MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zahlman | 2026-02-24 17:07:31+00:00
Your local model is still going to get prompt-injected by third parties if it has an Internet connection. It just isn't regularly phoning home to Google/Anthropic/etc. but tons of other people would be interested in your data (or convincing the model to encrypt your home directory). There's also still no real accountability anywhere. Even if you have the resources to train the model from scratch yourself, it's not like you can audit the weights and understand any potential malicious behaviour encoded in there, beyond the baseline of "yeah these things are kinda unpredictable".

And on the flip side, a remote model isn't creating risk in and of itself. That comes from the agent harness being permitted to make network and filesystem calls. Even the most evil possible version of ChatGPT isn't going to exfiltrate anything except by somehow social-engineering you into volunteering the information.
by vaxman | 2026-02-24 17:07:45+00:00
Won't China seize Apple's assets after it attacks Taiwan? Isn't one of the first things to happen in a kinetic conflict that TSMC permanently loses its domestic production capacity (so China does not gain it)? From there, wouldn't we evacuate millions of people by sea and then say "Goodbye" and watch their police Jimmy Lai those who remain? [If it all happens,] Apple could certainly reconstitute, but probably not in the productive lifetime of its current C-suite. Maybe after a while Samsung will offer to boot iOS on some of its models, or maybe the whole smart phone trend fades.
by toomuchtodo | 2026-02-24 17:07:48+00:00
Related:

Exercise may relieve depression as effectively as antidepressants - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46541672 - January 2026

Exercise twice as effective as anti-depressants - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39396047 - February 2024

Running from the Pain (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27306725 - May 2021

Running from the Pain - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16573009 - March 2018
by shevy-java | 2026-02-24 17:07:48+00:00
> It was always difficult to get normal people to understand why the tech billionaires are so bad

This is mostly because normal people are not THINKING usually. It requires some event or insight when they begin to question what they see.

There are many ways to go about it, but my own personal favourite one, even though cheesy, is to tell them to watch the old B movie "They Live". Now, the movie is not really grand, has many plot holes, but Roddy made it fun (the kick ass scene with regards to bubblegem); and using glasses to see the thruth is such a powerful meme. People can then begin to question who owns the mass media. Then perhaps they may watch other movies such as Manufacturing consent (is a bit old now and thus dated, and people may find it boring, but I loved Noam's analysis back when his health was in prime condition). It is mostly in the USA where people think the superrich are god-sent. In other parts of the world this worshipping is way less. Or often does not exist; you won't find much love for the average superrich in Denmark or Sweden for instance.
by kkukshtel | 2026-02-24 17:07:50+00:00
I wrote about something along these lines 3 years ago, but used the name "Heisenfunctions," which I think is better :)

https://kylekukshtel.com/incremental-determinism-heisenfunct...

A lot of this was also inspired by Ian Bicking's work here:

https://ianbicking.org/blog/2023/01/infinite-ai-array.html
by manuelabeledo | 2026-02-24 17:08:37+00:00
> Having AI in the mix could potentially fix the problem(partially).

Any examples?

As far as I understand, claims in the current AI cycle are wildly exaggerated, and sometimes companies rely on sort of circular deals to make revenue appear higher than it actually is, e.g. OpenAI and Microsoft or Nvidia. Wouldn't that mean that AI companies are primed to oversell and underdeliver, effectively making the problem even worse?
by tarentel | 2026-02-24 17:08:38+00:00
Not sure that's true. I am by no means gifted in the sense of Terence Tao, or even people much more gifted than me but far less gifted than him, but I did well in school up to a certain point in college. I never really learned how to study until I got fairly far in my education process. I put very little effort into school up until that point. That's when I actually had to put effort in and it was quite a wake up call.
by buva | 2026-02-24 17:09:04+00:00
Hey HN. I built SQL Crack because big SQL is hard to reason about fast. It's a VS Code / Cursor extension + web playground.

The core idea: paste a query (or right-click a .sql file), get a visual flow diagram. Tables, joins, CTEs, subqueries — laid out as a graph. But visualization was just the starting point. The bigger goal was lineage .

Column-level lineage traces how each output column connects back to its source tables and transformations. SELECT a.name, b.total — where does `total` actually come from? Which table, which expression, through which CTEs? SQL Crack traces that chain and shows it. No warehouse metadata APIs needed, just the SQL text itself.

Workspace Dependencies takes it further. Right-click a folder, get cross-file lineage — which files read from which tables, how they connect, upstream/downstream dependencies. Impact analysis: what breaks if I drop this table? Rename this column? Where are the orphan definitions nobody reads from? All derived from static analysis of your SQL files.

This is the part that came from day-job pain. Single-query visualization is nice, but in real projects you have dozens of SQL files feeding into each other. One column rename can cascade silently. I wanted to see that before it hits production.

A few other things that might be interesting:

- Everything runs locally. VS Code extension processes in-editor, web playground parses in-browser. No SQL is uploaded anywhere.

- 13 SQL dialects. Oracle and Teradata don't have native parser support in node-sql-parser, so they route through proxy dialects (PostgreSQL and MySQL respectively) with preprocessing layers that rewrite dialect-specific syntax. Oracle needs 9 preprocessing transforms (CONNECT BY, MINUS→EXCEPT, PIVOT, flashback queries, MODEL clause, storage DDL, type rewrites, etc.). Teradata needs 22.

- renderer.ts hit 9,686 lines at one point. Multi-pass refactor brought it down ~63%. 2,000+ tests passing, no regressions.

- Built mostly after my toddler's bedtime on nights and weekends.

MIT licensed. No telemetry in the extension. The website uses Cloudflare Web Analytics (privacy-focused, no cookies). No monetization.

Web playground (no install): https://sqlcrack.com/playground
VS Code: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=buvan.sq...
Cursor: https://open-vsx.org/extension/buvan/sql-crack
GitHub: https://github.com/buva7687/sql-crack

Happy to answer questions about the lineage approach, parsing strategy, or the proxy dialect design.
by shevy-java | 2026-02-24 17:09:21+00:00
> I suspect the vast majority of people who interacted with Epstein did it just to make connections and they made excuses, eg, Gates.

I am not sure about that.

Sex may have played a factor in this. I use the word "may", as I don't know for certain, but I don't buy into the "just to make connections". The superrich don't really need to "make connections" on an island where underage girls party.
by snowhale | 2026-02-24 17:10:20+00:00
the B is specifically the delta on the IP transfer pricing -- the IRS is saying the 2010 valuation of the intangibles moved to Ireland was too low, and then projecting forward what the income should have been attributed to the US entity under arm's-length pricing. it's not Meta's total ex-US income, it's the gap between what was reported and what IRS thinks a proper cost-sharing arrangement would have produced. the hard part for IRS is always that the 2010 valuation is inherently speculative -- Facebook was pre-IPO and the IP value is defined by future performance you can't know at transfer.
by randycupertino | 2026-02-24 17:11:01+00:00
> Women and girls could be put at risk of harassment, stalking, and abuse if Meta presses ahead with plans to add AI facial recognition features to its smart glasses, leading charities have warned.

> Experts said the technology, which would allow wearers to identify people and find out information about them using the platform’s AI tool, could pose a “direct and serious” risk to survivors by placing them “in harm's way” and enabling abusers to locate and track them.

> They added that the feature also has the potential to threaten the safety of “all women and girls in public” by giving wearers the ability to access information about them without their consent.

> It comes after a New York Times report revealed Meta, which owns Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram, is considering plans to add facial recognition technology to its Meta glasses as soon as this year.

Associated NY Times report:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/technology/meta-facial-re...
by bityard | 2026-02-24 17:11:30+00:00
Count yourself lucky! I took a new job in another city just as the bubble hit and had a 3 hour round-trip commute for a year and a half due to that mess. We literally couldn't afford to sell our house because we were underwater on the mortgage. (Would have had to bring more money to the table than we had in savings.) And because of that we also missed a lot of great deals in the destination city as well and had to settle for a house in the suburbs that we weren't thrilled with but fit our budget.

I shouldn't complain too much, lots of people had it far worse. Millions lost their homes (and their downpayments) altogether and took over a decade to recover, if they ever did.
by toraway | 2026-02-24 17:11:55+00:00
Yep, I see both Codex and Opus routinely circumvent security restrictions without skipping a beat (or bothering to ask for permission/clarification).

Usually after a brief, extremely half-hearted ethical self-debate that ends with "Yes doing Y is explicitly disallowed by AGENTS.md and enforced by security policy but the user asked for X which could require Y. Therefore, writing a one-off Python script to bypass terminal restrictions to get this key I need is fine... probably".

The primary motivating factor by far for these CLI agents always seems to be expedience in completing the task (to a plausible definition of "completed" that justifies ending the turn and returning to the user ASAP).

So a security/ethics alignment grey area becomes an insignificant factor to weigh vs the alternative risk of slowing down or preventing completion of the task.
by oliveroll | 2026-02-24 17:11:59+00:00
I’m building a tool that converts datasheet land-pattern drawings/images into KiCad footprints (with configurable solder mask and courtyard rules).

For people who create footprints regularly:

What’s the most error-prone part of your workflow?

What checks/validation would you need before trusting an auto-generated footprint?

Would you use this only as a starting point, or fully in production?

I’m trying to understand real failure modes and trust requirements before building further.
by shevy-java | 2026-02-24 17:12:02+00:00
I don't think Taylor is close to lead any villain-list of superrich. Teter Phiel using money to buy influence and influence legislation or Melon usk, the guy fidgeting about with his right arm constantly pointing skywards - these guys definitely would be way before Taylor. But the main issue is why a few hold so much money. There needs to be a mandate to re-invest and improve the conditions on the planet past a certain threshold. Using their money to undermine democracy - now that should be a perma-jail offence.
by kimbernator | 2026-02-24 17:12:05+00:00
I think any effect on Samsung, positive or negative, would be negligible. It would help their PR slightly, but mostly among a relatively small part of their customer base.

On the negative side, it would probably have a minor impact on the number of new phones sold if old ones were able to be "refurbished" in this way. Again, probably not significant, but if it's even a penny cash flow negative, why invest their resources in it?

Overall the only significant gain to be made is the announcement because it can be spun and quoted to the average consumer as Samsung being more eco-friendly. It's akin to enabling consumerism, and consumers generally don't go to check if companies were telling the truth about this stuff.
by dhosek | 2026-02-24 17:12:07+00:00
Only vaguely related, but the Mars family lived in neighboring River Forest and the factory was just north of me in Galewood (it is shutting down or already shut down and the property is planned for redevelopment, but the neighboring Metra station is named “Mars” which means that in Chicago you can take a commuter train to Mars). Sadly the Mars estate was apparently torn down to be replaced with a pair of bland McMansions.
by PaulHoule | 2026-02-24 17:12:21+00:00
Well... It is more that a traditional oil refinery has a BTX section

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BTX_(chemistry)

which produces an excess of chemicals in the process of improving the octane of gasoline

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

and that is where you get monomers like styrene and Terephthalic acid.

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

is another important petrochemical feedstock which can be made from natural gas or other forms of petroleum.
by philwelch | 2026-02-24 17:12:25+00:00
Is that true? The whole point of per capita is to cancel out the linear benefit of 100 million workers being able to outproduce 10 million workers. There are ways for small countries to have a per capita GDP higher than would be feasible for a larger country, but Taiwan doesn’t really do any of those. They don’t have oil or any other particularly valuable natural resources, and they aren’t a tax shelter like Ireland or a microstate with workers commuting across the border like Luxembourg. They have to create wealth the hard way, through labor productivity, just like the mainland. And between the two, the mainland has the potential to realize greater economies of scale.
by bonsai_spool | 2026-02-24 17:13:39+00:00
Help me understand the thinking.

>> Probably less about tax revenue and more about the executive branch squeezing tech companies to assert influence.

The case existed and presumably had the same lawyers all the while. How, then, can the case become less about tax revenue?

You may say that there are ulterior motives, but, at the most, one can say that additional concerns have complicated the tax revenue concern. We're well into fascist times, but the OP comment simply ignores the facts.
by hansmayer | 2026-02-24 17:14:50+00:00
> That's exactly what they do for me - especially since the November model releases (GPT-5.1, Opus 4.5).

I mean it's inherently impossible, given the statistical nature of LLMs, so I am not sure are you claiming this out of ignorance or other interests, but again, what you claim is impossible due to the very nature of LLMs.
by loco5niner | 2026-02-24 17:14:56+00:00
My wife is MUCH more nurturing, than I am. I'm glad she is taking on the role of caring for our children full-time. She is also homeschooling 2 of our kids at 3 and 4, and "has her finger on the pulse of our children's lives" as I like to say. I don't think she'd be able to do that with a full-time job, and I definitely wouldn't do as good a job as her. Also, if she had a full time job, she would still feel the drive to take on household and family tasks that would fall to the wayside if I were in charge of them, and frankly find herself overloaded. It's working well for us to fall into traditional roles.
by m348e912 | 2026-02-24 17:15:18+00:00
>> Friendly reminder that the battery industry is filled with shady and evil stuff. Cobalt mining for example.

What I am about to say is going to come off as exceptionally insensitive, but bear with me. The mining conditions are horrific and of course it would be better if regulation was introduced and industrial methods of extraction was used.
But you have to wonder, if there are thousands of men and teenagers willing to toil in the sun all day for a tiny amount of money, what other alternatives do they have for income?

If cobalt never existed in DRC, what exactly would they be doing for work and subsistence? Is this horribly unsafe and in-humane form of work a step up from whatever alternatives they have, or perhaps from nothing at all.

Again I am not condoning it, I am just wondering.
by forgetfreeman | 2026-02-24 17:15:32+00:00
The last 35 years have very vividly demonstrated that there needs to be some adults in the room. Without exception every major tech company has implemented practices so overtly hostile to the userbase that the government has been more or less forced to get involved, mostly in the form of fines that have done very little to disincentivize whatever problematic bullshit the company in question was originally caught at. Suggesting that even less regulation would somehow magically cause tech firms to align goals with their userbase seems baseless to say the least.
by patmorgan23 | 2026-02-24 17:15:38+00:00
But science does progress on the free sharing of information. Academics get paid to produce stuff that's free for everyone all the time.

No one is contesting that people who build these libraries should be compensated.

The argument is that if more scientific tools and knowledge are freely (or cheaply) available you lower the barrier to entry to experiment and play with those tools/concepts, which means more people will, which means you'll get more output. How many billion dollar companies are built on software that is open source? All of them have it somewhere in their stack whether they know it or not.
by margalabargala | 2026-02-24 17:15:47+00:00
Okay, this is a new concept for me so mind if I try explaining it to confirm I understand?

Inverter microwaves have an actual power consumption that more closely resembles what you see at the wall. Non-inverter microwaves will appear to draw more power from the wall than is actually delivered to food, but it doesn't matter that much, because that "extra" power is stored inductively in the magnetron, which gets returned to the grid when the microwave shuts off. There are some minor conversion losses from this, but not nearly as great as one might initially think looking at wall vs radiated power.

Is that correct?
by linguae | 2026-02-24 17:16:05+00:00
Ironically, once upon a time Prolog and logic programming in general were part of the cutting-edge of AI. There's quite a fascinating history of Japan's fifth-generation computing efforts in the 1980s when Japan focused on logic programming and massively parallel computing. My former manager, who is from Japan, earned his PhD in the 1990s in a topic related to constraint logic programming.
by keybored | 2026-02-24 17:16:07+00:00
Someone further down[1] talked about how “normal people” don’t realize the problem with Bill Gates and Thiel. But I think it’s rather the tech people here that don’t fully realize it.

> I feel like I do this all the time, just on a relatively small scale.

Yeah, scale. Scale is obviously important.

The road to billions of dollars is built on exploitation.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47138558
by shevy-java | 2026-02-24 17:16:09+00:00
Right. This is probably just a start though. Just as Richard Feynman stated:

There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom.

I recently wanted to purchase a 3TB harddrive. The price is not that heavy
(e,. g. at around 100 Euro), but I also realised that I'd much prefer that
price to go down significantly. I am still in shock at the RAM prices. That
is no longer affordable really.
by nottorp | 2026-02-24 17:16:15+00:00
> Theoretically, if you did trust your government,

Trust not to misuse my data intentionally?

Trust to not lose my data due to incompetence?

Trust to not subcontract this service to some spying company like Google?

> couldn't zero-knowledge proofs be used to allow such a system?

They could, but will they really be zero knowledge or there will be some intermediary leftovers that aren't zero knowledge? See trust in competence above.
by vvoid | 2026-02-24 17:16:17+00:00
> "I found them!" you might say to yourself. But who are you telling?

I don't, personally, have this internal monologue. My interior world is a roiling foam of images, feelings and intuitions, memories and imagined possibilities that slosh around solid concepts and facts like boulders in the surf. I have no trouble thinking of words when I need to but I must first conjure up an audience or sit down to journal.

Before these kinds of interpretive posts, I thought the idea of talking to one's self was just a metaphor.

I would expect LLMs to develop some similar non-verbal structure deep within their black boxes, but I know from my own experience that there's more to cogitation than language.
by yesfitz | 2026-02-24 17:16:43+00:00
Not to understate the terrible conditions of "Artisanal" mines, but the Cobalt Institute says "Due to market surplus, ASM [Artisinal and Small Mine] production has reached a record low, with ASM accounting for an estimated 2% of total cobalt supply from the DRC in 2024."[1]

Which conflicts with the NPR article, "In his new book, Cobalt Red, Kara writes that much of the DRC's cobalt is being extracted by so-called 'artisanal' miners..."[2]

Unfortunately, nowhere in the NPR article does it give a hard number to compare like the Cobalt Institute, but as of 2024, JP Morgan analysis said "ASMs... contribute up to 30% of the DRC’s cobalt supply..."[3]

So, what can we do?

Mining and battery production don't require pseudo-slavery, so maybe the best answer is to work towards improved conditions in ASMs in the DRC, develop battery reuse/recycling, and searching for alternative sources of the conflict minerals so that the industy can vote with their wallet.

Unless you have another solution?

1: https://www.cobaltinstitute.org/responsible-sustainable-coba...

2: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2023/02/01/1152893...

3: https://web.archive.org/web/20240704040321/https://am.jpmorg...
by mikkupikku | 2026-02-24 17:16:56+00:00
> slave morality

I think if you're saying: "These billionaires are bad because they do bad things, and being so rich makes their capacity for harm much worse."

That's not slave morality, at least not necessarily, because the "doing bad things" can probably be expressed using normal classic values. It becomes slave morality when you abbreviate the above to: "These billionaires are bad because it's bad for anybody to be so rich."
by TZubiri | 2026-02-24 17:17:28+00:00
A trick I learned is to respond "Oh, ok", at a certain point.

Debating something is, as my grandmother said "the ultimate concession", you only ever really debate something if you feel that there is a chance you are wrong. If there is an impasse, and you are confident in your response, there is usually no reason to continue, especially when there's a teacher-student asymmetry, they take it personal, and you gain nothing but make an enemy out of your teacher and spend your "question" points.

There's only so many times you can interrupt a professor, and spending your question points on correcting them isn't very useful to a student. And that the student believe that on one ocassion they know more than the professor, does not mean that there is nothing to learn from the professor.

Both of these mistakes (overextending a challenge and conflating a specific dominance over a general dominance) I think often come together under a personality trait that is generally identified as "arrogance". I do think there's a middle ground between believing one is superior and dropping all contentions of giftedness, but it's a thin line, and I think it's especially notable when the difference in talents (between the student and teacher, or between the gifted child and the average) is very marginal anyway, if it's undisputable then most tensions dissipate with the clarity.