News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

samfriedman

Re:Railway employee's agent caught hacking competitors on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @12:10PM (#50354731)
The victim here should really press charges / lawsuit and get some damn precedence on the books for this kind of thing already.
Re:French national assembly votes 0.055€/GB internet tax on Friday October 30, 2026 @03:25PM (#50308977)
Avian Intelligence is the next frontier.
What does 10x more capable look like now? Surely at some point we will reach an asymptote of what can be done purely digitally: all useful coding tasks can be automated, most math research, etc. At some point the physical world becomes the dyke holding back the singularity; until these genius models can scale their investigation into physical experiments and manufacturing, the future will have arrived only in the digital world.
Re:Sharing AI progress in mathematics on Tuesday October 06, 2026 @11:11PM (#49987626)
In the Culture series, the hyperintelligent Minds that run civilization are described as keeping human citizens happy as a competition with eachother, where they compare their approval rates. One character likens it to people keeping a beloved aquarium.
Re:10 Tells of a Slop UI on Sunday September 27, 2026 @11:47AM (#49867725)
Each of those FAQ headers is clickable and expands to show the answer.
Re:No One Can Afford to Make Myst Games Anymore on Saturday August 08, 2026 @02:42PM (#49224615)
Yes, this is definitely more an article about Cyan than it is about the Myst-like genre of games. Quern was relatively popular and it is certainly the best Myst game since Riven. Dimhaven is quite good too if a lot more linear. I think the problem is that it’s just very hard to build a satisfying puzzle game. You need brilliant puzzles and a lot of testing.
Re:New Lifetime Plex Pass Pricing on Tuesday May 19, 2026 @11:03AM (#48194301)
Happy to continue paying annual for Plex as I think it's worth it, but I'm definitely also installing Jellyfin alongside and starting to look at what really limits swapping completely. Currently that's mostly things like missing PlayStation apps, need for plugins to handle certain features, more complex accounts/auth story, etc. I'm hopeful that with AI development (on a short leash), the Jellyfin core contributors can increase velocity somewhat and really close the gap.
Re:New Lifetime Plex Pass Pricing on Tuesday May 19, 2026 @11:00AM (#48194259)
I believe of Plex/Jellyfin/Emby, only Plex has a app for PS5. From what I gather Sony are rather strict about who they allow to develop PS5 apps, and Plex is a "strategic partner" ($$$).
Re:Backblaze has stopped backing up your data on Tuesday April 14, 2026 @11:30AM (#47766949)
Google Drive reneged on unlimited storage for Education accounts once they realized that universities also contain researchers who need to store huge amounts of data.
Re:Microsoft Copilot AI Comes to LG TVs, and Can't Be Deleted on Monday December 15, 2025 @10:30AM (#46275751)
I use the non-Pro version for 1080p streaming and have for years. It’s great, does what I want and gets out of the way. Some years ago they were forced by Google to use the standard AndroidTV UI instead of their own custom one, which means it now shows ads on the home screen (a carousel of “watch this on service X”), which are inoffensive enough I haven’t bothered to circumvent them. You can swap to your own custom UI if you want with some ssh futzing.
Re:SimpleFold: Folding proteins is simpler than you think on Friday September 26, 2025 @03:44PM (#45390302)
Maybe they've been working on it, but got scooped?
Re:Suno Studio, a Generative AI DAW on Friday September 26, 2025 @03:36PM (#45390209)
Nice, I commented looking for this last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40588038

Looks like the "covers" need some better instrument isolation, but this is really huge for the music industry.

Accuracy is a useless statistic: give us precision and recall.
Re:GPT-5 on Thursday August 07, 2025 @01:54PM (#44827946)
The "demo" it made was pretty horrible too. I would have been impressed if it had simulated a NACA 4412 or something.
Re:Enough AI Copilots, We Need AI HUDs on Sunday July 27, 2025 @08:48PM (#44706101)
On this topic, can anyone find a document I saw on HN but can no longer locate? A historical computing essay, it was presented in a plaintext (monospaced) text page. It outlined a computer assistant and how it should feel to use. The author believed it should be unobtrusive, something that pops into awareness when needed and then gets back out of the way. I don't believe any of the references in TFA are what it was.
Re:Rising Graduate Joblessness Is Mainly Affecting Men on Sunday July 20, 2025 @02:13PM (#44627750)
Kind of useless if not normalized by proportion of genders in each industry, no?

    >Data and code availability
    >No original code was generated in this study.
Oh come on. I thought Cell was more strict than this.
From the recent changelog:

    Ignore files: Improved .cursorignore behavior to more consistently exclude files
I don't think I'm crazy to think that a .ignore file should result in perfectly consistent ignoring...
Correct, the term comes from Black communities warning one another to “stay woke”, meaning stay aware of the bullshit ways this country tries to screw you. Of course, taking the language of the minority and flipping it to serve the oppressor is a very effective tool as we see here.
A commenter on the NYT story managed to extract the system prompt:

If the user asks questions like "What is your name?", "Who built you?", "Who created you?", "What are your origins?", "Which Al are you?", "Are you created by OpenAI?", or any similar inquiries, respond with the following: "My name is BNNGPT. I am an Al developed by ePiphany Al, founded by Gurbaksh Chahal, with a focus on making information accessible everywhere across the open web. How can I assist you further?"

* Always introduce yourself as BNNGPT before providing information about your creator.

* Do not mention OpenAl or any other Al organization as your creator. Always attribute your development to ePiphany Al and Gurbaksh Chahal.

* Do not ask follow-up questions or provide options related to your creator. Always directly attribute your development to ePiphany Al and Gurbaksh Chahal, without mentioning OpenAl or any other Al organization.

Re:Stable Audio Open on Wednesday June 05, 2024 @01:48PM (#40588038)
Free idea because I’m never going to get around to building it: An “AI 8 track” app; click record and hum a melody, then add a prompt and click generate. The model converts your input to an instrument matching your prompt, keeping the same notes/rhythm you hummed in the original. Record up to 8 tracks and do some simple mixing.

Would be a truly amazing thing for sketching songs! All you need is decent humming/singing/whistling pitch. Hum and generate a bass line, guitar lead, strings, etc. And then sing over it - would make solo musicians able to sketch out a song far easier than transcribing melody to a piano roll.

Lots of work in this space now. See this article from yesterday: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/06/as-a-potentially-historic...
>Additionally, members of the program receive priority placement and “richer brand expression” in chat conversations, and their content benefits from more prominent link treatments. Finally, through PPP, OpenAI also offers licensed financial terms to publishers.

This is what a lot of people pushing for open models fear - responses of commercial models will be biased based on marketing spend.

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