MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zahlman | 2026-02-21 19:56:27+00:00
I've always understood "length" to mean what the author calls "count", and would never expect it to refer to byte size; as far as I can tell, it never did. Size is a design-time consideration; caring about it in the code is an exceptional case, for applications like (as you mention) serialization. So that's what deserves the dedicated term. "Length" refers specifically to a total number of elements in many languages preceding Rust.

For that matter, many languages, especially "object-oriented" ones, treat heterogeneous containers as the default. They might not even offer native containers that can store everything inline in a single contiguous allocation, except perhaps for strings. In which case, "number of bytes" is itself ambiguous; are you including the indirected objects or not?

"Count" is also overloaded — it commonly means, and I normally only understand it to mean, the number of elements in a collection meeting some condition. Hence the `.count` method of Python sequences, as well as the jargon "population count" referring to the number of set bits in an integer. Today, Python's integers have both a `.bit_count` and a `.bit_length`, and it's obvious what both of them do; calling either `.bit_size` would be confusing in my mental framework, and a contradiction in terms in the OP's.

I would disagree that even C's `strlen` refers to byte size. C comes from a pre-Unicode world; the type is called `char` because that was naively considered sufficient at the time to represent a text character. (Unicode is still in that sense naive, but it at least allows for systems that are acutely aware of the distinction between "characters" and graphemes.) But notice: C's "strings" aren't proper objects; they're null-terminated sequences, i.e. their length is signaled in-band. So that metadata is also just part of the data, in a single allocation with no indirection; the "size" of a string could only reasonably be interpreted to include that null terminator. Yet the result of `strlen` excludes it! Further, if `strlen` is used on a string that was placed within some allocated buffer, it knows nothing about that buffer.

(Similarly, Rust `str::len` is properly named by this scheme. It gives the number of valid 1-byte-sized elements in a collection, not the byte size of the buffer they're stored within. It's still ambiguous in a sense, but that's because of the convention of using UTF-8 to create an abstraction of "character" elements of non-uniform size. This kind of ambiguity is properly resolved either with iterators, like the `Chars` iterator in Rust, or with views.)

Also consider: C has a `sizeof` operator, influencing Python's `.__sizeof__()` methods. That's because the concept of "size" equally makes sense for non-sequences; neither "count" nor "length" does. So of course "length" cannot mean what the author calls "size".
by luckymate | 2026-02-21 19:56:34+00:00
I think I am in love. Clojure + Rust, everything is typed, but I don't need to annotate. And algebraic effects that I really wanted to explore in Ocaml, but now can do it in language with way easier syntax. I might be missing bit of Clojure dynamic nature, but it looks like a bunch of really interesting ideas in one language.
by sremani | 2026-02-21 19:56:47+00:00
I once did some research on Mirai and found at that time Plano, TX where Toyota NA is Headquartered did not have a Hydrogen station. Not sure if they have one now. It is such a limited car and because of the infrastructure stuck to LA and San Diego, I guess.

Pure range is 500+ miles but not many Hydrogen stations.
by OneDeuxTriSeiGo | 2026-02-21 19:56:53+00:00
Yeah on my SF86 I listed all the dumb shit I did and the investigator called obviously kind of concerned but receptive. We went through each one and his key point was "do you understand you can't do that" and as long as you answered yes, documented it on the form ahead of time, and it was obvious you weren't lying through your teeth then pretty much anything you did that wasn't in the last 3-5 years was pretty much immediately forgiven.

Some security officers are really touchy on these kinds of things and will tell you to exclude or lie but investigators pretty much never care what you did as long as it is obvious you don't plan on doing those types of things again or being an active problem.

They just want it for their records and they want you to be an open book such that they don't feel you are concealing anything problematic.
by the_nexus_guard | 2026-02-21 19:57:18+00:00
Nice work on the formal verification — 50K states with zero violations is solid.\n\nOne thing I've been thinking about in this space: authorization (what an agent CAN do) is only half the problem. The other half is identity (WHO is the agent). Your K-of-N threshold approach handles the authorization side well, but it assumes you already know which agents are part of the quorum.\n\nIn multi-agent systems where agents come from different frameworks or organizations, establishing identity first becomes critical. Who issued this agent? Can I verify it cryptographically? What's its track record?\n\nI've been working on this from the identity angle — Ed25519 DIDs, challenge-response verification, and a peer-to-peer vouching system for building trust graphs between agents. The two approaches feel very complementary: identity tells you who's asking, authorization (like IC-AGI) tells you what they're allowed to do.\n\nCurious: does your capability token model support any notion of agent reputation or trust scores, or is it purely policy-based?
by thangalin | 2026-02-21 19:57:39+00:00
> Email is an open, federated protocol. Anyone can run a mail server. In practice, running your own mail server is painful.

Wizards can be difficult to develop and maintain. Writing a working, useful, functional, robust, informative, environment-agnostic, and re-entrant script (or GUI/TUI) can take scads of effort. Now that LLMs abound, much of the grind is quickly solved. For example, here's a vibe-coded script that to get dovecot, postfix, and virtual users set up on my new server with mailboxes copied from an old server:

https://autonoma.ca/mail-setup.txt

To vibe code it, the prompt included content from:

https://xtreamsolution.net/complete-email-server-setup-tutor...

After a few kicks at the can (run script, capture errors, feed errors to LLM, repeat), it finally configured a working system. Reviewing the script, yes, it's beyond painful. It doesn't have to be, though; the authors of complex software could produce similar guided installers.
by vladvasiliu | 2026-02-21 19:57:47+00:00
I'm starting to think there's some variation / luck of the dray to these things. My iPhone 14 pro is like what you describe: when new, it held a great charge; now, not so much. But my HP laptops have the "limit charge to 80%" thing, and the battery held up very well. I don't use those laptops on battery very often, but they usually last several hours. They were rated for 5 hours I think, so it's close enough.

I'd really love to know the reasoning behind not allowing this charge-limit thing to older iPhones, since AFAIK the 15 and up have it.
by hyperhello | 2026-02-21 19:57:47+00:00
> In early education, teachers told her to “stay in a corner and sleep” or “draw pictures for them.” In high school, she relied on speech-to-text programs for every assignment. Teachers knew. Administrators knew. Nobody did anything. Now she’s a freshman at UConn studying public policy — and she still can’t read the textbooks.

Sounds like everyone else failed. Every single other person failed. A:Not(I)~>Fail(A).
by toomuchtodo | 2026-02-21 19:58:24+00:00
This is what always confused me about VC AI enthusiasm. Their moat is the capital. As AI improves, it destroys their moat. And yet, they are stoked to invest in it.

I mean, I’m all for it if it makes VCs irrelevant, as they are simply self important overly confident gatekeepers and kingmakers. The tokens must flow, their cost decline curve is the democratization of software power.
by jacquesm | 2026-02-21 19:58:41+00:00
Bluntly: they expended that credit a while ago. Those that can will move on. Those that can't have a real problem.

As for your last sentence:

Businesses really do care about the incident reports because they give good insight into whether they can trust the company going forward. Full transparency and a clear path to non-repetition due to process or software changes are called for. You be the judge of whether or not you think that standard has been met.
by bwestergard | 2026-02-21 19:58:44+00:00
Yes.

Here is another way to think of this. We all understand that the value of a lawyer in contract negotiations lies not only in drafting a document that, when fed to judge, produces the desired outcome. Rather, lawyers help clients (and counterparties) decide on what their interests consist in.

Developing software is always something of a principal-agent coordination problem, and comes with transaction costs.

Much of the time, most of us labor under the illusion that each of us understands our desires and interests better than any other party could.
by Aurornis | 2026-02-21 19:58:45+00:00
> the hacker left behind a calling card by changing the system identification name to "Jester."

> The attack on the branch of an unidentified major pharmacy chain occurred on four separate occasions from January through March of last year. The hacker acquired the names, contact information, and prescriptions for the pharmacy's customers

I think the story you heard was a watered down version of what they were doing. You can’t do things like exfiltrate data from a pharmacy database and not know what the system you’re attacking is for.
by giancarlostoro | 2026-02-21 19:58:47+00:00
This is one of those cars that's interesting to me, but I don't know that we'll ever go this route in a significant amount. Problem is how complex it is to create hydrogen, although 'green hydrogen' is a thing, it would take quite a bit regardless. Interesting to note that if we could extract only 2% of the hydrogen burried under the earth, we could power the entire world for over 200 years. Which is crazy to think about.

The other interesting thing about these cars is the output is water out of the tailpipe.
by verdverm | 2026-02-21 19:59:08+00:00
Simon has a lot more smaller projects than one big project these days (afaik, so special insights), which are more conducive to this maybe?

I always try to not use my phone when out and about, preferring to chat people up so we don't lose our IRL social skills. They are more interesting than whatever my phone might have to offer me in those moments.
by vincentvandeth | 2026-02-21 19:59:33+00:00
Interesting approach. Runtime enforcement is the part most people skip — they focus on logging what happened but don't prevent bad actions in the first place. The policy engine + kill switch combination makes sense for that.

I've been running ~2,400 multi-agent dispatches and came at this from the opposite direction: I started with staging gates (propose → human review → execute) as the runtime layer, then realized I also needed a forensic layer for when things slip through or when I need to understand patterns over time.

Curious about a few things:

- How granular are the JSON policies in practice? I found that "agent X can use tool Y" breaks down fast when agents chain tools in unexpected ways. The sequence matters more than individual permissions.
- The hash-chained audit trail — how do you handle schema evolution? After a few months of production, what you want to log changes significantly. Hash chains make adding fields tricky without breaking the chain.
- What happens when an agent crashes mid-action? With the hash chain, do you risk a corrupted tail entry that invalidates subsequent verification?

The runtime vs. after-the-fact distinction is important. Ideally you want both — prevent what you can, reconstruct what you couldn't prevent. Nice to see someone tackling the prevention side seriously.
by mnahkies | 2026-02-21 19:59:55+00:00
> I used to throw every scrap of code onto GitHub in the vague hope of “sharing knowledge”

I looked at a random repo today, and used some of its (MIT licensed) code as a starting point.

It was an expo plugin for managing android key stores, I didn't need most of what it did, and I went a different direction in the remaining bits - but it still helped me do that quickly. That won't show up in any stats the author can see, but I appreciate their contribution
by Neywiny | 2026-02-21 19:59:57+00:00
Yes. Let's do the math. The fastest sd cards can read at around 300 MB/s (https://havecamerawilltravel.com/fastest-sd-cards/). Modern GPUs use 16 lanes of PCIe gen 5, which is 16x32Gb/s = 512Gb/s = 64 GB/s. Meaning you'd need over 200 of the fastest SD cards. So what you're asking is: is there a reason GPUs don't use 200 SD cards? And I can't think of any way that would work
by dragonwriter | 2026-02-21 20:00:00+00:00
> If an LLM is a product, and it contains the work (in this case can spit out Harry Potter) it is derivative. Doesn't matter what it's used for.

That's not the definition of a derivative work in copyright law; further, whether what legally qualifies as a derivative work is within the scope of the exclusive rights of the copyright holder is, in the US, subject to whether it is within one of the exceptions to exclusive rights in the law, notably the fair use exception, which very much does depend on, among other things, what it is used for.
by duxup | 2026-02-21 20:00:01+00:00
>An SUV left the scene and Ms. Beltz followed. Then, she said, the SUV suddenly turned and sped at her. “I thought the agents were going to deliberately T-bone my car,” she wrote. “Right before it hit me, the unmarked SUV braked hard.”

>A masked woman leaned out the passenger window and yelled, “Emily, Emily, we’re going to take you home.” She shouted the address where Ms. Beltz lives with her husband and 5-year-old.

ICE is just a bunch of government thugs, nothing more.
by ibk_victor | 2026-02-21 20:00:12+00:00
Hi Everyone,

I have been working on AI-first computer aided engineering software for a while now. My two focus areas are:
* Functional and composable Generative modelling
* Constraint engine.

The Rust-based Computer Algebraic System in the link is my second attempt at an expressive system for the engine. Would appreciate thoughts on the software. Thanks :)
by luke5441 | 2026-02-21 20:01:04+00:00
Just as we had the other day: Competition is not market validation https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46961726

There is no doubt it is worth a lot in very remote destinations. But by definition there aren't many people there. Thus limited market size.

Launches for US military hardware is a market, yes.

Other countries are going to want to use/build up their own capabilities, so SpaceX won't have market access. Especially China.
by bryanrasmussen | 2026-02-21 20:01:11+00:00
Their long S is really annoying, although truthfully I generally am unfamiliar with the long s in modern fonts so I don't KNOW if it really looks worse than it needs to, but I feel it looks worse that it needs to and that makes it harder, for example I thought lest at first was left and had to go back a couple words after.

Anyway as I know from my reading history at 1400 it gets difficult, but I can make it through 1400 and 1300 with difficulty, but would need to break out the middle English dictionaries for 1200 and 1100. 1000 forget it, too busy to make that effort.
by fauigerzigerk | 2026-02-21 20:01:59+00:00
>But I'm not super bullish on "proofs" being the thing that keeps AI in line.

But do we have anything that works better than some form of formal specification?

We have to tell the AI what to do and we have to check whether it has done that. The only way to achieve that is for a person who knows the full context of the business problem and feels a social/legal/moral obligation not to cheat to write a formal spec.
by fmajid | 2026-02-21 20:02:07+00:00
https://blog.majid.info/pdf/patent_ppv.pdf

(in French, however)

It's a micropayment proxy using network authentication, billing on your ISP bill, with a reload grace period to prevent double-billing. It was deployed by France Telecom in its Wanadoo retail Internet service, but most of the money they made was from selling ringtones, not the original purpose of migrating Minitel service providers to the Web.
by stego-tech | 2026-02-21 20:02:52+00:00
Not bad, just as misinformed as most folks out there about the process and requirements.

National Security is a PITA, full of cutthroat sociopaths who would eat the SV VC-types for breakfast. That is a compliment, because the work they do is broadly dark and grimly necessary, at least at the levels of global geopolitics a lot of them are expected to operate at. I washed out in contracting for much the same reason this person kept "failing" polygraphs: honesty to the point of external perceptions of naivety. The types who excel in these sectors see folks like us as doormats or tissues, and react poorly when we catch them in the act and demand anything resembling respect because they know we're a threat to the entire establishment if we're allowed to succeed.

The point of polygraphs has always been about control, and folks who resist that sort of control are incidentally highlighting themselves as being uncontrollable to power alone. The books the author links are excellent starting points for understanding the true function of a polygraph, and why more places are outlawing them as a means of trying to diversify a deeply broken and hostile security apparatus by preventing it from being a "blind fools and sociopaths-only" club.
by fsloth | 2026-02-21 20:03:41+00:00
> if claws had existed beforehand.

That's literally not possible would be my take. But of course just intuition.

The dataset used to train LLM:s was scraped from an internet. The data was there mainly due to the user expansion due to www, and the telco infra laid during and after dot-com boom that enabled said users to access web in the first place.

The data labeling which underpins the actual training, done by masses of labour, on websites, could not have been scaled as massively and cheaply without www scaled globally with affordable telecoms infra.
by godelski | 2026-02-21 20:04:46+00:00
> when they are only incentivized to lie, cheat, and steal

The fact that they are allowed to do this is beyond me.

The fact that they do this is destructive to innovation and I'm not sure why we pretend it enables innovation. There's a thousands multi million dollar companies that I'm confident most users here could implement, but the major reason many don't is because to actually do it is far harder than what those companies build. People who understand that an unlisted link is not an actual security measure, that things need to actually be under lock and key.

I'm not saying we should go so far as make mistakes so punishable that no one can do anything but there needs to be some bar. There's so much gross incompetence that we're not even talking about incompetence; a far ways away from mistakes by competent people.

We are filtering out those with basic ethics. That's not a system we should be encouraging
by davidee | 2026-02-21 20:05:02+00:00
Perhaps relevant: https://campedersen.com/loon

This looks like a really neat project/idea; seeing the road map is exciting too, nearly everything I'd want.

I don't love the brackets syntax, or the [op val1 val2] ([* x x]) style, but I appreciate the attempt at clarity and consistency and none of these things are dealbreakers.

I do wonder why they've leaned so hard into talking about the type system being out of sight. Again, not a dealbreaker, but I feel strongly that explicit typing has a place in codebases beyond "describe something because you have to".

Strongly typed languages strike me as providing detailed hints throughout the codebase about what "shape" I need my data in or what shape of data I'm dealing with (without needing to lean on an LSP). I find it makes things very readable, almost self-documenting when done right.

From their docs about their choices: "The reasoning is simple: types exist to help the compiler catch your mistakes. They do not exist to help you express intent, at least not primarily." This strikes me as unnecessarily pedantic; as someone reading more code than I write (even my own), seeing a type distinctly—particular as part of a function signature—helps me understand (or add strong context) to the original author's goal before I even get to reading the implementation.

I find this doubly so when working through monadic types where I may get a typed error, a value, and have it all wrapped in an async promise of some kind (or perhaps an effect or two).

By the same token many languages allow you to leave out type annotations where they may be simple or clearly implied (and/or inferred by the compiler), so again, I'm not understanding the PoV (or need) for these claims. Perhaps Loon simply does it better? Am I missing something? Can I write return types to stub functions?

From the above blog post: "That's how good type inference feels! You write code. The types are just there. Because the language can see where it's going." Again, it feels strongly geared towards a world where we value writing code over reading/maintaining/understanding code, but maybe that's just my own bias/limitations.

Will follow it closely.
by scoofy | 2026-02-21 20:05:19+00:00
OP here. You make a very good point. Most of the holes definitely don't need a consistent gradient across every point on the hole. However, some will. The goal is to reveal that underlying nature of the hazards, and this includes contouring. When we get into the really nitty-gritty aspects of contouring's outsized effects on architecturally interesting areas, the main worry I have is that you can't know where to skimp on the resolution until after you've got the result.

I do think, however, that there should be some relationship between resolution and the "stickiness" of the surface (with higher friction variable, e.g. heavy rough). Given the higher friction areas, there will be less movement in rollout. Less movement in rollout means that the net effect of the contouring is less significant, which means that the resolution is less important, and we can probably save time in these areas.

I'll really have to think about this. It's a good idea.
by akie | 2026-02-21 20:05:31+00:00
Did you not see the chatbot they posted online (https://chatjimmy.ai/)? That thing is near instantaneous, it's all the proof you need that this is real.

And if the hardware is real and functional, as you can independently verify by chatting with that thing, how much more effort would it be to etch more recent models?

The real question is of course: what about LARGER models? I'm assuming you can apply some of the existing LLM inference parallelization techniques and split the workload over multiple cards. Some of the 32B models are plenty powerful.

It's a proof of concept, and a convincing one.
by blibble | 2026-02-21 20:05:39+00:00
okay so the code which returned everything isn't there

actual explanation: the API server by default returns everything. the client attempted to make a request to return "pending_deletes", but as the request was malformed, the API instead went down the default path, which returned everything. then the client deleted everything.

makes sense now

but is that explanation is even worse

because that means the code path was never tested?
by fuzzfactor | 2026-02-21 20:05:42+00:00
It can take a long time to get in position like that, a lot of focus or both.

Maybe not focus first on the goal(s) but the improved ability to keep options open.

I think I've always been comfortable having more viable options than I would ever be able to act on in one lifetime.

Always needed something to fall back on anyway.

It would be self-defeating to think that not doing all these things is failing to live up to your potential though, when just having more diverse options open when you need or want them is a feeling not everybody has.

Maybe a good way to bring the option of a sabbatical onto the table, is to have it on the menu to begin with.

Very inspiring :)