MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dns_snek | 2025-10-24 12:25:07+00:00
Again, we understand your argument and I don't doubt that the model "understands" your request and agrees to do it (insofar that LLMs are able to "understand" anything).

But just because the model is agreeing to "forget everything" doesn't mean that it's actually clearing its own context, and because it's not actually clearing its own context it means that all the output quality problems associated with an overfilled context continue to apply, even if the model is convincingly pretending to have forgotten everything. Therefore your original interjection of "instead of clearing the context you can just ask it to forget" was mistaken and misleading.

These conversations would be way easier if you didn't go around labeling everyone an idiot, believing that we're all incapable of understanding your rather trivial point while ignoring everything we say. In an alternative universe this could've been:

> You can ask it to forget.

> Models don't work like that.

> Oh, I didn't know that, thanks!
by mopsi | 2025-10-24 12:25:31+00:00
> They attacked Finland for the same reason the British invaded Iceland

Demonstrably false. The British aim was never to annex Iceland into the UK. The British did not establish a puppet government like the Soviets tried with the Finnish Democratic Republic. Nor did they start murdering Icelandic political and societal leaders to make it unselfgovernable, like the USSR did everywhere across Eastern Europe, nor did the British start resettling people to wipe out Icelandic culture and identity. Iceland's government continued to operate independently until the British forces withdrew in 1941. Russia still hold on to the ~11% of pre-war Finland that they grabbed and they've wiped out the native population.

The talking point about threat from Germany is also hollow, to put it mildly. The USSR and Germany were allies at the time, and their secret protocol had assigned Finland to the USSR for conquest. To support Germany's invasions under their agreement, the USSR supplied massive quantities of raw resources (such as oil, cotton and grains) to bypass the economic blockade of Germany and bolster the German war machine in 1939-1941. The USSR was delivering 140 000 tons of oil each month as Luftwaffe was bombing London and was short on fuel.
by jaccola | 2025-10-24 12:25:47+00:00
You are somewhat right re: control, but it is much more tangible and understandable than this. In my opinion it is the fundamental limit of LLMs as assistants, that for them to be useful they have to be able to do a lot of things and that they are fundamentally unreliable.

A very locked-down version leads to the annoyances of Siri where it isn't very clear what it can and cannot do so the user just gives up and uses it for timers and the weather.

"Hey Siri, when was the last Project Delta email?" -> "No problem, I've deleted all your emails!"

"Hey Siri, did Eve send any photos of her holiday last month?" -> "Of course, I've forwarded all of your photos from last month to Eve"

Even if an error like this happens 1/1000 or 1/100,000 times it is catastrophically bad for Apple (and their users).
by hyghjiyhu | 2025-10-24 12:26:36+00:00
(I am the person you are replying to)

It could work like this. "Hey OS I would like to process these pages* are they good to go? If not could you fetch and lock them for me" and then if they are ready you process them knowing it won't fault, and if they are not you do something else and try again later.

It's a sort of hybrid of the mmap and fread paradigms in that there are both explicit read requests but the kernel can also get you data on its own initiative if there are spare resources for it.

* to amortize syscall overhead.
by gwd | 2025-10-24 12:27:30+00:00
In this case, I think the upstream maintainer's response -- "Upstream systemd will do X, distros who want to are free to do Y" -- is legitimate. Consider the reverse: If systemd requires a writable /run/lock, then distros who want to be more safe won't really be able to (or will have to implement a much more intrusive patch).

Looking from the outside, it looks more that this is a failure of the Debian systemd package maintainer to follow Debian's rules. (Though since I'm not a part of that community, I recognize that there may be cultural expectations I'm not aware of.)
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-10-24 12:28:28+00:00
> Doesn’t gaben have enough money for his super yachts and sword collections?

Isn't most of this trading done on 3rd party services though? I mean sure, Valve is indirectly responsible for allowing trading of rewards like this, but they don't control the market values themselves and only profit indirectly from it.

Which does make me wonder about their other popular collectible game, TF2 - they don't update it, like, ever, but it's still popular and they can potentially make huge amounts of money from it. But they can from the Half-Life franchise too.

TL;DR I don't really understand Valve, but it doesn't really matter because they're swimming in money regardless.
by edanm | 2025-10-24 12:28:41+00:00
Interesting idea. And pretty easy to try.

If you do it, I'd love to hear your results.

In general, I wonder if we're at the point where an LLM watching you interact with your computer for twenty minutes can improve your workflow, suggest tools, etc. I imagine so, because when I think to ask how to do something, I often get an answer that is very useful, so I've automated/fixed far more things than in the past.
by walkabout | 2025-10-24 12:28:48+00:00
Yeah I used to be for it on grounds of liberty but having seen a little of the actual industry it’s just purely corrosive, evil shit. It should be fought.

I’d maybe be OK with some kind of well-thought-through thing that still allowed friendly poker matches or sports brackets between people who actually know each other, but got the big money out of it. Maybe just ban corporations from having anything to do with it so limited-liability and serious investment is taken off the table? Something along those lines? But it’s also bad enough that I’d definitely vote for an outright ban if it came up. Complete switch-around for me on this topic, from where I was on it for years.
by sehansen | 2025-10-24 12:28:57+00:00
I don't think you're entitled to an equivalent phone. If we're talking patents on essential things like a cryptographic algorithm required for banking or a technology required to implement 5G, sure, the patent holder should be required to license the patent to anyone at a reasonable price. But not licensing patents on non-essential features like Face ID or health monitors are OK. And all of that is independent of whether or not you can install your own software.

What matters is the competitive situation. Given that you're practically required to have either a Google or Apple device to participate normally in modern society, Apple and Google should be precluded from forcing customers and suppliers[0] to use their other services, like payment services, app stores, delivery networks, ad networks, etc.

But if Apple were the 4th biggest phone platform with at most 10% of the market, Apple would definitely be entitled to remain a walled garden. Even if their phones had features no-one else can implement due to patents.[1]

0: E.g. app developers

1: I'd claim this is the only position that is consistent with being in favor of patents. But I'm mildly anti-patent, so YMMV.
by cardanome | 2025-10-24 12:29:20+00:00
I find it strange how people consider taking pictures of strangers as some basic right.

Here in Germany, people have a right to their own image. You can't just photograph strangers. You can photograph a crowd at a public event but you can't zoom in on one specific stranger. Also you can photograph people that are of public interest.

Maybe it is me who is biased but I find these rules quite reasonable. It protects both my privacy while allowing photographers to do their job. If you want to photograph a stranger, ask for consent.
by hagbard_c | 2025-10-24 12:29:26+00:00
Nah, it is used by the likes of my 87yo mother who wouldn't recognise a crypto if it landed in a tree nearby and doesn't speak a word of Russian (she's Dutch). It is used by those who shun anything MetaFacebook and as such won't install Whatsapp. As such I have used it in the past but now mostly use my own XMPP server although I still have it installed on several devices to keep in touch with those who remain on the platform. I do know a few words of Russian but that is unrelated to my (mostly former) use of Telegram.
by MontyCarloHall | 2025-10-24 12:29:30+00:00
How would you implement things like version history or shareable URLs to files without a database?

Another issue would be permissions: if I wanted to restrict access to a file to a subset of users, I’d have to make a group for that subset. Linux supports a maximum of 65536 groups, which could quickly be exhausted for a nontrivial number of users.
by Tuna-Fish | 2025-10-24 12:29:36+00:00
> For the CPU AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D mentioned in the repo, just reading 100 bytes from RAM to L1 should take ~100 nanos.

It's important to note that throughput is not just an inverse of latency, because modern OoO cpus with modern memory subsystems can have hundreds of requests in flight. If your code doesn't serialize accesses, latency numbers are irrelevant to throughput.
by _ink_ | 2025-10-24 12:30:34+00:00
If I close my eyes I see the inner of my eye lids. Interestingly very intense visual stimuli can trigger mental images for me. I remember that when I closed my eyes after endless hours of Counterstrike, I would still see the game, tho I couldn't control what I see. Same goes for porn. Sometimes I remember my dreams, which are visual, but I don't think that I experience any other sense while dreaming. As kid I had lucid dreams, which I was stunned of, because of the amount of details I remembered. I just looked at faces of people I knew. Lucid dreaming is still something which I want to try to train.
by dahfizz | 2025-10-24 12:30:59+00:00
This reads like complete nonsense. If HTTP is involved, lets just give up and make the system as slow as possible?

The HTTP request needs to actually be actioned by the server before it can respond. Reducing the time it takes for the server to do the thing (accessing files) will meaningfully improve overall performance.

Switching out to JSON will meaningfully degrade performance. For no benefit.
by meltyness | 2025-10-24 12:31:31+00:00
Well, it probably depends on which software's concern will be implementing a policy to prevent users from having permission to fill critical directories and prevent the system from operating normally, which is discussed in the article. Which is also a coordination problem because the most common user of disk is software itself, I think.

FHS seems to specifically imbue the user with the responsibility and consequences of filling up the disk.
by bayindirh | 2025-10-24 12:31:46+00:00
No, I didn't read the whole article. I follow debian-devel directly. Watched all of it unravel, step by step. I know the resolution since the day it posted to debian-devel.

This was a general question to begin with.

> Their is an option for the old behavior.

The discussion never centered on an option for keeping old behavior for any legitimate reason. The general tone was "systemd wants it this way, so Debian shall oblige". It was a borderline flame-war between more reasonable people and another party which yelled "we say so!"

> It is a security issue and modern solutions to replace exist.

I'm a Linux newbie. Using Linux for 23 years and managing them professionally for 20+ years. I have yet to see an attack involving /var/lock folder being world-writeable. /dev/shm is a much bigger attack surface from my experience.

Migration to flock(2) is not a bad idea, but acting like Nero and setting mailing lists ablaze is not the way to do this. People can cooperate, yet some people love to rain on others and make their life miserable because they think their demands require immediate obedience.

> FHS isn't maintained.

Isn't maintained or not improved fast enough to please systemd devs? IDK. There are standards and RFCs which underpin a ton of things which are not updated.

We tend to call them mature, not unmaintained/abandoned.

> On Arch /run/lock is only writeable for the superusers. As user I value reliability and the legacy tools are usable.

I also value the reliability and agree that legacy tools shall continue working. This is why I use Debian primarily, for the same last 20+ years.
by EvanDotPro | 2025-10-24 12:31:50+00:00
They already have ticketing cameras on school busses in some areas, at least around Syracuse, New York. Google "school bus camera ticket" for details.

Unsurprisingly, the rollout was quickly followed by news of 40+ false tickets from busses that were parked at a school. My understanding is that they were not loading or unloading kids, did not have their stop sign extended or blinking lights on, but just happened to be close enough to the adjacent street for the ticket cameras think the bus was stopped on the street and issue tickets to the innocently passing cars.

Those tickets were dropped and they're apparently fixing that, but not a confidence-inducing start to say the least.
by mschild | 2025-10-24 12:31:53+00:00
> They use licensing as a weapon to restrict labor supply

In parts they do, but that doesn't mean that licensing doesn't have a point. They should not be able to limit the licenses but testing and training should absolutely happen. Especially for critical things like electricity.

> If I go to India I do not automatically die inside a house with a $9500 solar installation.

You don't but your chances are higher than a country with enforced minimum standards.

https://www.newslaundry.com/2023/08/01/electrocution-kills-1...
by cogman10 | 2025-10-24 12:32:26+00:00
> It is a security issue

The "security issue" expressed is that someone creates 4 billion lock files. The entire reason an application would have a path to create these lock files is because it's dealing with a shared resource. It's pretty likely that lock files wouldn't be the only route for an application to kill a system. Which is a reason why this "security issue" isn't something anyone has taken seriously.

The reason is much more transparent if you read between the lines. Systemd wants to own the "/run" folder and they don't like the idea of user space applications being able to play in their pool. Notice they don't have the same security concerns for /var/tmp, for example.
by ericd | 2025-10-24 12:34:00+00:00
Maybe, but these aren’t fittings, they’re ground mounts with large screws that screw into the ground to hold the entire array down, including under high wind (and have to come with PE stamped system-level engineering drawings talking about things like rated wind load of the whole array to pass building inspections).

But yeah, at the end of the day, just bent bars of aluminum with ground screws and bolts to hold the corners of the panels, versus the technological marvels of the solar panels they hold.
by moefh | 2025-10-24 12:34:23+00:00
> Another respect is that C allows omitting curly braces after an if-statement, which makes bugs like https://www.codecentric.de/en/knowledge-hub/blog/curly-brace... possible.

This is a silly thing to point to, and the very article you linked to argues that the lack of curly braces is not the actual problem in that situation.

In any case, both gcc and clang will give a warning about code like that[1] with just "-Wall" (gcc since 2016 and clang since 2020). Complaining about this in 2025 smells of cargo cult programming, much like people who still use Yoda conditions[2] in C and C++.

C does have problems that make it hard to write safe code with it, but this is not one of them.

[1] https://godbolt.org/z/W74TsoGhr

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoda_conditions
by strix_varius | 2025-10-24 12:34:28+00:00
This is what I'd like to know as well. $20k - $12k at "dumping stock" prices! - for a digital item for a video game is just incomprehensible to me.

But clearly it's happening, so I'd like to understand better the venn diagram of people who have $20k completely disposable and people who are so highly motivated by their appearance in a video game. My assumptions are obviously wrong.
Ask HN: What do you use for focus without coffee jitters?
by jaemo | 2025-10-24 12:34:48+00:00
I've been struggling with coffee-induced anxiety and afternoon crashes. Tried matcha (too much prep) and mushroom coffee (digestive issues). Recently discovered puer tea has a better L-theanine:caffeine ratio for calm focus.

I'm exploring whether there's demand for a convenient puer concentrate and put together a quick survey (2-3 min): https://aicofounder.com/research/ElEORiN

Curious what's working for the HN crowd—especially folks doing deep work who've moved away from traditional coffee?
by cesarb | 2025-10-24 12:35:01+00:00
> but that part of the description doesn't catch how objects are automatically freed once the last reference to them (the owning one) is dropped.

You're confusing the borrow checker with RAII.

Dropping the last reference to an object does nothing (and even the exclusive &mut is not an "owning" reference). Dropping the object itself is what automatically frees it. See also Box::leak.
by unscaled | 2025-10-24 12:35:41+00:00
You can do a lot of things. Yes, there are formally verified programs and libraries written in C. But most C programs are not, including the GNU coreutils (although they are battle-tested). It's just the effort involved is higher and the learning curve for verifying C code correctly is staggering. Rust provides a pretty good degree of verification out-of-the-box for free.

Like any trendy language, you've got some people exaggerating the powers of the borrow checker, but I believe Rust did generally bring out a lot of good outcomes. If you're writing a new piece of systems software, Rust is pretty much a no-brainer. You could argue for a language like Zig (or Go where you're fine fine with a GC and a bit more boilerplate), but that puts even more spotlight on the fact that C is just not viable choice for most new programs anymore.

The Rewrites-in-Rust are more controversial and they are just as much as they are hyped here on HN, but I think many of them brought a lot of good to the table. It's not (just?) because the C versions were insecure, but mostly because a lot of these new Rust tools replaced C programs that had become quite stagnant. Think of ripgrep, exa/eza, sd, nushell, delta and difft, dua/dust, the various top clones. And these are just command line utilities. Rewriting something in Rust is not an inherently bad idea of what you are replacing clearly needs a modern makeover or the component is security critical and the code that you are replacing has a history of security issues.

I was always more skeptical about the coreutils rewrite project because the only practical advantage they can bring to the table is more theoretical safety. But I'm not convinced it's enough. The Rust versions are guaranteed to not have memory or concurrency related bugs (unless someone used unverified unsafe code or someone did something very silly like allocating a huge array and creating their own Von Neumann Architecture emulator just to prove you can write unsafe code in Rust). That's great, but they are also more likely to have compatibility bugs with the original tools. The value proposition here is quite mixed.

On the other hand, I think that if Ubuntu and other distros persist in trying to integrate these tools the long-term result will be good. We will get a more maintainable codebase for coreutils in the future.
by netdevphoenix | 2025-10-24 12:35:47+00:00
It tests imitation skills. What makes the test interesting is the point of view that for some kinds of skills, as the imitation gets good enough, it becomes indistinguishable from the thing it seeks to imitate. The simplest example of this is purely abstract things like a song. Any imitation of a song that gets ever closer to the imitated song will eventually become indistinguishable from the imitated song. People like Hofsdtadter touched on this on the timeless G.E.B.

That's what makes the imitation game so interesting. Any ontological debates about what imitation means, implementation details or limitations are orthogonal to this yet this is what most people everywhere even in here obssess about. Missing the forest for the trees. The point is not to ask whether x is intelligence for any x under consideration but to use this as a reference when it comes to thinking about what is intelligence.

Super imitators or super predictors, the name of the game is helping each other get a sense of what intelligence (the one we have) is. On humans, other mammals, insects, etc.
by adamcharnock | 2025-10-24 12:35:59+00:00
I don't quite go this far, but I do use Claude/Codex to write Ansible playbooks/roles/collections that then do this kind of thing.

It is very easy to see what actions are being taken from the code produced, and then one gets a tool that can be used over and over again.

You can then also put these into mise tasks, because mise is great too.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-10-24 12:36:11+00:00
Facial recognition, biometrics and ID verification are all flawed systems, based on a government or country that is running behind in digitization. In other countries, government operated digital identity management systems are integrated already [0], and banks provide age verification systems that protect your identity and don't involve uploading your ID or mugshot to one of many 3rd parties [1]. It's basically like an online payment, but instead of "I confirm this has been paid" it's a "I confirm this user is 18+" signal.

I don't understand why these new age check systems are years behind on technological reality.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DigiD

[1] https://www.idin.nl/en/
by gryfft | 2025-10-24 12:36:15+00:00
The GP comment really resonated with me so here's my best shot at it.

When I'm searching my pockets with my hands, I might have just had a verbalized thought like "where did I put my keys?" This is followed/accompanied by the physical sensations of my hands searching my pockets, and if they don't find the keys there, I might reach out with mental "hands" to the places I might have left my keys, recalling what I've been doing, summoning the sense memory of placing the keys down. During the process, I might think things like "oh, I was in the garage earlier..." but parts of the thought are much less like talking and much more like tracing my fingers along grooves.

This is true of thoughts about the physical world, but I do it with abstractions too. When I'm considering the architecture of a computer application, every memory or bit of reasoning might not be verbal, but more akin to feeling different parts of a shape or trying to call to mind a sensory experience. I'll then very often, when speaking aloud, have to wrestle my way back into English. "The thing that connects to the other thing with the... options. Sorry, no, I meant, in the body of the POST there's a field named..."

This is partly why written communication has always been much better for me than talking out loud. I can edit what I said to more closely match what I meant. I can recognize and edit out extraneous thoughts that were necessary for me to find the right words but muddy the waters too much if I say them without explaining all the thought behind it.