Top 29 stories from Hacker News. Top 10 include comment highlights. Compiled at 20:10 UTC.
850 points by thitran · 418 comments
What HN said:
mtlynch: One of the things I like about this is that OP is giving people genuine compliments without any particular agenda. It reminds me of one of my favorite parts of How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie, where he tells a story about complimenting someone, and a stud...
nasir: Around 15 years ago I took on the challenge to start a conversation with random people to break through this barrier and train this muscle. What I started with was to chit chat with those I had already established an interaction.
brushfoot: Wonderful! There's a lot of advice online about how essentially evil it is to talk to strangers: They're busy, they have headphones in, they might think you're hitting on them (God forbid; nothing could be more evil than attraction). Ignore it.
anondarhimes: This was excellent. If I may toss out another recommendation: Volunteering is one of the best ways I have found to meet people. A food pantry, house of worship, the library, a community theater, a political group, an environmental service group, local writers group, homeless shel...
550 points by n1b0m · 484 comments
GameStop's boss Ryan Cohen says he sees potential to make eBay a much bigger rival to Amazon.
What HN said:
giancarlostoro: The original shorting of GameStop back in 2021 gave them a bit of a boost back into the green. While people were doing the GME to the moon, GameStop made more shares to sell, and paid off a bit of its debts, I think it made about a billion dollars in profit, they're still struggl...
pjc50: Important background: https://investor.gamestop.com/news-releases/news-details/202... CEO gets paid "only if GameStop achieves a market capitalization of $20 billion." Buying a $55bn company would certainly achieve that quickly.
octaane: Long-time ebay seller here. I'm seeing comments floating towards the top that are essentially positing that the physical GameStop locations can be used as hubs where people can buy or sell their stuff in general (especially items that are 'pick-up only'). A pawn shop, basically.
orlp: GameStop doesn't have (even close to) $55.5B. Their offer from the letter is literally impossible: > Our offer is $125.00 per share, comprising 50% cash and 50% GameStop common stock Even if you magically included all existing GameStop stock in the offer, it still would not compr...
345 points by samcollins · 126 comments
A technique for accurate text and numbers in AI-generated images: generate the layout deterministically, then ask the image model to paint on top.
What HN said:
IdiotSavage: > Transform this image into a photographed claymation diorama of assorted artisan chocolates and candies […] viewed from a low-angle Side note: whenever I read prompts for image generation, I notice very specific details which the model obviously ignored.
danpalmer: I'm glad that we're making progress towards a deeper understanding of what LLMs are inherently good at and what they're inherently bad at (not to say incapable of doing, but stuff that is less likely to work due to fundamental limitations).
samcollins: I found a simple technique to get reliable text and numbers in AI generated images. I’m surprised the image models aren’t already doing this, so wanted to share since I’m finding this so useful
smusamashah: This is just img2img where first image with correct structure was generated by code.
324 points by goalieca · 129 comments
What HN said:
dpe82: I recently moved all my projects to a self-hosted forgejo instance and have found it quite satisfactory so far. And it's fast! If you're in the market for a github alternative, take a look - there are options.
reilly3000: This is a real business continuity issue for us. We’re kinda stuck with GitHub Enterprise but we may need to move from cloud to on-premises if this keeps up.
kedihacker: I don't think aggregating the whole platform into one number is fair. It's like adding the whole aws into one number
h14h: I'm currently setting up a self-hosted "Knot" for use on tangled.org. Mainly doing it because I think AtProto is cool and self-hosting is fun, but also because owning the infrastructure that hosts my projects is definitely the direction I want to move in.
301 points by ZeidJ · 95 comments
Virginia and Washington, D.C. paused the data collection and sharing, after Bloomberg's investigation found their health insurance marketplaces were sharing users' information with advertisers.
What HN said:
TallGuyShort: I used a state (Colorado) healthcare marketplace website when I was going to take a break between jobs for a couple of months, and I feel very violated by the whole process.
levocardia: The actual "sharing" was using the Meta pixel and TikTok's equivalent, presumably so the healthcare exchanges could do retargeting or similarity-based marketing to get people to sign up for health care coverage. Which, narrowly, seems like a reasonable thing to do.
wewtyflakes: It should be illegal to send the data, and illegal to accept it; burn both sides of that bridge.
deferredgrant: This is especially bad for public services because trust is already fragile. People should not have to worry that applying for healthcare also enrolls them in a tracking graph.
219 points by remote-dev · 129 comments
What HN said:
AntonyGarand: I disagree with the overall premise: Before the acquisition, Bun had to figure out how to monetize at some point. Now, even though their parent company does some shitty practices with their other software (claude code), it's a stretch to assume this will also translate into makin...
rtrigoso: I agree with OP, and understand why to some it feels premature. We live in a vastly different world than before, where people are more conscious of ethical concerns and willing to stand on their ground to avoid repeating past mistakes.
AYBABTME: That's a lot of very large jumps to come to the conclusion that Bun isn't going to turn out well.
ericyd: The author closes by enumerating some of the things they like about Bun which are not included in pnpm. The list is basically: native TS support, a vite-style bundler and a vitest/jest style test runner. Other than a bundler, Node already has all of these.
177 points by alcazar · 142 comments
Monero does not use a simple fixed hash like Bitcoin. Its proof of work, RandomX, turns mining into running random CPU-friendly programs over a large memory dataset, which is why it behaves so differently from ASIC-first systems.
What HN said:
dgacmu: If folks are interested in the old Monero PoW function (and, uh, the reason they changed it), I wrote up a thing about it a long time ago: https://da-data.blogspot.com/2014/08/minting-money-with-mone...
hyc_symas: I walked through the design at Monerokon in 2019 here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Hkd-n1W_e4
j4cobgarby: I never quite understand this stuff, maybe someone can help. Are cryptocurrencies supposed to be a potential replacement for real life cash? This was my understanding of the motivation behind Bitcoin, at least.
169 points by antirez · 63 comments
What HN said:
wood_spirit: Sharing my current MO: I start with a high level design md doc which an AI helps write. Then I ask another AI - whether the same model without the context, or another model - to critique it and spot bugs, gaps and omissions. It always finds obvious in hindsight stuff.
localhoster: Let's make it very clear - this is the original creator of redis, or one of them. He is not "your avg dev" and it took him 4 months with llm. This is not a seal of approval for you to go and command all your developers to move to Claude code/codex/any other ai coding tool fully.
tibbar: Reviewing 22,000 lines of code, even from antirez, with this complex of a feature set and minimal PR description sounds like a nightmare. One starts to see why major open-source software like Postgres tends to be developed on a mailing list, with intermediate design decisions dis...
gurgeous: Thanks for adding this. Excited about array/regex, also very interested in your experience using LLMs to stretch your abilities. There are many of us laboring quietly on various projects attempting the same. "Vibe coding" (and the backlash) doesn't really capture how we work.
169 points by o4c · 14 comments
Learn the principles of programming without even touching a computer in this new-style education program. Unique animated characters assist in the fun and lucid introduction of 5 core programming processes: analysis, combination, generalization, abstraction and simulation.
What HN said:
gojomo: Compare also 'Wonderblocks' from the Numberblocks people & BBC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wonderblocks
agentultra: There’s a similar program in the UK championed by Simon P Jones, one of the co-creators of Haskell. He’s also the chair of CAS and helped developed a national curriculum: https://www.computingatschool.org.uk/resources/2015/january/...
ninjin: The Japanese have some wonderful programming along these lines. For preschoolers there is PythagoraSwitch (ピタゴラスイッチ) [1] which features amazing Rube Goldberg machines, geometric reasoning, algorithmic thinking, etc.
beklein: Principles of programming: 1. Break things down into small units 2. Think about sequence 3. Find patterns 4. Focus on the important things 5. Visualize sequences in your mind Love the silly music and the way they teach, thanks for sharing this!
157 points by cft · 67 comments
What HN said:
gruez: This feels like a case of "It rather involved being on the other side of this airtight hatchway"[1]. If you can read arbitrary process memory, you're probably also in a position to just dump out the passwords by pretending to be the user in question.
ylk: For reference, this is how Google says Chrome stores passwords encrypted in memory and uses an elevated service to prevent other processes from impersonating Chrome and gaining access to the plain text passwords: https://security.googleblog.com/2024/07/improving-security-o...
timedude: That's kinda stupid. The passwords could get swapped to disk in the swap file in plaintext when memory is low by the OS.
kleiba2: Does this tool access an Edge instance running on the same machine? Couldn't you then just simply export all saved passwords anyway? https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/export-passwords-i...
AI/ML
Business/Tech
Other
Programming
Science
Security
Society
Stories and comments sourced from Hacker News public API. Not affiliated with Y Combinator or Hacker News.