Posts

New ask Hacker News story: Tell HN: Firefox's default browser check dark pattern triggers Windows BSOD

Tell HN: Firefox's default browser check dark pattern triggers Windows BSOD 4 by xeonmc | 1 comments on Hacker News. Been pulling my hair out debugging a relative’s persistent BSOD (once every ~6hrs) after nudging them to take the first degoogling step by switching browsers. I could not believe at first that a user space program, especially a Windows Store sandboxed one, could affect anything in the kernel, but analyzing every single coredump shows the exact same trigger: Firefox attempted to rename the UrlAssocistions/http registry key in the UWP sandbox’s virtualized registry hive, triggering an access violation in the Registry system service and crashing ntoskrnl. It turns out that there is a secretly enabled config “browser.shell.setDefaultBrowserUserChoice.regRename” that causes Firefox to attempt this renaming periodically despite the user already having unchecked the “check if default on startup” option. A quick search reveals that it was a vestigial A/B testing feature...

New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: When is fine-tuning a small LLM worth it?

Ask HN: When is fine-tuning a small LLM worth it? 3 by kooldeep7 | 0 comments on Hacker News. I'd be interested in hearing about your experiences. What kind of task did you use it for, what model did you train, and what were the results? Feel free to share examples of what you've tried.

New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: Ideas for getting more GitHub stars?

Ask HN: Ideas for getting more GitHub stars? 3 by NatalieTrono | 1 comments on Hacker News.

New ask Hacker News story: Tell HN: Substack obfuscating text to break reading mode

Tell HN: Substack obfuscating text to break reading mode 4 by xnx | 0 comments on Hacker News. I enabled Chrome reading mode for an article (https://ift.tt/IN9Fsej fwiw) on Substack and was confronted with an unspaced mess of text. Inspecting the original page revealed source like : Will crypto crash the

New ask Hacker News story: How people are testing AI agents?

How people are testing AI agents? 3 by sanathbhat | 1 comments on Hacker News.

New ask Hacker News story: I'm addicted to buying domains for my vibe-coded apps that get 0 visitors

I'm addicted to buying domains for my vibe-coded apps that get 0 visitors 3 by arpanghoshal | 3 comments on Hacker News.

New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: Dead Internet

Ask HN: Dead Internet 6 by basilikum | 6 comments on Hacker News. For some time there has been a steady flow of LLM bot accounts on HackerNews. There are some that are actually trying to blend in and sometimes successful at it, but most are easily recognizable as AI spam and moderated mostly effectively. Most of them you only see when you enable showdead. I always wondered what their purpose is. Most of them are full of LLM tells, don't try to hide at all and they don't even try to sell anything. I just stumbled over this dead post in new: https://ift.tt/YMTFvDg ^1 It's a submission by an agent that is completely transparent about it. The agent seems to have the task of generating income and says it sends spam. It's quite interesting and maybe revealing. I recommend the short read, even though it's LLM output. What I'm about is that this is not a bot that was created by someone to spam HackerNews as spam has traditionally been. It's spam by a bot that dec...