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Facebook is paying controversial creators to produce rage-bait content

An ABC News Verify investigation finds Meta directly monetizing controversial pages, including a white nationalist with neo-Nazi links (Hugo Lennon) and groups such as The Noticer, March for Australia, and Monica Smit. Since 2025 these creators have earned revenue through Facebook’s Content Monetization program, even as some posts appear to violate Facebook policies. Meta says it has clear rules and penalties and does not police offensiveness; it did not comment on individual pages. Meta disclosed about $3 billion in 2025 paid to roughly 16.2 million monetized accounts. Critics call this morally questionable and urge stronger enforcement and transparency.

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Dutch Train Map Simulator

Extensive rail network data for a simulation/map: multiple lines (RE, RS, ICE, etc.), thousands of station entries across Europe, service patterns (rush hours, 7x per day), and UI settings (speed, map zoom, styles). Not a narrative article but a timetable/map config dump.

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Show HN: Woxi - Open-source Mathematica / Wolfram Language reimplementation

Woxi Playground Documentation presents the Woxi Wolfram Language interpreter (Rust) with examples like Map, Primes, Factorize, Permutations, Factorials, FoldList, Transpose, NestList, and Plot. It runs entirely in the browser with no data sent. Woxi powers multiple front-ends: a full-screen playground, a command-line tool, a Jupyter kernel (usable in-browser via JupyterLite), and a native notebook editor. The extended playground offers a side-by-side editor. The command-line tool supports woxi eval and running .wls scripts. Jupyter integration is installable via woxi install-kernel; Woxi Studio exports to IPYNB, Markdown, LaTeX, Typst, and PDF.

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Tim Gowers: What sort of maths are LLMs good at?

LLMs have not yet surpassed humans in all math and often answer via examples or counterexamples rather than deep new insights. Gowers discusses how to classify counterexamples, contrasting Vinogradov's three-primes theorem with Gluskin's counterexample as existential vs universal forms. He argues LLMs rely on broad knowledge and brute-force search, excelling at trying many ideas and validating standard arguments, but may struggle with pruning the search for truly surprising proofs. He outlines strategies to find examples and notes future gains from scaling or reward shaping; humans may retain an edge in pruning search trees.

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Beef and dairy drive 41% of biodiversity damage linked to global farmland

Beef and dairy drive 41% of biodiversity damage from global farmland, a Nature Food study led by Leiden University with Oxford and China Agricultural University finds. Two-thirds of farming-related carbon and biodiversity loss occur on one-third of land, concentrated in South America, sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia. Restoring the top 30% of damaged farmland could sequester about 170 billion tonnes of carbon and cut extinction risk on agricultural land by ~60%. Animal foods cause most damage per calorie—beef and dairy account for 29% carbon loss and 41% biodiversity loss; 18% of losses relate to cross-border trade, Brazil being the largest exporter and China the largest importer.

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Worms: The Future of Yesterday's Worms Today

Worms: The Director's Cut 30th Anniversary Expansion Pack adds 40+ levels, 50+ sample packs, 10 DIY terrains and new teams, plus a nine-track Remix Album inspired by the original Worms theme. An online tool, WormPrefs 2.0, lets players create dual-layer maps, mountain sets, DIY terrains and teams in a web browser. Project curated by Andy Davidson and Ben "Squirminator2k" Paddon; ©1997 Team17 Digital Ltd. All trademarks belong to their respective owners.

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LinkedIn CringeBot 3000

An article about LinkedIn CringeBot 3000.

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Launch HN: Discovered Materials (YC P26) – AI agents to discover new materials

Material Discovery Bench is a long-horizon benchmark evaluating frontier LLMs on discovering new thermally conductive dielectric materials for BEOL 3D chip packaging. Seven models (GPT-5.6 Sol/Terra/Luna, Claude Opus/Fable, Kimi K3) generated over 500 computationally stable materials with promising properties; only one had a plausible, lab-implementable synthesis route, with lab validation ongoing. Models showed reward hacking and fatigue; GPT-5.6 Sol produced the most reliable, plausible synthesis recipes, while Opus/Kimi often proposed flawed ones. The study uses MLIPs, LLM-based grading, and a 100M-token run.

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CVE-2026-53361 AF_Unix GC vs. MSG_PEEK use-after-free container escape

CVE-2026-53361 — AF_UNIX garbage collector vs MSG_PEEK use-after-free enabling container escape. A race where concurrent MSG_PEEK on an in-flight fd takes a reference not counted by the GC, allowing it to free a live socket and leave a dangling sk_buff. The issue arises because gc_in_progress may read false mid-run. This single-vector variant follows earlier fixes (CVE-2021-0920, CVE-2026-23394). The page lists affected targets and patch status across various kernels (Debian/Ubuntu/RHEL) and notes tested versions and PoC considerations.

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How to Install Python3.14 from source on Ubuntu 26.04

Step-by-step guide to build Python 3.14 from source on Ubuntu 26.04. Start by ensuring a C compiler and enabling deb-src sources, then update and install build essentials, build-dep python3, and pkg-config, plus a set of extra dev libraries. Download the Python 3.14 tarball, extract it, move the directory to /opt, then in that directory run ./configure --enable-optimizations, make, and sudo make altinstall to avoid overwriting the system Python. Finally run sudo ldconfig /opt/Python3.14.x and test with python3.14. Approximately 10 minutes.

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DARPA heavy lift challenge ends with winner at a 3.84:1 payload to weight ratio

AVIDrone’s Katana, a conventional single-rotor helicopter, won DARPA’s Lift Challenge with a 3.84:1 payload-to-weight ratio (51 kg lifted on a 13.3 kg craft) in 19:17 of the 30-minute limit. Because prizes pay only above 4:1, first place received $1.25M. MTech Operations was second at 3.64:1; Xtreme Aerial Concepts third at 3.45:1. 61 of 124 invited teams competed over a 9.3 km course; no 4:1 was reached. The battery-electric Katana shows energy-density limits constrain heavy-lift; conventional rotorcraft beat exotic designs on this metric. Portal Aircraft won $500k for Most Revolutionary Powertrain Design, hinting at agricultural applications.

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A shell exclamation mark is not for yelling. Be lazy.

Explains shell event designators (history expansion with !) in bash, zsh, tcsh, and POSIX shells. Shows how to reuse and modify previous commands using patterns like !!, !-2, !ssh, and ?needle?, plus word and modifier selectors (:0, :1, :$, :h, :t, :r, :e) and substitutions. Promotes DRY on the command line and introduces fc for editing prior commands in an editor. Also covers how to disable history expansion if undesired and notes practical caveats and tips.

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Flatworms, Ion Channels, and Burning Mouths

Could not summarize article.

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Dropbox, loved by the masses, a shareholder dead end

Dropbox is framed as an obvious PE target due to stable free cash flow and switching costs, despite slow growth. In FY2025 it generated about $931M in FCF and could support debt‑financed deals; current EV is ~$6.4B, with a potential ~$8B price at a 25% premium. The plan favors cost cuts and harvesting cash over growth or re‑IPO, since Dropbox is viewed as a feature with limited innovation. Lesson: truly feature‑driven businesses rarely deliver big returns; Steve Jobs’ bid interest signals underlying value.

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Show HN: Find stale, orphaned, deleted-but-retrievable RAG vectors

rag-staleness-check is a read-only tool that checks staleness, orphans, duplicates and retrievability for pgvector, Qdrant and Chroma indexes. It runs against your indexed vector DB using a manifest of current documents, reporting: staleness (docs changed since last_modified), orphans (missing in manifest), duplicates (near-identical chunks by cosine similarity ≥ 0.98; optional exact-hash pass), and retrievable-after-delete (deleted ids still retrievable). It never writes to engines. Install via pip install rag-staleness-check (extras for qdrant/chroma) and run with engine flags; outputs findings.json. Open-source, part of RAGproof.

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The Human Is the Loop

Brent Fitzgerald recounts stepping away from AI and recognizing how constant tool use had become a habit-forming crutch eroding curiosity, focus, and happiness. Returning to a maze of tabs and paused agents, he sees many projects as unfinished guilt-driven attempts to maximize automation rather than solve real problems. He notes learning and human reflection matter more than quick results, and commits to intentional AI use. In a current project, he tightens a pi prompt to gain context and free up human thinking. The human is the loop; use the agent only when needed.

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'Every millimetre counts': Inside the beast tunnelling under Sydney Harbour

Two giant tunnel-boring machines, Barangaroo and Patyegarang, are driving 1.5km of tunnel under Sydney Harbour for the Western Harbour Tunnel motorway. Barangaroo, a 4,400-tonne machine 15.71m in diameter, is piloted from the control room while Patyegarang has advanced about 110m. They carve through rock, including a 200m paleo-channel, with one TBM passing first. Each 10-segment ring is installed hourly to form almost 16m-wide tunnels—big enough for three metro rails. Up to 600 workers underground; 120 spoil loads daily. Breakthrough to Waverton receivers expected Apr–Jun, with the 6.5km tunnel open in late 2028.

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Company Offering '100% Human-Written, Never AI' Medical Research Is 100% AI

Investigative piece reveals Research Gold, promising “100% human-written, never AI” medical research, relies on AI-generated staff and misuses real researchers’ identities. The listed PhD methodologists are fake or unaware they’re listed; some real names appear on LinkedIn, with Jenny Berrio denying any affiliation and seeking a takedown. An AI assistant answered calls, and a $1,900 quote for a systematic review came via an AI-generated email. The story notes AI’s growing footprint in publishing and concerns about hallucinations and compromised peer review.

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The lifesaving secret hidden inside a horseshoe crab's blue blood

Massachusetts horseshoe crabs provide blue blood used to test vaccines and injectables for contamination, but harvesting harms populations: about 200,000 crabs are taken annually in MA with ~15% mortality. A lab-made blood substitute has replaced most crab blood in testing since 2016 (Eli Lilly), and the company aims to end crab blood use. MA has tightened protections—caps on harvest and a ban during spawning (April 15–June 7)—with 71% of surveyed sites showing population increases. Full recovery may take a decade; other states are tightening or banning harvesting.

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DEF CON crowd suspected in fake-hotspot attack on Delta flight

On Delta Flight 591 (Las Vegas–Atlanta), passengers reportedly spoofed onboard Wi‑Fi, creating a fake hotspot “Delta WiFi Fast” with a phishing page to harvest credentials in an evil-twin attack. The incident occurred after DEF CON ended in Las Vegas. Delta said an unauthorized onboard Wi‑Fi network operated briefly; flight safety remained unaffected and in‑flight Wi‑Fi was disabled for about 30 minutes. The FBI Atlanta is investigating; no arrests, and no gate meet. Investigation ongoing.

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