MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jychang | 2026-02-28 12:20:07+00:00
Yeah, I saw that yesterday. The blog post does not explain why/how the Qwen 3.5 quants uploaded on 2/27 are different from the files uploaded on 2/24.

Old 2/24 Q4_K_XL commit (pre bugfix files): https://huggingface.co/unsloth/Qwen3.5-35B-A3B-GGUF/commit/7...

Questions for a postmortem that the blog post left unanswered:

- Why the change? Is it just to improve PPL/KLD? Sure, we can assume PPL and KLD are not perfect benchmarks. If yes, then why change the quantization anyways? Or was the old 2/24 quant actually much worse performing in the real world?I presume the Q4_K_XL quant using mxfp4 was the issue? If the 2/24 files having a lower PPL is an actual issue due to low quality tensors, then why not just say that?

- What were the main tensors that had the quantizations changed from 2/24 to 2/27? Did you now quantize attention tensors differently? Or perhaps ssm? T

- What was it changed from? Was it changed from mxfp4 or q4_k to q8, or something else?

A quick sentence in the blog post saying "ok, we've confirmed that using mxfp4 (or q3 or whatever) in the attention/ssm/biases/norms/etc is a bad idea, we had that in our old models on 2/24 and our new models today are better" that would make it clear. As it's written, it's trying to both say "PPL/KLD don't actually reflect real world quality" and "we changed our quant to increase PPL/KLD" at the same time, which seems contradictory.
by portacaval | 2026-02-28 12:20:19+00:00
See your answer below, from the BBC:

An Anthropic spokeswoman added on Thursday that while the company received updated wording from the DoD for its contract on Wednesday night, it represented "virtually no progress on preventing Claude's use for mass surveillance of Americans or in fully autonomous weapons."

"New language framed as compromise was paired with legalese that would allow those safeguards to be disregarded at will," she said. "Despite [the Department of War's] recent public statements, these narrow safeguards have been the crux of our negotiations for months."

https://bbc.com/news/articles/cvg3vlzzkqeo
by Revanche1367 | 2026-02-28 12:20:38+00:00
I agree about Israel fast losing support among the general public here but the idea of a less accommodating executive or legislative branch in the US for Israel is unthinkable. Not unless the system is changed from the ground up in dramatic fashion. The two most relevant branches of government in this country are completely beholden to Israel and anybody denying it is a zionist shill.
by heresie-dabord | 2026-02-28 12:21:06+00:00
> much broader implications

Setting aside the spectacular metastasis of a lawless kakistocracy that is literally rewriting the facts on record...

Anthropic's leadership has wisely attempted to make it clear that its product is not fit for the US DoD's purpose/objective, which is automated killing at scale.

It would be (is) grossly, historically negligent to operate weapons with LLMs. Anthropic built systems for a thuggocracy that only understands bribery, blackmail, and force.
by Telaneo | 2026-02-28 12:21:41+00:00
> For a random website, no, for bank and primary email (used for account recovery), they probably should.

Even for this, for grandma, this is probably still asking for a lot.

Grandma's bank will have a recovery option even if she's tossed her phone, computer and hardware token in the ocean, and then had a stroke which made her forget any passphrases or whatever: You can call the bank and physically authenticate yourself with a passport, driver's licence or some other ID. It's a bitch to do, you may have to go to an actual bank branch, but grandma will get access to her money again. Meanwhile, her access to physical mail doesn't stop just because she's forgotten some passphrase or lost her phone.

Even techy people get caught out by Google forcing 2FA, while casuals don't even consider the possibility of losing access to their email. While both the rhetorical you and grandma both should probably have a bulletproof recovery option for their email, since it will be the foundation of their digital identity, getting them to acknowledge the problem is going to be hard, and the solution, paying for a Yubikey or some other house of cards solution, is a tough sell.
by tjansen | 2026-02-28 12:22:01+00:00
Over the last 12 months, AI agents have become dramatically better. And in the last 3 months, they have reached a point where, with some light guidance, they can write 100% of the code. Most skeptics have been convinced and are now realizing the impact. That's what you see in the stock market.

I don't know where the ceiling is. And how much of the improvement was due to better context engineering, and how much to better models. I would expect the context engineering to plateau very soon. Not sure about the models.

An even more dramatic change for the whole economy will be when non-IT, non-creative office clerks are replaced. This is mostly a matter of redesigning the interfaces around them. AI could probably do already most of the work, but getting the tasks to the AI, using their output, and communication with third parties are still a major challenge. Like someone processing insurance claims. AI needs a way to get the claim, to contact third parties (write emails to humans, communicate with other AI agents, maybe even call humans), and then to initiate the payout. It's already doable with today's technology, but still a lot of work.
by Ray20 | 2026-02-28 12:22:05+00:00
> First, the difference isn’t that big in the economically stronger EU countries

It's exactly that big. It's not as big for people with low qualifications, but the more highly qualified the specialist, the greater the difference.

> Second, you need to factor in cost of living, which by most accounts is lower.

But here the difference really isn't that big.

> Third, meaningful labor laws and a shared appreciation for work-life balance.

This works more against EU rather than for them. Peak tech skills aren't usually acquired through laziness around and following meaningful labor laws, even in the EU.

> while we celebrate business acumen, we don’t fetishize wealth

An excuse for poor people (who still fetishize wealth)
by DivingForGold | 2026-02-28 12:22:10+00:00
If anyone is the epitomy of arrogance, it is Hegseth.

No doubt the US Gov't will be using A I to perform automated military strikes without human supervision. and spying on US citizens (which they already have been doing for decades now).

Look no further than the case of patriot Mark Klein, a former AT&T technician, exposed a massive NSA surveillance program in 2006, revealing that AT&T allowed the government to intercept, copy, and monitor massive amounts of American internet traffic. Klein discovered a secret, NSA-controlled room—Room 641A—inside an AT&T facility in San Francisco, which acted as a splitter for internet traffic.
by xg15 | 2026-02-28 12:24:38+00:00
> Self-attention is required. The model must contain at least one self-attention layer. This is the defining feature of a transformer — without it, you have an MLP or RNN, not a transformer.

I think it would be interesting to see challenges where two networks are trained and evaluated on the exact same datasets and the architecture is the same except for the presence of self-attention layers in one network.

So far it seems to me that self-attention really brought new capabilities to a network - essentially change the network's functionality in response to the input. It would be interesting to see if there are problems (i.e. datasets) that a "traditional" feedforward network fails to solve, but a transformer network of the same size can solve.

My guess would be: yes there are, and the problems are the kind where the specific strategy to find the correct output is itself depending on some of the input.
Show HN: Outbound, a minimal reverse tunnel in Go
by kwakubiney | 2026-02-28 12:25:00+00:00
Hi HN, I built Outbound, a minimal self-hosted HTTP tunneling tool in Go.
An agent running behind a firewall opens a long-lived bidirectional gRPC stream to an edge server. The edge accepts inbound HTTP requests and forwards them over the stream to the agent, which proxies them to local services and streams the response back.
It is intentionally small: single-tenant pre-shared secret auth for agent registration, keepalives, and TLS termination handled by a reverse proxy (Caddy/nginx) in front of the edge.

I would love any feedback on the design, security assumptions, ergonomics, and what you would change or add if you were using this.
by matkoniecz | 2026-02-28 12:25:10+00:00
I seen estimates that are much more pessimistic.

https://www.osw.waw.pl/pl/publikacje/komentarze-osw/2023-11-... mentions optimistic estimate of 70 years, and other statistics give estimated cleanup time of 740 years.

And in months since then more mines were placed.
by josephg | 2026-02-28 12:26:59+00:00
Rust doesn't eliminate all bugs. But anecdotally, by the time the type checker and borrow checker have humbled me, my programs really do often work the first time I run them. Its quite remarkable.

This isn't a special thing about rust. All languages are on a spectrum of "detect all bugs statically" to "detect all bugs dynamically". Rust programs run correctly "first time" more than javascript, more than typescript. But still less than haskell.

You can still write bugs in rust, obviously. I've written plenty. As you say, so has cloudflare. But strong typing does find a lot of bugs in practice.
by elcritch | 2026-02-28 12:27:39+00:00
> It turns out the columnist copied his blog post verbatim: but he says he can't complain without being inconsistent, since he pirated every movie ever made.

Copyright laws should be applied to LLMs and their users just like any others. If they verbatim reproduce a post (or near enough), then it should be a copyright violation.

> You find this humorous, until you recognize his style in the Atlantic - then the Post.

There's nothing inherently wrong with humans or LLMs learning to mimic someones style. This is actually a basis for styles and genres, etc. Whole trends in arts are just people copying others style's. Sometimes with little improvements.

> Hollywood starts using PatelLM to indirectly plagiarize other movies. Soon, Patel's posts begin to echo each other as the supply of novel perspectives is overwhelmed by PatelLM. Film criticism become a dessicated corpse, filled with plastic and presented in a glass case with a pin through its heart. Thought is dead. There is only Patel.

How exactly is this different than what Hollywood did pre-LLMs for the last decade or two? LLMs didn't cause the homogenization of culture. Corporate Hollywood and the internet did that.
by invader | 2026-02-28 12:27:53+00:00
However, to be fair, Desert Storm hasn't resulted in regime change. The Coalition bombed the shit out of the Iraqi army, but never committed to the ground operation deep inside Iraq. And Saddam's regime survived until the next war.

That alone hints that it is very hard to bring a dictatorship down with just aerial attacks - the ground component is also essential. Something tells me it is going to be the same here.

Only a land operation or a total collapse of the government, with the armed police and military joining the opposition, can topple the Iranian regime.
by Matl | 2026-02-28 12:28:20+00:00
> Hitler's rationale

Ah yes, give any discussion enough time and Hitler inevitably gets to be whoever your opponent is.

Unlike Hitler, unlike Israel and unlike the US, Iran has not proactively attacked.

Hitler had no reason to fear attack from Russia, Czechoslovakia or France. Iran has every reason to fear an attack from the US and Israel, look at what is happening right now ffs.

Western governments provide funding and shelter for extremist Iranian groups like People's Mojahedin Organization of Iran and various separatists movements inside the country, so please spare me this Hitler nonsense.
by NekkoDroid | 2026-02-28 12:28:26+00:00
While I in theory would love this idea, attaching arbitrary metadata to something and expecting a manager to somewhat "nicely" figure out some text to display for it is just not really scalable unless you limit what those fields can be set to. Mainly cuz just displaying keywords isn't exactly user friendly and having anything longer will also need to get translated for all/most/some languages they manager supports.
by jychang | 2026-02-28 12:28:45+00:00
The Q4_K_XL is easily the most popular quant for the model, though.

So then why was Q4_K_XL having issues? Is it just a PPL issue that doesn't reflect in real world usage? If yes, why not just say that? "The Q4_K_XL had lower PPL, but don't worry, PPL can be wrong, and other benchmarks show it's fine". If it was a real quality issue, then where was the issue caused by?

The blog post says "Retiring MXFP4 from all GGUF quants: Q2_K_XL, Q3_K_XL and Q4_K_XL, except for pure MXFP4_MOE" but doesn't say why. The easy assumption that most people would make is "oh, you quanted attention or ssn or something to mxfp4 and that turned out to be bad, so you retire mxfp4" but if you say that it's not that, then what's the actual issue?
by aeon_ai | 2026-02-28 12:29:07+00:00
The most likely and capable retaliation will be cyber/info wars.

Iran has sophisticated influence operations and will likely flood social media with disinformation designed to deepen political divisions and erode trust in institutions.

This advice serves even if you don’t believe the above. Be deeply skeptical of all viral content in the coming days and weeks, especially anything designed to change your opinions, or provoke outrage/fear. Verify before sharing. Expect deepfakes. Stick to primary sources when possible.
by ifwinterco | 2026-02-28 12:29:10+00:00
There is a theory (a bit "school of schizo" and totally unsubstantiated but kind of interesting) that the sense of urgency from Israel at the moment is because they really believe in the curse of the eighth decade.

In other words it is actually totally irrational and driven by belief in (and attempt to refute) a kind of prophecy.

No idea if that's true or not, but at this point, it wouldn't even surprise me
by matkoniecz | 2026-02-28 12:29:44+00:00
> Yes. But the what's the point of a convention about weapons that you only observe during peacetime and abandon as soon as war is at your gates?

You should ask people who supported or invented this convention. I never supported it and would support exit from it also before 2014 or 2022.

More cynical answer is that in time of peace refusing to sign up gives you bad PR so you sign up and in case of war you exit it (Finland, Poland, Baltics just did it) or ignore altogether (as Ukraine did). But it just weakens commitment to other conventions and PR hit would not be so bad, so I consider it as a mistake.

but signing up to it while Russia has not even pretended to do so was absurd.
by soulofmischief | 2026-02-28 12:30:01+00:00
Export your data and ask Claude to shove it in a database that you can let it access anytime you want via tool calling.

I agree, this could have been a moment of solidarity across the industry, an acknowledgement that we're all in this together having fun and building out intelligent systems, and instead we're seeing Sam Altman yet again for who he really is.
by edg5000 | 2026-02-28 12:30:17+00:00
If you own a store and people walk in, you observe this and take a mental note. You know who visits the store. If you sell tokens, you know who buys and what people buy. It's just that now, the metadata (what I buy, when I buy, what I look like) and my intrinsics (my data) are one. I send tokens, get tokens back. If there was a way to round-robin somehow across vendors to control who gets what, I'd do it.

When contracting out manufacturing, it's common sense to spread across manufacturers, so no single manufacturer has everything. They may have half a shell. Or an peripheral module without the core. Or a core without anything around it.
by xg15 | 2026-02-28 12:30:58+00:00
Also, the official explanation how October 7 could have happened honestly makes no sense to me. Somehow Hamas suddenly gained super powers on that day and could break through the "containment" that ostensibly had been perfectly adequate before. And because of their mysterious newfound strength, it was also imperative to bomb Gaza to bits and impossible to go back to the security situation as it was before...
by lvl155 | 2026-02-28 12:31:07+00:00
I canceled my subscription though I still have a lot of money in API (which I know they don’t refund). I will sundown and move it all over to Anthropic/Google. It’s pretty clear to me what OAI is doing. Shame on anyone working there selling their souls for a few more pennies.

Shame because Codex was a bit better for me in the past few weeks but not enough to justify spending my money on them.
by elasticeel | 2026-02-28 12:31:15+00:00
Do they though? Our do they learn that having a good engineer means they can assign ambiguous tasks and the software developer can reason through good decision making and follow up with clarifying questions.

LLMs need to get better at asking clarifying questions and trying to show the initial solution might not work. Even when they get better at that, this article states that managers not capable of thinking through the answers well enough will fall short and this is the space that developers live in.
by xdennis | 2026-02-28 12:32:08+00:00
1. Iranians protested.

2. Islamists massacred them.

3. Trump said "help is on its way" ( https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jan/13/trump-promises... )

4. Now is the help.

---

Trump also said that when he says things he means them, unlike Obama's red lines in Syria (his words). When he said that, it was pretty clear he couldn't back off of attacking Iran.

I assume it took so long because he's going for regime change, not just a few bombings. When Iraq invaded Kuwait, it took the US 5 months to launch a counter-invasion (mostly because of coalition building).
by Schmerika | 2026-02-28 12:32:17+00:00
Even some of the most "left" Dems, like Elizabeth Warren, were giving Trump an emphatic standing ovation as he talked about Iran in the SotU [0].

That was literally days after Warren posted on social media about "not sending our military into another endless war in the Middle East" [1]. Look at the comments on the post - they all believe her. It's really very silly.

0 - https://x.com/i/trending/2026793972086222987

1 - https://www.facebook.com/ElizabethWarren/posts/pfbid0BCLJaUv...
by josephg | 2026-02-28 12:32:23+00:00
The rust standard library is excellent. Start more or less anywhere, and click "view source". Or open up the source code files on github.

There's often a lot more comments than code, which is kind of annoying. But it really is the best way to learn how a lot of good rust is written.

Vec is a good read: https://doc.rust-lang.org/src/alloc/vec/mod.rs.html

Here's the lovely slice::binary_search_by: https://doc.rust-lang.org/src/core/slice/mod.rs.html#2967-29...
by conartist6 | 2026-02-28 12:32:23+00:00
Yeah I mean don't take my word, play around with it! Here's a simple JSFiddle that makes an iterator of 10,000,000 items, each with a step object that cannot be optimized except through efficient minor GC. Try using your browser's profiler to look at the costs of running it! My profiler says 40% of the time is spent inside `next()` and only 1% of the time is spent on minor GCs. (I used the Firefox profiler. Chrome was being weird and not showing me any data from inside the fiddle iframe).
by base76 | 2026-02-28 12:32:25+00:00
We built CognOS exactly for this: it runs as a local gateway (Docker, no external calls), wraps each LLM output with a signed trust score, decision trace, and EU AI Act risk
classification. The audit trail lives in your own infrastructure.

github.com/base76-research-lab/operational-cognos — open source, MIT license.
by cogman10 | 2026-02-28 12:32:28+00:00
Incompetence can't be ruled out.

I've listened to podcasts discussing the Israel military. One thing that people need to realize is that the IDF and it's leaders are skewed incredibly young. The mandatory service paired with the fact that people often don't stay in service means that they have 30 year old colonels and 35 year old generals.

They don't have the sort of career and institution knowledge like the US military has.
by epolanski | 2026-02-28 12:32:35+00:00
While I agree, and I find that Israel is on the wrong side of history, I'm not entirely into seeing this whole matter as black and white.

I have the opinion that modern world history is mostly shaped around each countries/population traumas that echo through society till today.

E.g. the biggest trauma of Ukrainians aren't even the events that are playing recently, but the Holodomor that happened 100 years ago. On the other hand the biggest trauma on Russian side is still the German invasion and war of annihilation happened during the second world war. As both sides see themselves as the victims and see the other side as the aggressor (or collaborator) and none has ever taken a step back to recognize their actions, they simply cannot communicate.

The biggest trauma of China is the century of humiliation where western powers and Japan went above and beyond any decency in their actions. Thus, Chinese society and leadership is all about never being dictated conditions and terms by foreign powers. They see themselves as victims of events that they don't want to see ever again.

The jewish Israeli population biggest trauma are centuries if not millenia of animosity, racism and violence coming from any side, last but definitely not least the Holocaust. Thus Israel is all about security at all costs, even if it means bending any sign of human decency. Again, they see themselves as victims and their actions will always go in that direction.

Sadly many parts of the world, many countries, many societies, are simply too scarred and unable to take a step back from the victim mentality and recognize their own actions.

Israelis are unable to recognize they are Goliath and not David from the longest time, they are unable and unwilling to say sorry, the last Israeli leader that tried, got assassinated by one of his own.

The arabic/muslim population in the area too see themselves as victims of the post world war 2 events, and they are as well unable to recognize how scarred and traumatized is Israeli society from centuries of events, including modern ones where they had to survive against hostile Arab coalitions aimed to annihilate them.

So, without a generation of leaders able to recognize and understand the role of history and those traumas and empathize with the other sides we're trapped in those loops of aggression.