of TypeScript, compression (of already compressed JPGs, of course), and extensive unit and integration tests to try and iron out the bugs.
by Zambyte | 2025-07-30 11:17:38+00:00
It certainly should be able to tell you it doesn't know. Until it can though, a trick that I have learned is to try to frame the question in different ways that suggest contradictory answers. For example, I'd ask something like these, in a fresh context for each:

- Why does Duckduckgo change it's logo based on what you've searched?

- Why doesn't Duckduckgo change it's logo based on what you've searched?

- When did Duckduckgo add the current feature that will change the logo based on what you've searched?

- When did Duckduckgo remove the feature that changes the logo based on what you've searched?

This is similar to what you did, but it feels more natural when I genuinely don't know the answer myself. By asking loaded questions like this, you can get a sense of how strongly this information is encoded in the model. If the LLM comes up with an answer without contradicting any of the questions, it simply doesn't know. If it comes up with a reason for one of them, and contradicts the other matching loaded question, you know that information is encoded fairly strongly in the model (whether it is correct is a different matter).
by jon-wood | 2025-07-30 11:18:46+00:00
Particularly for something designed to run on consoles sandboxing of addons is basically a requirement. Microsoft are never going to allow random people on the internet to run unsandboxed code on the Xbox because that's a fast route to people jailbreaking the DRM on them. I suspect the fact this also limits the use of Flight Sim mods as a vector for malware on Windows is just a happy side effect.
by diggan | 2025-07-30 11:20:15+00:00
Looks like a great start, played around with it a bit yesterday and today, I've basically been doing the same with my own CLI but the UI you came up with helps a great deal with navigation and resuming learning :)

One issue I found is the typical "LLM accuracy" issue, with seemingly no recurse. I tried to generate some courses for topics I already know well, just to review how accurate it is, and while popular subjects (ex: "Electronic Music Fundamentals") it gets most of the details correct, less popular subjects (ex: "Scene Transitions with Octatrack") are riddled with errors (both in the "docs" and the quizes/exercises), and I cannot find a way of correcting/adjusting/reporting the errors.
by notahacker | 2025-07-30 11:20:16+00:00
There is not a government wide conspiracy to cover up the sex crimes of any people, least of all groups of mostly low-status ethnic minority taxi drivers in cities none of the recent governments have paid much attention to except to discuss sex crimes occurring in them and call for more public inquiries.

Although at police level, it came out yesterday that multiple officers in Rotherham were under investigation for sexually exploiting the victims themselves. Which would sound a much more likely reason why victims were ignored until they became part of wider investigations than some high-level conspiracy to empower taxi drivers to rape. I'm quite comfortable in being able to declare this is a major scandal without having to wait for the ethnicity of the police officers to be identified to decide whether it was an isolated incident or the fault of the entire community.

Only one of us is implying that some gang rape perpetrators and groomers are less of a big deal than others; it isn't me. Whether that is your intention or not, it certainly isn't helping victims get the support they needed or crimes get solved.

> It's hard to connect immigration to crimes by committed by ethnic immigrant gangs? Dear lord.

I mean, yeah, it's super hard to connect immigration routes that British Pakistanis and their ancestors didn't use at any point to crimes some of them committed.

> Look up the stats on sex crime convictions per capita by immigrant origin in various European countries.

We've got stats for sex crimes per capita for the actual UK, for convictions and for reports and for those targeting minors specifically. They certainly don't support your argument that white Britons' sex crimes against kids are "isolated incidents". Statistically, they're actually slightly overrepresented on a per capita basis, and that's after decades of large investigations into specific crimes committed in specific communities.
by alphazard | 2025-07-30 11:20:59+00:00
I've never seen these attempts at categorizing and operationalizing system design be effective in getting people or teams to design better systems. There's an exception to basically every rule, and good system designers often break any individual rule with good reason.

You have to grow system designers the hard way. Lots of iterations, go off and write up a design, get feedback, repeat. And then dogfood the design, whoever designed it should also do the brunt of the implementation and maintenance. That forced contact with reality leads to well designed systems, and people who produce them consistently. A second order effect is a culture of valuing well designed systems, people clustering around good system designers. No one wants to be on the project that is too complicated or unlikely to work or a high maintenance burden.
by jon-wood | 2025-07-30 11:21:01+00:00
Is it "awful" though, or is it just not quite as accurate as X-Plane? Because I've seen a far few videos from actual pilots of various aircraft playing Flight Sim 2024, and generally what they say is that while it's not the same as flying the real thing (mostly because of the lack of feedback for things like trim adjustment) it's pretty damn close. Just because that was achieved by writing specific models for each aircraft rather than full fluid dynamics simulation I don't think that makes it awful.
by entropsilk | 2025-07-30 11:21:05+00:00
I think it is wrong to say that life without work is meaningless.

The problem is what good enough yesterday is expected today and won't be enough tomorrow.

Not being able to do whatever you want all the time acts as a break on this process.

The moment work is abolished would be a wonderful moment. A month later though the biggest topic would be how to get a side hustle or a job.
by meinersbur | 2025-07-30 11:22:09+00:00
There is also market separation in play: For the base service you only charge cost+small margin. For higher service levels you charge higher profit margins even though the additional service does not cost that much more to provide.

Best example: flight seats. Economy class fills the plane, but business and first class are the money makers [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzB5xtGGsTc
by poulpy123 | 2025-07-30 11:22:21+00:00
> and I'll never be able to teach passers-by when they take a group picture for us

Well, you don't need to teach photography to passerby, just to tell them to look there and push this button. It's not more complicated than on a phone, maybe even less. But it may look more intimidating to old a camera, it's true
by kobenni | 2025-07-30 11:22:36+00:00
In my experience asking questions to Claude, the amount of incorrect information it gives is on a completely different scale in comparison to traditional sources. And the information often sounds completely plausible too. When using a text book, I would usually not Google every single piece of new information to verify it independently, but with Claude, doing that is absolutely necessary. At this point I only use Claude as a stepping stone to get ideas on what to Google because it is giving me false information so often. That is the only "effective" usage I have found for it, which is obviously much less useful than a good old-fashioned textbook or online course.

Admittedly I have less experience with ChatGPT, but those experiences were equally bad.
by ghm2180 | 2025-07-30 11:22:48+00:00
A lot of the comments have to do with how does one use these things to speed up learning. I've tried a few things. A couple of them are prompts: 1. Make me a tutorial on ... 2. Make probes to quiz me along the way ...

I think the trick is to look at the references that the model shows you. e.g. o3 with web search will give you lots of references. 90% of the time just reading those tells me of the model and I are aligned.

For example the other day I was figuring out why using SQL alchemy Sessions and PyTest async might I get the "Connection was attached to different loop" error. Now If you started using o3 to give you a solution you would take a long time because there would be small mistakes it would make in the code and You would spend a lot of time trying to fix it. Better way to use 03 then was to ask it to give you debugging statements (session listeners attached to Sqlalchemy sessions) and understand by reading code output, what was going on. Much faster.

Once it(and I) started looking at the debugging statements the error became clear: the session/connections where leaking to different event loop, a loop_scope= param needed to be specified for all fixtures. O3 did not provide a correct solution for the code but I could, but it's help.was crucial in writing a fuck ton of debugging code and getting clues.

I also asked o3 to make a bunch of probe questions to test me, for example it said something like: try changing the loop_scope module to function, what do you expect the loopid and transaction id to be for this test?

I learned More than I realized about ORMs and how it can be used to structure transactions and structuring async PyTest tests.

One thing I'm trying these days is to have it create a memory palace from all the stuff I have in my house and link it to a new concept I'm learning and put it into an anki decks.
by jraph | 2025-07-30 11:23:14+00:00
> I don't know how else one gets information and forms an opinion on the technology except for media consumption or hands-on experience.

Okay, I think I got your intent better, thanks for clarifying.

You can add discussion with other people outside software media, or opinion pieces outside media (I would not include personal blogs in "media" for instance, but would not be bothered if someone did), including people who tried and people who didn't. Medias are also not uniform in their views.

But I hear you, grounded perspectives would be a positive.

> That for it to result in good outcomes for humanity, it requires good people to help shape it in its formative years.

I hear you as well, makes perfect sense.

OTOH, it's difficult to engage into something that feels fundamentally wrong or a dead end, and that's what LLMs feel like to me. It would be also frightening: the risk that, as a good person, you help shape a monster.

The only way out I can see is inventing the thing that will make LLMs irrelevant, but also don't have their fatal flaws. That's quite the undertaking though.

We'd not be competing on an equal footing: LLM providers have been doing things I would never have dared even considering: ingesting considerable amount of source materials completely disregarding their licenses, hammering everyone servers, spending a crazy amount of energy, sourcing a crazy amount of (very closed) hardware, burning an insane amount of money even on paid plans. It feels very brutal.

Can an LLM be built avoiding any of this stuff? Because otherwise, I'm simply not interested.

(of course, the discussion has shifted quite a bit! The initial question was if a dev not using the LLMs would remain relevant, but I believe this was addressed at large in other comments already)