MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dspillett | 2026-02-20 22:10:15+00:00
I read that post as him talking about their company, in the sense of the company they were working for. If that was the case, then an exploit of an unfixed security issue could very much affect them either just as part of the company if the fallout is enough to massively harm business, or specifically if they had not properly documented their concerns so “we didn't know” could be the excuse from above and they could be blamed for not adequately communicating the problem.

For an external company “not your company, not your problem” for security issues is not a good moral position IMO. “I can't risk the fallout in my direction that I'm pretty sure will result from this” is more understandable because of how often you see whistle-blowers getting black-listed, but I'd still have a major battle with the pernickety prick that is my conscience¹ and it would likely win out in the end.

[1] oh, the things I could do if it wasn't for conscience and empathy :)
by willturman | 2026-02-20 22:10:31+00:00
I'll name a specific highly developed country in the western hemisphere: The United States. There's no need to bend over backward trying to blame some perceived degradation in quality of discussion on international adoption of the internet.

According to the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy [1] 130 million Americans — 54% of adults between the ages of 16 and 74 years old—lack proficiency in literacy, essentially reading below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level.

[1]https://map.barbarabush.org
by krackers | 2026-02-20 22:10:35+00:00
More than the prose itself, I think it's that what he's writing about isn't exactly "common knowledge" but rather shrewd, piercing observation.

The way he understands and captures the dynamics makes you think he's a native to the "bay area" tech scene or immersed in TPOT. Yet here's a complete outsider, pinpointing the unstated core premises and paradoxes of these communities.
by zokier | 2026-02-20 22:11:05+00:00
I've been thinking about photogrammetry and 3dgs lately. One consideration is the depth of field of images. Afaik it is somewhat common to focus stack images, or just use small apertures, before feeding them to photogrammetry/3dgs pipeline. But that doesn't really make sense because focus stacking is lossy operation and requires some way to estimate which parts are in focus (=indirect depth estimate). So it would make more sense to have the photogrammetry/3dgs work directly on unstacked shallow dof images. Ideally the algorithm should use the focus information to enhance the reconstruction process somehow.
by carefree-bob | 2026-02-20 22:11:51+00:00
GDP is a useful metric when we remember what it problems it was created to solve --e.g. in the Great Depression there was a concern of a decline of economic activity and a way to measure such activity and decide whether it was at a depressed level, and to what degree.

Similarly, the reason in international finance there is a focus on current value GDP is because lenders want to know whether a nation can repay foreign loans. As foreign loans are measured in dollars, lenders care about GDP in dollar terms.

But as is often the case, when people with money or institutional power create a metric for their own use case, many other groups see that and go "Aha! Free data!" and they start writing publications using this data for their own purposes, often forgetting what GDP is actually measuring and forcing it into a proxy for what they care about, for example, development economics, and often this is a poor proxy.
by vkou | 2026-02-20 22:11:58+00:00
That's the case in any country where a parliamentary body is split so closely.

When you need every vote to get legislature to pass, because you control 51% of a chamber, backbenchers on the ideological fringe of a party, (DINOs and RINOs) have a lot of power.

When you have a majority with comfortable margins, you can care a lot less about what the Sinemas and Manchins and McCains of a party think.
by idle_zealot | 2026-02-20 22:13:14+00:00
> I've moved toward viewing security and quality as sufficiently overlapping that they can be treated as a single area.

Quality implies knowledge, understanding, and the willingness to use them. Security is the same, but for the narrowed domain of security best-practices and common vulnerabilities. It's possible for something superficially high-quality to be insecure, but that implies that whoever made it either has extremely lopsided experience, or left the vulnerabilities in intentionally or knowingly. Of course, security is a particularly tricky domain, so even a fairly talented and good-intentioned developer is likely to make some missteps. Those missteps, I'd say, qualify as lapses in quality. I'd be damned surprised, on the other hand, to find that something low-quality is secure, and would assume that any such security is the product of a happy accident or sheer simplicity of the software, and is more likely than not to be lost as it grows and changes.
by Ferret7446 | 2026-02-20 22:13:15+00:00
The problem is there's "mess" and then there's mess, and it's nontrivial to distinguish the two.

Ultimately, it comes down to: can you find something you're looking for? For most people, this will require some amount of organization as they will not be able to remember the location of every individual thing, but what this organization looks like may seem inscrutable to someone else.
by m4rtink | 2026-02-20 22:13:43+00:00
Maybe "intelectual property" is really imaginary property given how the same big companies just gobble data from other people and companies wothout permission to feed their AI models (Facebook with books, recently NVIDIA with milions of videos from Youtube).

I guess they would not due that if they really believed some questionable synthetic construct like "intelectual property" really existed ?
by nandomrumber | 2026-02-20 22:13:43+00:00
It’s about the equivalent of someone claiming my saying I find woollen clothing directly touching my skin to be irritating / itchy requires double blind randomised controlled studies to determine whether this is true at the population level.

There are eight billion of us, we can’t all be different, there must be at least some categories we can’t be sorted in to, maybe those who find woollen clothing itchy and those who don’t, and those who find blue-light reduction more comfortable and those who don’t.

One of my pet theories is that this hyper fixation on The Ultimate Truth via The Scientific Method is what happens when a society mints PhDs at an absurd rate. We went up with a lot of people who learn more and more about less and less, and a set of people who idolise those people and their output.
by crazygringo | 2026-02-20 22:14:20+00:00
I'm sorry, but using the idea of Russell's teapot to claim anything without rock-solid proof is "bullshit" is a deep misunderstanding of the idea. It's wrong, it's offensive, and it's not helpful to genuine understanding.

Amber light is not Russell's teapot. There's widespread anecdotal reporting that it helps with sleep. It's not something nonsensical like a teapot between Earth and Mars. And for you to suggest that they're the equivalent is, frankly, arguing in bad faith.

The world of knowledge is not divided, black-and-white, between things that are scientifically proven and "bullshit". Probably the vast majority of practical facts we rely on daily are not "proven" with empirical studies. That doesn't make them "bullshit". I hope you can understand that.
by matu3ba | 2026-02-20 22:14:46+00:00
> Engineering isn't free, models tend to grow obsolete as the price/capability frontier advances, and AI specialists are less of a commodity than AI inference is. I'm inclined to bet against approaches like this on a principle.

This does not sound like it will simplify the training and data side, unless their or subsequent models can somehow be efficiently utilized for that.
However, this development may lead to (open source) hardware and distributed system compilation, EDA tooling, bus system design, etc getting more deserved attention and funding.
In turn, new hardware may lead to more training and data competition instead of the current NVIDIA model training monopoly market.
So I think you're correct for ~5 years.
by necovek | 2026-02-20 22:14:51+00:00
Do you have any source for that claim? That would be a pretty serious security issue even unrelated to any security hardening (eg. on a multi-user system, one user could read out the password from another user — even with desktop usage, second user could be SSHed in).

As a datapoint, everything in /dev/input/* is owned by root:input on my Debian Bookworm install, and my main user is not a member of the "input" group either.

Biggest problem with most security hardening for Linux desktop is that it breaks the natural usage pattern: I store my files by their content, not by their format (eg. I might have a folder for my project containing image files, spreadsheets, FreeCAD files, maybe even some code or TeX/ODF files). If programs are restricted to access the entirety of my $HOME though, there is not much benefit to that protection since that's where my most valuable data is. If they are restricted to per-program folder, I need to start organizing my data differently and unnaturally.

Android mostly does not use the "files" metaphor and basically does exactly that (per-app data): coming up with a security model and file management UX that does both is where the challenge is.
by jacobgkau | 2026-02-20 22:14:55+00:00
Yeah, I honestly have not been one of those "it's just a negotiating tactic" people and have instead been saying this whole time that I understand why tariffs (and the end of de minimis) are needed at the moment. Seeing Temu ads all over TV and the internet flouting word-for-word that I can "shop like a millionaire" to buy their cheap, disposable, polluting, unethically-produced junk, while I'm not making enough to actually live comfortably (with many worse off than me), comes across as a real and obvious problem to me that needs to be nipped in the bud despite whatever short-term dollars I might save by buying Temu knock-offs on a regular basis. (And I do import personal purchases from overseas a few times a year, and have put my money where my mouth is when it comes to paying tariffs on those.)

I obviously am not particularly happy about the tariffs being struck down like a lot of people are. And having paid those tariffs thinking they were at least legitimate tariffs, I'm also not super happy that I won't be seeing that money come back to me (neither in the form of services paid for by taxes, nor in the form of a refund). It's a crappy situation all around.

I won't sit here and claim the Supreme Court got it wrong, but it does make me wish the administration had worked more carefully to do it in a legal way the first time, for example, or that Congress had been involved to achieve it since the administration's party controlled them this whole time, anyway.
by vaxman | 2026-02-20 22:15:07+00:00
OpenAI is not worth $30B to anyone other than to the companies hoping to inflate their own valuations by selling it goods and services, at until OpenAI inevitably goes to zero and its assets are acquired for substantially less than $30B.

If OpenAI were one of many companies generally promoting the increased use of GPUs, that would be one thing, but $30B? Just, No. nVidia will get into a lot of trouble for doing this.
by pigpop | 2026-02-20 22:15:19+00:00
Aren't they only using the SRAM for the KV cache? They mention that the hardwired weights have a very high density. They say about the ROM part:

> We have got this scheme for the mask ROM recall fabric – the hard-wired part – where we can store four bits away and do the multiply related to it – everything – with a single transistor. So the density is basically insane.

I'm not a hardware guy but they seem to be making a strong distinction between the techniques they're using for the weights vs KV cache

> In the current generation, our density is 8 billion parameters on the hard wired part of the chip., plus the SRAM to allow us to do KV caches, adaptations like fine tuning, and etc.
by mmooss | 2026-02-20 22:15:25+00:00
> you have written their conclusion off as "transparently false"

I didn't say that. I said that the common argument that tax/tariff increases are always passed along 100% to consumers is transparently false. And contrary to your criticism, the cited paper agrees with my claim (in this case, while my claim is general):

"In CBO’s assessment, foreign exporters will absorb 5 percent of the cost of the tariffs, slightly offsetting the import price increases faced by U.S. importers. In the near term, CBO anticipates, U.S. businesses will absorb 30 percent of the import price increases by reducing their profit margins; the remaining 70 percent will be passed through to consumers by raising prices."

It goes on to say that other businesses, whose costs haven't increased, will raise prices - which is not at all 'passing along costs to consumers' but a different dynamic - and that the combined two dynamics yield the overall consumer impact equal to 95% of tariff costs:

"In addition, U.S. businesses that produce goods that compete with foreign imports will, in CBO’s assessment, increase their prices because of the decline in competition from abroad and the increased demand for tariff-free domestic goods. Those price increases are estimated to fully offset the 30 percent of price increases absorbed by U.S. businesses that import goods, so the net effect of tariffs is to raise U.S. consumer prices by the full portion of the cost of the tariffs borne domestically (95 percent)."

I think the tariffs are a big mistake but the argument I was addressing - if you tax businesses then consumers effectively pay the tax - is widespread disinformation.
by ipdashc | 2026-02-20 22:15:43+00:00
> banking/insurance/whatever apps

I know banking apps are the typical example, but I've always wondered why. I use my bank's app maybe once or twice a year when I need to Zelle someone, which I only need to do when they don't have Venmo. (Unless we consider Venmo a banking app.)

I only have one bank's app installed, the rest of my banks I only interact with over their website, on desktop.

As for insurance, I've never had an insurance company's app installed.

Am I just an outlier here? Honestly, if I switched to a non standard OS, I'd be more annoyed about losing, say, Google Maps, Uber/Lyft, or various chat apps. Banking and insurance just don't come to mind at all as something I need my phone for.
by popalchemist | 2026-02-20 22:15:57+00:00
You clearly don't know what the term upward mobility means. It doesn't necessarily mean moving from one class to another - though that WOULD be included within its scope, however extraordinary an example it may be.

It can mean moving within a class.

Surely most people want to better their station. To argue against that is insane and counter to every observable fact about human nature.
by NickJLange | 2026-02-20 22:16:19+00:00
Love the idea, agree with most of the feedback here.

Suggestion:
>
Worth a PR to swap out SQLite for Jira/Linear? Or have a job that moves the work there?

I can then maybe save $50 on that window replacement by allowing local business to search/ bid on my home maintenance Jira queue (versus spam mail in the physical inbox)

ducks
by tim333 | 2026-02-20 22:16:41+00:00
I think the tax is basically on the profit made when you add up costs and expenses. Say:

Before: Importer pays China $10 for widget, pays $2 duty, sells to shop for $12 - profit zero, tax on that zero.

Now: Paid $10 for widget. Paid $2 duty, sold for $12, $2 refunded - profit $2, pays tax on the $2.

At least that's the normal way of doing accounting. There can be odd exceptions and complications in local laws.
by hombre_fatal | 2026-02-20 22:16:46+00:00
This is one of the most naive things I see people repeat.

The reality is that we're lucky to have mostly-good things at all that align with most of our interests.

Yet people get so comfortable that they start to think mostly-good things are some sort of guarantee or natural order of the world.

Such that if only they could just kill off the thing that's mostly-good, they'll finally get something that's even better (or rather, more aligned with their interests rather than anyone else's).

In reality, mostly-good things that align with most of our interests is mostly a fluke of history, not something that was guaranteed to unfold.

Other common examples: capitalism, the internet, html/css, their favorite part of society (but they have ideas of how it could be a little better), some open-source project they actually use daily, etc.

If only there weren't Android, surely your set of ideals would win and nobody else's.
by k33n | 2026-02-20 22:16:50+00:00
It’s racist to call out the anti-white hatred that is prevalent with leftists who claim to be patriots (while they generally claim that the US is illegitimate)?

All the internet brigading in the world won’t absolve you from what you’re part of.

Again, the left are not patriots by any stretch of the world. MAGA is a patriotic movement. You can’t hate nationalism and be a patriot.
by Groxx | 2026-02-20 22:17:27+00:00
after an initial "... is that a misquote too? sounds super low" I decided to hunt around. I haven't seen anything on that low of a dose... but doing the math, it does seem to make some sense I suppose. a rough check of the total amount of melatonin in your blood at night implies something like 0.5mcg at peak (peak concentration at ~100pg/ml times 5L of blood). lots more is produced in a night because it has a short half-life, but yea, blood concentration is lower than I remembered.

what I also haven't seen though is anything covering how well it's absorbed through your digestive system. 0.3mcg intravenously I can certainly see being effective, but orally? sublingually? not sure. but you've definitely got me interested in looking more :)

(initial results: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melatonin_as_a_medication_and_... implies it varies quite a lot, but I'm seeing it centering around 15%-ish many places. so you might want like 3mcg to hit normal levels? and https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5405617/ is implying 1-5mg -> 10x-100x normal concentration peak, so that does hit the right ballpark reasonably well... I guess I'm going to start experimenting with even smaller doses!)
by btown | 2026-02-20 22:17:35+00:00
I'd ask the inverse of the question: morally, should a single gatekeeper have the right to deny two consenting parties the ability for one to run the other's software?

Especially when that ability has been established practice and depended upon for decades? And the gate-kept device in question is many users' primary gateway to the modern world?

There's nuance here, of course - I'm not morally obliged to help you run Doom on your Tamagotchi just because you want to do so. But many people around the world rely on an Android device as their only personal computing device (and this is arguably more true for Android than it is for iOS). And to install myself as an arbiter of what code they can and cannot run, with full knowledge that I could at any time be required to leverage that capability at the behest of a government those worldwide users never agreed to be dependent on? That would be a morally fraught system for me to create.
by micik | 2026-02-20 22:18:33+00:00
OpenAI is not the one who will be requiring the bailout. they aren't even a public company, for one.

Oracle, Coreweave or both will be the ones requiring it, ostensibly. in reality it's much larger than that.

tremendous money has been invested into AI already, commitments for far more spending still have been made, contracts signed and funds borrowed. the building sites are abuzz and soon racks will welcome fresh batches of not-so-fresh previous gen GPUs.

you think the LPs of VC firms will just write off the losses when those are realized? O&C will just default on loans and their many creditors will let them?

there are tens if not hundreds of billions already locked in the storm cloud beyond the point of no return. financiers from all corners of finance and sundry are already holding a compartment or two in that bag, each.

when the bag turns out to be largely full of hot air, i suppose all those powerful bagholders will just go "welp, we dun goof'd" and hold a Sprint Retro about the learnings that will be their consolation prize for the financial haircuts suffered.

perhaps if they had no other option, they would. they do have that other option and the debts in risk of default which, something tells me, the banks will not be able to write off without being pushed to the brink themselves, are the wedge that's already planted in the financial system the bailout breeze draft will gently blow through.

P.S. it's not that Oracle or any of the Magnate 7 are devoid of means to patch up the fabric of a battered balance sheet.

that wasn't the case in 2008, either. it's a little known and even less appreciated fact that parties tied up in Lehman on day of Chapter 11 filing were made whole to the tune of 100 cents on the dollar after all was said and done in the post-bankruptcy proceedings. sure it took 10 years but it happened.

in the heat of the moment, though, there's a burning hole in the pocket, runs on the bank imminent if not in motion already and 401 millions of voices crying out in anguish.

that's no time for methodical disbursement, it's time for the hair-on-fire vaudeville act Wall Street has gotten rather good at throughout the numerous reruns of that particular number they performed to date.

it will be politically absolutely unacceptable and a burning public grievance for numerous news cycles, as if that spectacle of outrage, justified and futile, was anything but jolly good entertainment for those looking on at it from the gallery.
by tovej | 2026-02-20 22:18:35+00:00
They do not. The "reasoning" is just adding more text in multiple steps, and then summarizing it. An LLM does not apply logic at any point, the "reasoning" features only use clever prompting to make these chains more likely to resemble logical reasoning.

This is still only possible if the prompts given by the user resembles what's in the corpus. And the same applies to the reasoning chain. For it to resemble actual logical reasoning, the same or extremely similar reasoning has to exist in the corpus.

This is not "just" semantics if your whole claim is that they are "synthesizing" new facts. This is your choice of misleading terminology which does not apply in the slightest.
by necovek | 2026-02-20 22:19:54+00:00
FWIW, Nokia did develop a pretty good Linux phone back in the day (Maemo/Meego) with Nokia N9 (it even received rave reviews from consumer tech sites like engadget), but it did get killed off as they got absorbed into Microsoft (we all know that didn't age well).

Similarly, Palm Pre, and especially HP Pre 3 was a wonderful WebOS incarnation.

Ubuntu Touch did seem like it had a future, but it was a massive sink for Canonical so it was defunded as well.

The user experience was there on all of these: the apps, not so much.