MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fsflover | 2026-01-05 21:32:50+00:00
>> Give me your actual threat model.

> A vulnerability in the VM allowing exfiltration.

Thanks, now we can talk technically without accusations.

> Any data in the VM is vulnerable if the VM has a vulnerability allowing exfiltration.

Qubes OS has a possibility to open any file in a dedicated, offline, disposable VM, for reading or for editing [0]. The original VM will not get compromised because it never touches the file. The disposable VM will not allow exfiltration, since it has no network (with the correct configuration).

There is a reason why this OS is chosen for SecureDrop Workstation [1].

> Then why did you suggest Qubes as a 100% secure OS?

There is nothing 100% in this world. Qubes is as close to 100% secure as possible. People often use imprecise expressions for things they wish existed. This is what I expected from your comment.

> Security clearly isn't your area of expertise. Security through correctness is indeed a solution to many/most threats.

Indeed, it is not my area. However it is the area of well-known security professionals whose opinion I trust [2].

[0] https://doc.qubes-os.org/en/latest/user/how-to-guides/how-to...

[1] https://workstation.securedrop.org/en/stable/

[2] https://blog.invisiblethings.org/2008/09/02/three-approaches...
by mattlondon | 2026-01-05 21:33:12+00:00
I wonder if Google regret selling Boston Dynamics? It was a interesting proposition at the time - self driving delivery vans with a humanoid delivery robot (charging from the van's traction battery between deliveries) for the last few steps from van to door etc. Ahead of its time perhaps ... but these days perhaps that will become viable again "soon"?

At least they didn't kill it I guess and BD got to live on as an independent.
by scott_w | 2026-01-05 21:33:18+00:00
I think there's more nuance to what I'm saying: it's not just based on your company culture but on the situation you're faced with. Let's make my example more concrete. Let's say a member of your team calls another team member stupid for an honest mistake, in a public setting (so was witnessed by the rest of your team). Telling that person there and then "that's a disrespectful way to speak to a colleague and is against our values" will:

a) Demonstrate to all witnesses that the behaviour is not in line with your values

b) Make the victim of the behaviour feel seen and know they aren't alone

c) Make clear to the person receiving the feedback that you're unhappy

To achieve this same result in private conversations is monumentally more effort, if not impossible. If you pull them into a private conversation, you're still publicly reprimanding them, just without giving clear communication to everyone. Do you wait until later to reprimand in private? Then you need to speak to everyone about what was said and repair the damage that the delay in speaking up caused.

However, there are plenty of situations where calling out something so publicly would be the wrong thing to do, like pushing bugs to production, as you'd likely be seen to be overreacting. You still want to give the feedback if, say, the team member was ignoring processes. It's just usually better done in private.
by subscribed | 2026-01-05 21:33:31+00:00
This is probably harder because it's synthetic and doesn't exist in PhotoDNA database.

Also, since Grok is really good in getting the context, something akin to "remove their T-shirt" would be enough to generate a picture someone wanted, but very hard to find using keywords.

IMO they should mass hide ALL the images created since then specific moment, and use some sort of the AI classifier to flag/ban the accounts.
by bell-cot | 2026-01-05 21:33:38+00:00
I wouldn't describe Trump as seriously wanting to take over Greenland. Vs. being kinda desperate to talk big, get headlines, flex his ego, and distract folks from his domestic problems & waning voter approval numbers.

Obviously, that's no assurance that he won't actually try to do it. But I think he and his inner circle are quite aware that taking it would mostly remove "talk big about taking Greenland" from his rhetorical toolbox. While providing endless opportunities for Trump to look bad, for having "conquered" an undefended, high-maintenance block of ice.
by jzb | 2026-01-05 21:33:44+00:00
"Aren't they required to obey chain-of-command?"

If an order is legal, yes. Not if an order is illegal. If a superior officer orders a private to shoot unarmed civilians or commit some other war crime, the private is supposed to refuse the order. They are not protected by a "just following orders" defense.

"And doesn't their pay and their family's healthcare depend on them remaining employed?"

Sure. But that does not excuse committing war crimes or otherwise knowingly following illegal orders.

Most of the time, the presumption is that illegal orders will be issued infrequently and by rogue elements in the armed forces -- so disobeying may have unpleasant immediate consequences (say, get thrown in the brig) but long-term they should prevail.

Right now? Well... that's the problem. But if significant numbers of the armed forces refused illegal orders, there's little that the administration can do. Which is why they've been cleaning house to kick out anybody at the top who might push back.
by 578_Observer | 2026-01-05 21:33:47+00:00
@throwaway94275, absolutely. The pixel art caught our eyes, but the rock-solid gameplay is what captured our hearts.

Honestly, I haven’t played SF2 for over 30 years, but I’m certain I can still perform a Hadouken or a Shoryuken today. That intense training from my youth is carved into my muscle memory, not just my brain! (^_^) That obsession with every single detail is the true secret to why this game still feels like "Steel" after all these decades.
by ibejoeb | 2026-01-05 21:34:18+00:00
There's still a lot of of unanswered questions in that area regarding generated content. Whether the law deems it CSAM depends on if the image depicts a real child, and even that is ambiguous, like was it wholly generated or augmented. Also, is it "real" if it's a model trained on real images?

Some of these things are going into the ENFORCE act, but it's going to be a muddy mess for a while.
by XorNot | 2026-01-05 21:34:30+00:00
No I picked the case I'm dealing with most commonly: which is establishing trust. X509 certs will also do this.

I have numerous criticisms of the GPG system but it's not a solution to just not implement any solution at all: I.e. I need revocation lists, I need intermediate keys, I need the ability to establish alternate chains of trust or promote a chain to trusted. Some of this is very hard to do with x509 even or not will supported.
by TrianguloY | 2026-01-05 21:34:44+00:00
Isn't this called "Boy Scout Rule"?

I learned this when a collage mentioning this to me. Turns out I was doing it without knowing it was a thing! Of course I continue doing it, but it's good to have a short and clear name to give others (specially those that only seem to follow concepts if they have a flashy name)
by cameldrv | 2026-01-05 21:34:53+00:00
They should. Unfortunately a lot of incentives are not aligned. Due to the profit cap as a percentage of premiums, generally higher medical spending increases health insurance profits rather than reducing them. It's the same thing with PG&E -- the only way for them to make more money is to increase costs. It's exactly the opposite of a normally functioning market, and you see the same result in both cases.
by araes | 2026-01-05 21:35:07+00:00
Boring answer. Your first case - testing for app development, web development, display variations, device feature variations.

A little bit of @hnburnsy's answer, with segmented logins and emails separated by phones with layered restoration so it's difficult to accidentally get bricked by having one system get malware, system faults, or other failures. Two-Factor Auth also gets separated around between devices.
by dwohnitmok | 2026-01-05 21:35:10+00:00
> but I could see how they would resonate with a LessWronger using ChatGPT as a conversation partner until it gave the expected responses: The flattery about being the first to discover a solution, encouragement to post on LessWrong, and the reflection of some specific thought problem are all themes I'd expect a LessWronger in a bad mental state to be engaging with ChatGPT about.

For what it's worth, this article is meant mainly for people who have never interacted with LessWrong before (as evidenced by its coda), who are getting their LessWrong post rejected.

Pre-existing LWers tend to have different failure states if they're caused by LLMs.

Other communities have noticed this problem as well, in particular the part where the LLM is actively asking users to spread this further. One of the more fascinating and scary parts of this particular phenomenon is LLMs asking users to share particular prompts with other users and communities that cause other LLMs to also start exhibiting the same set of behavior.

> That ChatGPT encouraged people to hide their secret discoveries and not reveal them.

Yes those happen too. But luckily are somewhat more self-limiting (although of course come with their own different set of problems).
by dang | 2026-01-05 21:35:18+00:00
On the contrary, we particularly tell YC founders not to do this—mostly privately, but there's a public version of it at https://news.ycombinator.com/yli.html (scroll down to "Comments" and see the part in bold. That's me trying to scare them.)

We do tend to be more lenient when there's no evidence of organized manipulation, just people's friends/fans/users trying to be helpful and not realizing that they're actually being unhelpful. What dedicated HN users tend not to realize is that such casual commenters usually have no idea how HN is supposed to work.

But this leniency isn't YC-specific. We're actually less lax when it comes to YC startups, for several reasons.
by doctorpangloss | 2026-01-05 21:35:18+00:00
this is supposed to be the part where i say something about the smart watch. i own a $20 Casio F91 that should cost $3 at retail, which is to say, i'm not really your intended audience. is performative positivity an obligation for interesting questions? is it the only framework to figure out products? do you see?

is positivity the only valid emotion for a product launch?

how do you balance your experience with the rewards of taking risks?
by jraph | 2026-01-05 21:36:07+00:00
Right! Thanks for this. I've never really looked into this and have been writing whatever worked, with a preference for the single colon.

CSS 1 & 2 apparently conflated the two, and CSS 3 allows one column for CSS 1 & 2 pseudo elements. I never noticed it wasn't all of them. Since I learned CSS right before CSS3, my situation kinda makes sense I guess.

Single colons everywhere have felt easier and more regular to me, so I've written basically everything with single colons except maybe the odd CSS 3 pseudo element here and there. But it seems the two colons will be mandated going forward.

I guess I'll have some edits to do, though I do hope and kinda expect they won't break backward compatibility.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17684797/should-i-use-si...
by dragos_crintea | 2026-01-05 21:36:08+00:00
For the past year or so I was working on text2sql, trying several libraries. I came to the conclusion that most of them lacked the build of a semantic layer, thus I am open sourcing my own wrapper for SQLAlchemy. If you use SQLAlchemy I believe this is least intrusive way to wrap your models and produce a valid semantic layer. As an added benefit this forces the layers to stay in sync, as when the models gets updated you will only need to call refresh and you are done. Tomatoes and eggs thrown at it are welcome and also contributions.
by YossarianFrPrez | 2026-01-05 21:36:47+00:00
Fair question. While I'm not an expert on AI Alignment, I'd be surprised if any AI alignment approach did not involve real math at some point, given that all machine learning algorithms are inherently mathematical-computational in nature.

Like I would imagine one has to know things like how various reward functions work, what happens in the modern variants of attention mechanisms, how different back-propagation strategies affect the overall result etc. in order to come up with (and effectively leverage) reinforcement learning with human feedback.

I did a little searching, here's a 2025 review I found by entering "AI Alignment" into Google Scholar, and it has at least one serious looking mathematical equation: https://dl.acm.org/doi/full/10.1145/3770749 (section 2.2). This being said, maybe you have examples of historical breakthroughs in AI Alignment that didn't involve doing / understanding the mathematical concepts I mentioned in the previous paragraph?

In the context of the above article, I think it's possible that some people are talking to ChatGPT on a buzzword level end up thinking that alignment can be solved via "fractal recursion of human in the loop validation sessions" for example. It seems like a modern incarnation of people thinking they can trisect the angle: https://www.ufv.ca/media/faculty/gregschlitt/information/Wha...
by measurablefunc | 2026-01-05 21:37:21+00:00
> Nor do I have any clue what to do about it if it is an issue that needs addressing.

What happened with cigarettes? Same must happen with chat bots. There must be a prominent & visible warning about the fact that chat bots are nothing more than Markov chains, they are not sentient, they are not conscious, & are not capable of providing psychological guidance & advice to anyone, let alone those who might be susceptible to paranoid delusions & suggestions. Once that's done the companies can be held liable for promising what they can't deliver & their representatives can be fined for doing the same thing across various media platforms & in their marketing.
by Spooky23 | 2026-01-05 21:37:50+00:00
I have a good friend who is having a hard time and is moonlighting as a delivery driver. He basically has conversations with ChatGPT for 5-6 hours a day. He says it's been helpful for him for things as varied as technical understanding to working out conflicts with his wife and family.

But... I can't help but think that having a obsequious female AI buddy telling you how right you are isn't the healthiest thing.
by krylon | 2026-01-05 21:37:53+00:00
When I started using Linux, I didn't do so because I disliked Windows so much, I just was an insatiably curious nerd.

But since then, each new version of Windows has made me more and more grateful for not having to deal with that dumpster fire on my personal devices.

The saddest part to me is that I have the strong impression it wouldn't take that much work to turn Windows into a much better system. But for whatever reason, Microsoft is not interested in making that happen. Maybe they are incapable of doing so. But the system itself not the reason.
by chaps | 2026-01-05 21:37:53+00:00
Nice, thank you. It's really appreciated. For Chicagoland:

Lucy Parsons Labs: https://www.lucyparsonslabs.com/donate

Chicago Appleseed: https://www.chicagoappleseed.org/ways-to-give/

Invisible Institute: https://invisible.institute/donate

Unraveled Press: https://unraveledpress.com/support-unraveled/

All four are great. One is my employer. Unraveled Press would benefit the most from donations.
by crazygringo | 2026-01-05 21:37:55+00:00
While this is true... it's also letting yourself be massively taken advantage of, and underpaid.

Yes, the best way to get promoted is to do work above your level. The problem is, you're not getting paid what you deserve for that. If you're always doing this, you're always being underpaid by a full level.

Which is why much better advice is to try to get promoted by switching companies and jumping a level in the process.

Managers certainly want to take advantage of you by getting you to overperform without being overpaid. But employees should do everything they can not to fall for it. Which usually requires getting companies to compete over you.
by JohnMakin | 2026-01-05 21:38:20+00:00
It's probably an artifact of how I use it (I turn off any kind of history or "remembering" of past conversations), but when I started becoming really impressed by tools like claude/chatgpt/etc. was the first time I was chasing down some dumb idea I had for work, convinced I was right, and it finally gently told me I was wrong (in its own way). That is exactly what I want these things to do, but it seems like most users do not want to be told they are wrong, and the companies are not very incentivized to encourage these tools to behave that way.

I have identified very few instances where something like chatGPT just randomly started praising me (outside of the whole "you're absolutely correct to push back on this" kind of thing). I guess leading questions probably have something to do with this.
by alterom | 2026-01-05 21:38:32+00:00
>It's pretty clear the "kind of content" I'm referring to is the doublespeak that pervades American politics

Clear to whom? You are clearly referring to the BBC article (that's the content); characterizing it as "pervaded with doublespeak" is a hot new take; particularly given that BBC isn't an American entity to begin with.

Please point out what exactly in the article you consider to be an instance of "doublespeak".

> And what is there to say about it? The comment section seems to pretty clearly align on "there is both no legal authority for this move and the action being punished is clearly not illegal"

Well that's exactly the thing you say. You said it.

It's not a controversial thing for reasonable people, so we're all in agreement. It's a good thing.

Now, if you are arguing against the "kind of content" on which "the comment section seems to clearly align", that's a point on which I disagree with you.

Since we're not in alignment on this, this validates the belonging of this content here by your own metric.

Are we good now?

> yet we will all get to watch this slowly unravel however Trump wants, will we not?

Oh, great point! We could talk about how that outcome could be avoided, or what could be done in general.

We could, for example, wonder out loud whether it's worth mentioning such acts of administration at all. I think it'd be a very counterproductive response.

What do you think?
by mothballed | 2026-01-05 21:38:43+00:00
I've heard it as well, but after debating with a lot of people with anti-abortion views I think you've done yourself a huge disservice if you view that as the dominating argument against abortion.

I initially held your viewpoint but after engaging a lot of people I realized they often had pretty similar views on life and liberty as mine, they just were looking at it from the viewpoint of the fetus rather than the mother. From that perspective it just doesn't make sense at all to make an exception for rape.
by ahmadyan | 2026-01-05 21:39:28+00:00
ack

i run .agentastic/setup.sh script on every newly created worktrees (doc: https://www.agentastic.dev/docs/how-to/git-worktrees) and we set a few env variables in that script (e.g. current-worktree-dir, etc) so your stack should be supported https://docs.orbstack.dev/docker/

don't have shut-down yet, but i can add it as well (i.e. cleaning up the env upon deletion)

would a pair of setup.sh/shutdown.sh cover majority of your workflow? what else is needed?
by xg15 | 2026-01-05 21:39:31+00:00
> All of this reeks of the entrenched (pre-) Victorian British worldview, where it is natural and appropriate for the "more civilized" to look down on the "savages" of "lower order", as if a moral ladder like that were as clear as daylight.

For a long time that literally was the dominant philosophy in the west: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_chain_of_being
by dpark | 2026-01-05 21:39:31+00:00
This is still a bad faith argument.

No one wants suicides increasing as a result of AI chatbot usage. So what is the point of your question? You are trying to drain nuance from the conversation to turn it into a black and white statement.

If “aim for zero” means we should restrict access to chatbots with zero statical evidence, no. We should not engage in moral panic.

We should figure out what dangers these pose and then decide what appropriate actions, if any, should be taken. We should not give in to knee jerk reactions because we read a news story.
by ceejayoz | 2026-01-05 21:39:48+00:00
> What if you could simply turn off the power grid of Kyiv or Moscow in anticipation of a strike?

I expect every major world power has a plan to (attempt to) do precisely that to their enemies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphite_bomb

> The US Navy used sea-launched Tomahawk missiles with Kit-2 warheads, involving reels of carbon fibers, in Iraq as part of Operation Desert Storm during the Gulf War in 1991, where it disabled about 85% of the electricity supply. The US Air Force used the CBU-94, dropped by F-117 Nighthawks, during the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia on 2 May 1999, where it disabled more than 70% national grid electricity supply.

I would not, however, take "Trump said something" as indicative of much. "It was dark, the lights of Caracas were largely turned off due to a certain expertise that we have, it was dark, and it was deadly" is both visibly untrue from the video evidence available, and is the precise sort of off-the-cuff low-fact statement he's prone to.
by deflator | 2026-01-05 21:40:03+00:00
Once they can reset their range quickly like an ICE vehicle can then this becomes a non-issue. EV torque would be great for towing. But it's not quite there yet, outside of some BYD fast-chargers AFAIK.
But losing (even theoretical) tow range is something I think would bother the typical F150 buyer. Even changing from a V8 to a V6 in the F150 was a problem for such folks. They don't like change, and they don't like their truck's "stats" to reduce, even if it gives better overall performance.
by bangaladore | 2026-01-05 21:40:13+00:00
Which is stupid as those are the vulnerabilities worth determining if they exist.

I can understand in a heavily regulated industry (e.g. Medical) that a company couldn't due to liability give you the go ahead to poke into other user's data in attempt to find a vulnerability, but they could always publish a dummy account detail that can be identified with fake data.

Something like:

It is strictly forbidden to probe arbitrary user data. However, if a vulnerability is suspected to allow access to user data, the user with GUID 'xyzw' is permitted to probe.

Now you might say that won't help. The people who want to follow the rules probably will, and the people who don't want to won't anyways.
by MoltenMan | 2026-01-05 21:40:19+00:00
I haven't looked at the source but the first paragraph of the article shows the percentage of people thinking a college education is important or worth it declining in the last decade. This is what I was referring to, but to be fair I don't know if college has actually gotten worse or if it's solely a change in what people think. For me personally it definitely is not useful at all for learning.
by showerst | 2026-01-05 21:40:40+00:00
I know a thing or two about that, 2,400 commits to the scrapers powering openstates over the past 9 years.

Even with openstates, we have an API but don't "just" dump the bills to git for legacy nerd reasons.

The nice thing about laws is that the host websites (or PDFs) don't change templates _that_ often, so generally you can rescrape quarterly (or in some states, annually) without a ton of maintenance. With administrative codes you need to scrape more often, but the websites are still pretty stable.

The downside is that codes in particular are often big, so a single scrape might need to make 20,000 or more requests, so you have to be very careful about rate limiting and proxies, which goes to my original point that it sucks that accessing this stuff is such a mess.