MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by matheusmoreira | 2025-10-26 04:29:05+00:00
Hacking this stuff is so fun!!

> Depending on your program, _start may be the only thing between the entrypoint and your main function

I once developed a liblinux project entirely built around this idea.

I wanted to get rid of libc and all of its initialization, complexity and global state. The C library is so complex it has a primitive form of package management built into it:

https://blogs.oracle.com/solaris/post/init-and-fini-processi...

So I made _start functions which did nothing but pass argc, argv, envp and auxv to the actual main function:

https://github.com/matheusmoreira/liblinux/blob/master/start...

https://github.com/matheusmoreira/liblinux/blob/master/start...

You can get surprisingly far with just this, and it's actually possible to understand what's going on. Biggest pain point was the lack of C library utility functions like number/string conversion. I simply wrote my own.

https://github.com/matheusmoreira/liblinux/tree/master/examp...

Linux is the only operating system that lets us do this. In other systems, the C library is part of the kernel interface. Bypassing it like this can and does break things. Go developers once discovered this the hard way.

https://www.matheusmoreira.com/articles/linux-system-calls

The kernel has their own nolibc infrastructure now, no doubt much better than my project.

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/tree/master/tools/include/...

I encourage everyone to use it.

Note also that _start is an arbitrary symbol. The name is not special at all. It's just some linker default. The ELF header contains a pointer to the entry point, not a symbol. Feel free to choose a nice name!
by arthurcolle | 2025-10-26 04:31:55+00:00
Thank you for the followup (familiar with the XKCD)

Dumb question from a true non-expert:

So CPM varies with all those factors you mention, but wouldn't the site HP team know exactly what detector they used, the geometry, distance, etc.? They could convert to dose if they wanted, right?

Why report the ambiguous "300 CPM" instead of an actual dose estimate in mSv/μSv? Seems like that would be more useful for any medical team, any set of potential regulators or regulatory bodies as well as just general public understanding (drawing on my father's work here as he always emphasized the tension between "public fears radiation unnecessarily" and "industry safety protocols are inconsistent")

Follow-up: Is there any legitimate reason to report CPM instead of dose after a contamination event? Or does staying with CPM keep things conveniently vague? Because from my limited understanding, if they did a proper survey, they have everything needed to calculate dose.
by tombert | 2025-10-26 04:32:31+00:00
In fairness, there have been plenty of times I have had to message my mom (an attorney) for legal advice, and messaged my dad (an aerospace engineer) for help with math or any kind of non-software engineering, so it's not like they're terribly selfish; if the shoe were on the other foot they'd do the same for me.

While I do find it really irritating that they refuse to leave Windows and I do find their unwillingness to learn new stuff about computers infuriating, I do get it.

Linux has gotten a lot better and easier to use now, but historically there's a reason that it has been associated as a "nerd operating system". Prior to about ~10 years ago, desktop Linux was decidedly unpolished and difficult to use. Getting video and audio drivers working used to be a long and difficult ordeal, package managers were non-intuitive, and we hadn't fully gotten the "web apps have taken over the world" state that we're in now. I've been running Linux for like the last fifteen years and for quite awhile Linux had a well-earned reputation of being hard to use, and I think my parents are afraid of that.

It's gotten much better now, and I think a lot of people could pretty easily migrate without too much issue, but I can't completely blame people for still thinking about how crappy it used to be.
by arthurcolle | 2025-10-26 04:35:14+00:00
My use case for data that exists that is pre-AI scientifically vetted work is completely divorced from the specifics of this conversation actually. If I want to do paper-maché sculptures with printouts of these papers, and I still commented on this post, would that be better or worse for you, here?

I was just sharing background. I want to make good models that can help scientists do work. Your personal feelings about LLMs and their capabilities feels quite distinct from the focus on this post, and the chain of comments that have led us here.
by bee_rider | 2025-10-26 04:35:32+00:00
Are you actually good at Windows 11? Are you really helping them as much as you could be that way?

I don’t think I could help somebody set up modern Windows. If I help someone with a computer, I’m telling them I’ve got it into a reasonably usable and safe state. With all the spyware built into a modern Windows system, I don’t think I could be confident there.
by LeoPanthera | 2025-10-26 04:35:39+00:00
I would imagine the on-site team would know, yes. I don't know why the report only gives a measurement in CPM, but just because the person was sent off-site doesn't mean the levels were dangerous. Thresholds at nuclear facilities tend to be very low for safety.

The USNRC is currently not operating normally due to the government shutdown. Perhaps that has something to do with it.
by exsomet | 2025-10-26 04:36:35+00:00
> Just project yourself 50 years from now: our current web pages will look archaic. Everything will be conversational, using language, vision, the whole spectrum.

To what end?

We’ve interacted with the internet using the same text-oriented protocols, the same markup languages, and even the same layout elements for 36 years. What profit motive exists to upend that and standardize on a new format like conversational language?

And, based on the development trends of the internet over its entire history, what suggests that if the world were to commit to some radical shift in the foundational technology underpinning the web, it would move towards voice, or vision (what does this mean?) based interfaces.

I get that AI is cool, and it has legitimate use cases, but is it possible that we as technologists might be falling into that age-old trap of having a solution in search of a problem?
by peddling-brink | 2025-10-26 04:36:58+00:00
Essentially yes, it’s a data set that can help train or fine tune another model or similar research. From the site:

> Pico-Banana-400K serves as a versatile resource for advancing controllable and instruction-aware image editing. Beyond single-step editing, the dataset enables multi-turn, conversational editing and reward-based training paradigms.
by mg | 2025-10-26 04:42:35+00:00
Looking at the syntax, I wonder how close one could get to it in a "normal" programming language.

x -> y: hello world declares a connection between two shapes, x and y, with the label, hello world

When I read this, I see this Python line in my mind:

connect('x', 'y', 'hello world')

This is of course a lot longer. The reason is that D2 seems to rather use operators than functions. So another approach could be

'x' * 'y' + 'hello world'

This would be possible to implement if the language supports overloading the __add__ and __mul__ functions of the str class. Python does not support it though. So I guess one would have to put at least one instance of a custom class into the mix. Say 'scene', then one might be able to achieve the above with this line:

scene + 'x' * 'y' + 'hello world'

Meaning "Put a connection between x and y with label 'hello world' into the scene".

Hmm.. also not very close to the D2 syntax. So a DSL for diagrams seems to be warranted.
by spikej | 2025-10-26 04:45:16+00:00
This may or may not help, but have a look at ZorinOS. The latest release and it's announcement is targeted towards those wanting to jump ship from Windows -> Linux. They've tried to account for the adjustment with built-in tips/prompts and the UI looks closer to Windows also.

You're right, Office is where you will struggle.

https://blog.zorin.com/2025/10/14/zorin-os-18-has-arrived/
by matheusmoreira | 2025-10-26 04:45:31+00:00
Yeah it turns out the kernel doesn't care about sections at all. It only ever cares about the PT_LOAD segments in the program header table, which is essentially a table of arguments for the mmap system call. Sections are just dynamic linker metadata and are never covered by PT_LOAD segments.

This seems to be a common misconception. I too suffered from it once... Tried to embed arbitrary files into ELF files using objcopy. The tool could easily create new sections with the file contents just fine, but the kernel wouldn't load them into memory. It was really confusing at first.

https://stackoverflow.com/q/77468641

There were no tools for patching the program header table, I ended up making them! The mold linker even added a feature just to make this patching easy!

https://www.matheusmoreira.com/articles/self-contained-lone-...
by btilly | 2025-10-26 04:46:17+00:00
I have to wonder why some enterprising Democrat doesn't run an ad with this clip, with language talking about how thin-skinned Trump is, and how the Republican party has lost its core principles.

What can Trump do? Get mad? That will drive the politician who does this to prominence! Surely someone wants to get their name out on the national stage? And while it costs money to start, I'm sure that lots will want to donate if they see Trump getting unhappy with it!

And it's a strategy that can be repeated over and over again until Trump learns to stop trying to use threats to censor free speech. Which hopefully takes a while.
by nebula8804 | 2025-10-26 04:47:09+00:00
The problem with O'Keeffe is that he has burned his reputation in the past with false reports that have harmed innocent people. Reporters like Ken Klippenstein and Matt Taibbi have discussed the topic of how in the "old days" of pre internet, reporters would lose their careers over serious mistakes made in reporting. In the post social media era that no longer seems to apply anymore. However I refuse to accept that. There is so much noise that people are exposed to that there HAS to be some mechanism to filter out the chaff. I propose bringing back the reputation of a reporter based on their past work. If you cannot put in the work to thoroughly vet your major stories then you are not a true reporter in my eyes. How am supposed to vet this given im not familiar with the area? The only signal to go by is his history and it is not a good indicator in this regard.
by doctor_radium | 2025-10-26 04:48:31+00:00
"Since 2023, I and a couple of other key members of the Film is Fabulous! team have been aware of a large collection of films, thousands of films, that have become vulnerable. That collection contains some very important material including a missing episode of Doctor Who."

I assume this refers to Network (now defunct UK home video company) founder Tim Beddows, who passed away unexpectedly in 2023. I remember reading an article about the drama that unfolded thereafter (sorry, no links), which mentioned him having a large, private collection of vintage material, and the first thing I thought is that he probably has a missing episode or two of Who.

Obviously the missing episode of The Web of Fear is out there somewhere [0], and I recall speculation, probably from the Roobarbs web board [1] that "a couple lost episodes of The Dalek Masterplan are in private hands".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Web_of_Fear [1] https://www.zetaminor.com/roobarb/forum.php
by tombert | 2025-10-26 04:49:09+00:00
The laptop that caused all this shit was from 2019. Not "ancient" but not exactly "new" either, and the issue was because Windows Update did an auto-update to Windows 11 and decided my mom didn't need her computer to boot anymore. When I walked them through flashing Windows 11 onto a flash drive (using a stock Windows 11 image using Microsoft's own flashing tools) and installing it manually it worked fine, so it was specifically Windows Update that broke things, not Windows 11 itself.

I've had updates break Linux and cause things to not boot anymore, and those aren't fun, but generally fixing it boils down to rebooting to a previous snapshot [1], or logging in with the command line running like three commands.

I did try fixing the computer before we nuked it. I tried walking them through the Windows auto repair, which didn't do anything (but at least it took a long time), and I tried booting into safe mode, but it wouldn't get any farther than the regular boot did. Apparently there is a way to get into a Powershell live-boot (though I didn't know this at the time), so maybe I could have fixed it with that, anything is possible, but ultimately my solution was getting the to flash a live USB of Ubuntu, and I then mounted the drive and rsync'd everything to my server.

[1] Because Microsoft still doesn't have Copy on Write (despite being a proven and more than 20 year old bit of tech) and so they can't do good snapshotting.
by dang | 2025-10-26 04:49:18+00:00
No. But your question is both a good and an understandable one, so I'll try to explain.

It's against HN's rules to do promotional voting and/or commenting. We want voting and discussion to happen because people are randomly curious—not because they or a friend have something to promote. This is in both the guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and the FAQ (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html).

However, there are different degrees of breaking this rule. For simplicity, I'll call them A and B. There are more than two of these categories, but let's keep it simple.

Degree A: OP is clueless about the culture and rules of HN. Out of enthusiasm, they tell their friends (or project community) "hey, I posted <link> to Hacker News". Friends are even more clueless but want to help OP so they come to HN and and create new accounts to upvote and post things like "Wow this is really cool! I think this is really cool! Woo hoo OP!!"

Degree B: OP knows perfectly well that HN doesn't allow voting rings or booster comments, but want some sweet sweet frontpage juice for their thing. So they organize and make a bunch of accounts (or co-ordinate a bunch of existing ones) to upvote and/or comment but also hide their tracks.

A is naive. B is abusive.

A is venial. B is cardinal. A = misdemeanor, B = felony.

A means well, but is hapless and obvious. B knows what they're doing and think they can get away with it.

A is the juvenile delinquent that responds to kindness and explanation. B is the hardened criminal that learns nothing but to game the system better next time.

B is an obvious ban. A, maybe not. If their work is good and they seem like they (and their friends) might become good community members with enough guidance, then they're welcome—even though the rules are the rules.

Going lenient on A would be a bad idea if HN were vulnerable to naive voting rings; but we've been writing software for many years to catch those. The A cases are so naive that after a few years we realized that we were better off going easy on them. They're not the abusers we need to worry about! and often they turn into good citizens.
by noodletheworld | 2025-10-26 04:49:31+00:00
Hot take: it’s not just “me too! Valuation pls”.

Tokens are fine grained billable attribute that lets you add micro transactions to your service.

Not in all cases, but in many we exist in a complicated world of enshitifcation + inflation.

Inflation means you need to somehow make more money.

You can either: raise prices (unpopular), make your product cheaper (unpopular) or add new features and rise the price on the basis of “new value!”.

You see major organisations doing this: same product, but now with ai! …and it’s more expensive. Or it’s a mandatory bundle. Or it’s “premium”.

Long storm short, a lot of companies see the way that cloud providers do billing (usage based billing, no caps, you get the bill after using it) as the ideal end state.

Token based billing moves towards that world; which isn’t just “profit!” …it’s companies trying to deal with the reality of a complicated market place that will punish them for raising prices.

…and it is bad. I’m just saying that it’s kind of naive to think so many companies are doing this just as a “me tooooo!”. Come on; even if you’re hunting a funding round, the people running these companies are (mostly) not complete idiots.

No one is adding AI features because it’s fun, or they’re bored.

…

…ok, there are some idiots. Most people have a bigger vision for these features than just annoying their users.
by doganugurlu | 2025-10-26 04:49:59+00:00
I was pretty clear about my agreement with the real people AI fakes issue. And pretty clear on what I considered to be prudish. Would mind reading my comment and editing your response? Or you’re responding to someone else?

Edit: the fact that the author is right to be uncomfortable with their face on generated fetish content, doesn’t make their stance on fetish content with generated characters less prudish. They can be right about one thing, and prudish about the other.
by btilly | 2025-10-26 04:50:08+00:00
Do you have a reference for this?

https://www.natesilver.net/p/trump-approval-ratings-nate-sil... shows me that, while a lot of people strongly disapprove of Trump, he retains a very strong base of over 40% of likely voters. And his overall approval rating is pretty typical for a US President at this point in their term.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-10-26 04:50:54+00:00
I once wrote a liblinux project just for this!! It was indeed extremely fun. Details in my other comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45709141

I abandoned it because Linux itself now has a rich set of nolibc headers.

Now I'm working on a whole programming language based around this concept. A freestanding lisp interpreter targeting Linux directly with builtin system call support. The idea is to complete the interpreter and then write the standard library and Linux user space in lisp using the system calls.

It's been an amazing journey. It's incredible how far one can take this.
by delis-thumbs-7e | 2025-10-26 04:52:20+00:00
My experience is similar, the new 26 os is great, and since I only use Apple and linux, I don’t really experience any of this. I do use LLM’s, but it is in its own app as it should be.

I think I can kinda see what they are tryingto do it with Apple Intelligence. It is pretty useless now, but given time maybe it could grow into actually having powerful features now when developers have an access to its API, as in incorporating applications into seamless workflows.

Shoving an AI chatbot into every nook and cranny of your application is just dumb. LLM’s should be unobtrusive, learning ways you want to interact with the larger ecosystem and only show up when called.

Reason why MS and G and shoving it everywhere is that they have no idea how to actually use this technology yet, but they already invested billions to it. I don’t see how that is going to end well.
by angelgonzales | 2025-10-26 04:52:42+00:00
I don’t mind this at all as somebody who is currently living in California. Idaho is very safe and a working person can purchase a very nice home. California is very expensive and relatively unsafe in many of the major cities although not as unsafe as cities like Portland. Boise, Idaho also has better human rights like less unconstitutional firearm ownership intrusions. I’m making enough money to be firmly middle class but if I was making $200,000 a year I would live out of state as well. I have lived in Los Angeles, Boise, Seattle, Portland, and Texas and I know that Boise is very safe and a pleasant place to live, which I’m sure the police chief in the Bay really appreciates after dealing with the violence that he experiences while working. I wish this man the best.
by johnwheeler | 2025-10-26 04:54:18+00:00
Yeah, fuck your boss. Guys an asshole. He knows how stressful it is for you and either doesn't do something about it because the guy's nice to him, or because he's threatened by you and he knows that having this dickhead around gives him leverage against you. Worst-case scenario: he's just plain incompetent. I guess there is no worst-case scenario. They're all terrible.
by squigz | 2025-10-26 04:54:37+00:00
The idea of replacing "blind people" with "people with blindness" has absolutely nothing to do with the idea that "blind" is negative - if it did, I suspect proponents would, you know, not use the word blind!

The actual reasoning is putting the people first, not their disability.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People-first_language
by utopiah | 2025-10-26 04:54:48+00:00
I actually asked them about it https://bsky.app/profile/benetou.fr/post/3m3orbh5h7s2n and basically :

- devices are not OSHW (and didn't comment on the new OSHWA open healtware initiative) - implants don't actually have firmware or even battery - devices connected to implants rely on their protocol Synapse https://github.com/sciencecorp/synapse-api

So... arguably they haven't taken a positive stance on the topic IMHO but assuming the situation is as they describe (kind of an advanced mirror in the body connected to smarter stuff outside but that one could replace) it's not as terrible as others mentioned e.g. in the IEEE Spectrum article.
by tombert | 2025-10-26 04:56:02+00:00
I mean, I'm not "good" at it exactly, but a lot of the old Windows XP terminology still applies (e.g. "run", "dxdiag", "device manager"), and I have a bit more intuition about computers than they do, so I can usually brute force a solution to their problems. I don't have any non-virtualized Windows computers in my house, so it is always me figuring it out, but I generally am able to figure stuff out quicker than they can.

I agree with your point though, and I've tried explaining that to them; if something is broken on your Linux box I can get you to send me a tmate URL and I can likely fix any problem you have quickly just because I am much more used to it. At some point I probably should try doing the ultimatum.
by grogenaut | 2025-10-26 04:57:33+00:00
Is a ski lift athletic, it's powered. Does it make skiers inherently UN-athletic?

I've got a 12 mile bike commute with a big ass hill at the end. If I do 0 miles a day/week/ever without an electric bike to get me up that hill, or I do 8 miles 2x a week with the electric, am I not more athletic? Are firemen who use a hose that is powered by a pump less athletic than those who carry water in buckets?

If I'm normally sitting stationary and I do anything movement at all am I not, in fact, pushing the limits of my body?

My mom was 80, and had a stroke. She couldn't lift her toes on the right side, making it hard to walk without tripping. These shoes are for "everyday athletes". Does this make her completely unathletic, or do they, in fact, allow her to become more athletic than she could be otherwise?
by nebula8804 | 2025-10-26 04:58:11+00:00
Supposedly over 700 confirmed languages are spoken in NYC making it the most linguistically diverse urban center in the world. NYC is truly a showpiece that sets America apart from the rest of the world.

Don't take my word for it, explore the linguistic diversity using this cool map:

[1]: https://languagemap.nyc/Info/About

I have been humbled in the last few years at how much amazing political talent and ideas emerge from this one city.

It truly is a tale of two Americas: The bright and ambitious future filled with new ideas comes out of NYC contrasted to the old decrepit past from rural(supposedly "real") America.
by mslt | 2025-10-26 05:00:34+00:00
Sorry you lost your mum, I’m in that club too.

The relentless sea may not transform them the way she did, but it will transform them nonetheless.

Might be a worthwhile ritual taking a handful to the shore and launching them out into earth’s great rock tumbler in her honor.

Or not; grief wears a new mask for each of us.