MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by krisoft | 2026-02-28 09:39:43+00:00
Modern landmines do have safety features like what you describe.

For example consider this Department of Defence policy from 2020: https://media.defense.gov/2020/Jan/31/2002242359/-1/-1/1/DOD...

“The Department will continue its commitment not to employ persistent landmines.
For the purposes of this policy, ‘persistent landmines’ means landmines that do not
incorporate self-destruction mechanisms and self-deactivation features. The Department will only employ, develop, produce, or otherwise acquire landmines that are non-persistent, meaning they must possess self destruction mechanisms and self-
deactivation features.”

“ For example, all activated landmines, regardless of whether they are remotely delivered or not, will be designed and constructed to self-destruct in 30 days or less after emplacement and will possess a back-up self-deactivation feature. Some landmines, regardless of whether they are remotely delivered or not, will be designed and constructed to self-destruct in shorter periods of time, such as two hours or forty-eight hours.”

This distinguishes “self-destruct” where the mine blows itself up and “self-deactivation” where the mine disarms itself. The first is safer because it doesn’t leave explosive material behind, which could chemicaly detoriate and become unstable decades later. The second is used as a failsafe in case the self-destruct fails.

> Or are the reasons technical

They certainly were when the really old mines were made. Some of them are nothing more than just spring loaded pressure plates. But today modern landmines are much more sophisticated. Some of them can distinguish the seismic signature or a truck from a tank. There are also radio controlled mine fields where soldiers can remotely activate / deactivate the whole mine field as the threat evolves.
by oefrha | 2026-02-28 09:39:57+00:00
I was checking Trump approval ratings yesterday. I didn’t have high hopes but I thought it had to be under 35% at this point (I think in a sane country it has to be <10% or at least <20% after the nonstop madness dropping everyday). But nope, every poll places him at >40% approval or ever so slightly below 40%. To me that’s definitive confirmation that “it’s on Trump and his cronies, not the American people” is nonsense. It’s on at least 40% of American people. They weren’t blindsided by false promises, they want this.
by propagandist | 2026-02-28 09:40:43+00:00
You're a good person and I feel similarly. We live under the Fourth Reich.

I do not think ceasing work is the right move, but definitely get involved politically and don't equivocate when you condemn our elected "representatives".

It might also soothe your soul to be in the company of like-minded individuals. A Quaker prayer is a sure place to find many.
by athrowaway3z | 2026-02-28 09:40:48+00:00
Dedicate user account.

That's not to say I don't use bwrap.

But I use that specifically to run 'user-emulation' stories where an agent starts in their own `~/` environment with my tarball at ~/Downloads/app.tar.gz, and has to find its way through the docs / code / cli's and report on the experience.
by adamgold7 | 2026-02-28 09:41:07+00:00
We've been working on exactly this at Islo. Zero-setup microVM sandboxes with isolated networking by default, plus an approval workflow layer so agents can request capabilities and humans approve/deny in real-time.

The credential problem is handled through proxy middleware - agents never see real tokens, requests get routed through policy-checked proxies that inject credentials only for approved operations.

Happy to share more: https://islo.dev
by Moldoteck | 2026-02-28 09:41:11+00:00
I think it's (mostly) sufficient to have a regex on git change-set for "new" "malloc" "calloc" keywords to cut most of such stuff if you have such a policy.

Documentation / UT are harder to define (what is good documentation, is UT covering everything?), but usage of manual memory handling can be spotted relatively easy automatically. There can be some exceptions for 3rd party libs interaction if it's absolutely necessary but detecting such occurrences and keeping track of them is relatively easy.
by magicalhippo | 2026-02-28 09:41:27+00:00
There are no hard rules regarding quants, except less is better.

However models respond very differently, and there are tricks you can do like limiting quantization of certain layers. Some models can genrally behave fine down into sub-Q4 territory, while others don't do well below Q8 at all. And then you have the way it was quantized on top of that.

So either find some actual benchmarks, which can be rare, or you just have to try.

As an example, Unsloth recently released some benchmarks[1] which showed Qwen3.5 35B tolerating quantization very well, except for a few layers which was very sensitive.

edit: Unsloth has a page detailing their updated quantization method here[2], which was just submitted[3].

[1]: https://unsloth.ai/docs/models/qwen3.5/gguf-benchmarks

[2]: https://unsloth.ai/docs/basics/unsloth-dynamic-2.0-ggufs

[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47192505
by ozgung | 2026-02-28 09:41:33+00:00
Do I understand this correctly:

An algorithm, an ML model trained to predict next tokens to write meaningful text, is going to KILL actual humans by itself.

So killing people is legal,

Killing people by a random process is legal,

A randomized algorithm deciding on who to kill is legal,

And some of you think you are legally protected because they used the word “domestic”?
by crocowhile | 2026-02-28 09:41:34+00:00
Frankly this is a very easy choice. Unless you need to make images, Claude wins over chatgpt on every realm. For writing and coding there is no match. It's one of those times where you can do the right thing and get the better product.

I was one of the early paying adopter of chatgpt but when Claude came around I switched and never looked back. I've been on the max plan for a while.
by as1mov | 2026-02-28 09:41:55+00:00
Ah that tracks with my experience later too. Even in the mainland, computers were pretty rare for us regular folk. Early in the 2000's, my father for whatever reason assumed computers would be hugely influential in the future and borrowed money to buy one for us. Mostly meant for my older sibling who was in high school, it didn't take his interest but worked its charm on me hah.

And thanks for the pictures! I was a kid during this time, so had no contact with any professionals. Just other kids on various places like Newgrounds and other forums. I remember emailing Armor Games and Miniclip for sponsorship for my shoddy games and understandably not receiving a reply ;)

Nostalgic see to those giant beige CRT computers, that damn copy of Flash MX and people just goofing off haha.
by gavinray | 2026-02-28 09:42:49+00:00
Then replace git with "rsync" or "borg. But I don't see how running "git init" in a directory you have "days of work" accumulated in is a sticking point.

Git is a convenient implementation detail.

The core loop of "watch a directory for changes, create a delta-only/patch-based snapshot" has been a solved few-liner in bash for a long time...
by thisismyswamp | 2026-02-28 09:43:02+00:00
I built a way for my agent to call me on a real phone: https://clawr.ing

I thought it would be cool to have it reach me proactively when something I care about happens instead of having to look for a notification or ask it directly

The result is pretty surreal, being out for a workout or groceries or something and getting a call about a stock price or an important email feels like I was suddenly transported into the future

It took quite a bit of effort to set up though, there’s a lot of complexity to routing calls in a cost efficient manner and generating realistic human like speech

I’m happy with the result though, you can reply back and the agent can run any tool call while it’s on the call with you, and if it takes a bit of time as in for a web search or so it will put you on hold and you will hear hold music for a few moments
by rurban | 2026-02-28 09:43:38+00:00
I gave lots of prolog rules to analyze log files of a complicated distributed system with 20 realtime components to find problems and root causes. Worked really well. In 2008 or so

Cannot believe that LLM are that useful.
When ever a component changes or adds a log line, you edit one rule. With an LLM you need weeks of new logs and then weeks to retrain. And a high budget for the H100`s
by mrkeen | 2026-02-28 09:43:54+00:00
The regime won't be touched by this.

Israel will bomb a few hospitals and universities, and the US will park some battleships nearby and unfurl a "mission accomplished" banner.

After a few fake declarations of ceasefire, the Mullahs will donate to the Trump Presidential library, Trump will take credit for bringing peace to the middle east, and then will speak as glowingly about the Mullahs as he does about Putin, Kim Jong Un and MBS.
by somenameforme | 2026-02-28 09:43:55+00:00
Large scale deployments shifted under Obama to widescale bombing campaigns. The site mentions its various sources such as this [1] which mentions that Obama also increased the number of drone strikes by an order of magnitude relative to his predecessor. To be clear I'm not picking on Obama, but saying solely that this isn't a partisan issue. "They" all love war.

And places being in a state of internal conflict, conflict which is itself often backed and fomented by US intelligence agencies and backed proxy forces, is hardly some reason to go bomb them. Even moreso when you look at results. See what Libya turned into, and what Syria is now turning into. It turns out that Al Qaeda in a suit is still Al Qaeda, to literally nobody's surprise if you're even vaguely familiar with our history of backing extremists and putting them in power, something which we have done repeatedly.

This war, if it escalates, is not going to be good for Iran, the people of Iran, or likely even the US. The only country that might come out a winner is Israel, but even that might not end up being the case, as Iran's retaliation will likely focus on them. To say nothing of longer term consequences.

[1] - https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-preside...
by MattPalmer1086 | 2026-02-28 09:44:12+00:00
Huh, I've been using DDG for years now, and I maybe use !g a few times a year.

It used to be the case that shopping was way better using Google than DDG, but Google seems to have enshitified that now, and it seems to mostly show me deals on different models than I searched for.

These days when DDG fails me, I usually find Google does too.
by pjmlp | 2026-02-28 09:44:33+00:00
Not even C/C++, only if vim and emacs are the only experience one has ever had.

See Visual C++ (with hot code reloading, incremental linking, AI integration, on the fly analysis), QtCreator, Clion (comparable with VS in many options), C++ Builder (with its RAD capabilities),....

Cargo is great as long as it is only Rust code and there is little need to interop with platform SDKs, then it is build.rs fun.
by Keyframe | 2026-02-28 09:44:33+00:00
What are my options if I want a decent coding agent at a reasonable price?

I'd even come from another angle.. What are my options if I want a decent coding agent, on the level of what Claude does at any given price? Let's say few tens of thousands of dollars? I've had a limited look at what's available to be run locally and nothing is on par.
by zepearl | 2026-02-28 09:44:41+00:00
I downloaded Ollama ( https://github.com/ollama/ollama/releases ) and experimented with a few Qwen models ( https://huggingface.co/Qwen/collections ).

My performance when using an RTX 5070 12GiB VRAM, Ryzen 7 9700X 8 cores CPU, 32GiB DDR5 6000MT (2 sticks):

- "qwen2.5:7b": ~128 tokens/second (this model fits 100% in the VRAM).
- "qwen2.5:32b": ~4.6 tokens/second.
- "qwen3:30b-a3b": ~42 tokens/second (this is a MoE model with multiple specialized "brains") (this uses all 12GiB VRAM + 9GiB system RAM, but the GPU usage during tests is only ~25%).
- qwen3.5:35b-a3b: ~17 tokens/second, but it's highly unstable and crashes -> currently not usable for me.

So currently my sweet spot is "qwen3:30b-a3b" - even if the model doesn't completely fit on the GPU it's still fast enough. "qwen3.5" was disappointing so far, but maybe things will change in the future (maybe Ollama needs some special optimizations for the 3.5-series?).

I would therefore deduce that the most important thing is the amount of VRAM and that performance would be similar even when using an older GPU (e.g. an RTX 3060 with as well 12GiB RAM)?

Performance without a GPU, tested by using a Ryzen 9 5950X 16 cores CPU, 128GiB DDR4 3200 MT:

- "qwen2.5:7b": ~9 tokens/second
- "qwen3:32b": ~2 tokens/second
- "qwen3:30b-a3b": ~16 tokens/second
by IshKebab | 2026-02-28 09:44:53+00:00
I think it's just what happens when something genuinely great comes along. Some people try it and enthuse about it. Sometimes other people who haven't tried it assume that it's just like all the other average things and therefore the only explanation is irrational fanboyism.

We saw the same thing with the iPhone. It was a step change from previous phones. Loads of people were like "it's just Apple fanbois, I'll stick to my N95" without even trying it.
by Tuna-Fish | 2026-02-28 09:45:12+00:00
Do note that with modern compilers it's surprisingly hard to accidentally do something that is always guaranteed to write to 0. Because it is UB, and an optimizing compiler is allowed assume that it doesn't happen. This can lead to seemingly crazy things like a variable that is set to zero, and when you deref through it it gives you something completely different instead. Because if a variable is first set to zero in all code paths, and then complex logic usually sets it to something else, after which it is dereferenced, the compiler is allowed to notice that the path where it is accessed without being first set to something else never happens, and then it is allowed to notice that the first write to the variable is dead because it's never read before being set to something else, and thus can be eliminated.
by jona-f | 2026-02-28 09:45:18+00:00
Or btrfs for that matter. I'm doing something similar with btrfs. Used zfs for a while, but the external repositories kept getting out of sync with the distribtion kernel, so system updates required manual intervention. That annoyed the heck out of me over time. Switched back to btrfs, which has been working fine for the last year. 10 or so years earlier I still had data corruption and bugs with btrfs.
by moxifly7 | 2026-02-28 09:45:48+00:00
Don't listen to me, listen to the OG Zionists:

>Ben-Gurion, along with Yitzhak Ben-Zvi (the second President of Israel), argued in a 1918 booklet (written in Yiddish) that the Arab peasants of Palestine were not descendants of the Arab conquests, but rather the "remnant of the ancient Hebrew agriculturalists".

If you'd rather modern science, then there are genetic studies out of Israeli universities leading weight to this hypothesis (they tend to not get much attention among modern zionists as you can imagine). It's also the general consensus among historians of the region, inside and outside Israel. It's not really a contested position amongst academic historians.

>I love how you turned the elimination of hundreds of religions and ethnic groups into some beautiful cultural influence.

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

It was not always a clean process, varied a lot by century and location, but on the whole did not involve ethnic cleansing or massacres of ethnicities. The percentages of Arabs you quote above are, again, people who started calling themselves Arabs after cultural shifts, and not, as you seem to believe, a result of mass migration of ethnic Arabs from the Arabian peninsula to replace the local populations.

I don't think we have much else to exchange in good faith on this topic, so I'll leave you here.
by jachee | 2026-02-28 09:46:10+00:00
Okay, if you have big actions to show off, then show us how it’s done.

You step up and start shooting at the heartless monsters running the first (US armed forces) and second (ICE) most well-funded militaries in the world. Go ahead. We’ll be right there behind you.

(Yeah, I’m burning some hn karma for this, I imagine.)
by Maxious | 2026-02-28 09:47:05+00:00
ICYMI unsloth has had some major breakthroughs today with the Qwen3.5 local models https://unsloth.ai/docs/models/qwen3.5/gguf-benchmarks

With the Qwen3.5 35B A3B at Q4 I've got 200k context running at 62.98 tokens per second on a local RTX5080 16GB.
by TheAlchemist | 2026-02-28 09:47:11+00:00
The big difference with previous campaign is that now, the Iranian regime is facing existential threat. While the previous war was more a of a show for respective domestic publics, this one feels like there is no coming back.

Of course Russia or China won't go to war for Iran - nobody is saying that. They can get involved though, just as Europe is involved in Ukraine war.
by pjmlp | 2026-02-28 09:47:15+00:00
See, already there you missed all the C language constructs that C++ is copy-paste compatible with, and should only be used inside unsafe code blocks.

Which in C++ good practices means type safe abstractions not exposing any kind of C style strings, arrays, casts, pointer arithmetic,....

Unfortunely still relatively rare, some of us when we were the C++ Striking Force in the 1990's Usenet flamewars already advocated for such practices, most of them already possible with C++ARM, no need for modern, post-modern, rococo, baroque or whatever C++ style is going on with C++26 now.
by supriyo-biswas | 2026-02-28 09:47:40+00:00
The point that I've not seen someone making: do you even need LLMs for domestic surveillance? I can grab a copy of EmbeddingGemma or Qwen3-embedding or a similar model and do semantic clustering of existing data, since the "retrieval" is the most important part for such applications, not its integration into a LLM.
by tedsanders | 2026-02-28 09:48:42+00:00
The supply chain risk stuff is bogus. Anthropic is a great, trustworthy company, and no enemy of America. I genuinely root for Anthropic, because its success benefits consumers and all the charities that Anthropic employees have pledged equity toward.

Whether Anthropic’s clear mistreatment means that all other companies should refrain from doing business with the US government isn’t as clear to me. I can see arguments on both sides and I acknowledge it’s probably impossible to eliminate all possible bias within myself.

One thing I hope we can agree on is that it would be good if the contract (or its relevant portions) is made public so that people can judge for themselves, without having to speculate about who’s being honest and who’s lying.
by ChadNauseam | 2026-02-28 09:48:50+00:00
They specifically said they never agreed to let the DoD use anthropic for fully autonomous weapons. They said "Two such use cases have never been included in our contracts with the Department of War, and we believe they should not be included now: Mass domestic surveillance [...] Fully autonomous weapons"

Their rational was pragmatic. But they specifically said that they didn't agree to let the DoD create fully automatic weapons using their technology. I'll bet 10:1 you won't ever hear Sam Altman say that. He doesn't even imply it today.
by virtualritz | 2026-02-28 09:48:57+00:00
Giving you the benefit of the doubt and assuming [1] does not play a role in your thinking:

I don't mean this in any way rude and I apologize if this comes accross as such but believing it won't be used in exactly this way is just naive. History has taught us this lesson again and again and again.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47189650#47189970
by IshKebab | 2026-02-28 09:50:26+00:00
> Most errors are not type errors.

With a sufficiently strong type system all errors are type errors! Rust doesn't have that of course, but it does have quite a strong type system so this is a very bold assertion with no evidence.

Rust does have an "if it compiles it works" feel. Nobody means that literally (this should be really obvious). They just mean that once you get it to compile the chance that it works first time is quite high (like 20% maybe?) compared to most other languages where it's more like 1%.
by joe-user | 2026-02-28 09:51:12+00:00
I can see some interest in Fil-C, but some will still be against it due to the overhead it imposes (1.5x-4x worse performance, less deterministic since there's a GC), as well as the program will simply crash on arbitrary memory reinterpretation, use-after-free, and reading uninitialized memory. This is certainly better than it continuing, but certainly not as good as it could be.

CHERI has different characteristics in that it will crash for buffer overflows, but crashing on use-after-free is opt-in, it can only detect double-frees sometimes, it does nothing about uninitialized memory access, etc. It also requires adopting new hardware, which may be a hard sell.

In all I've mentioned above, I haven't even touched thread safety or integer safety which these do nothing about.

So with that being said, do as you please, but understand that simply adopting these is a different level of safety (program will not be exploitable but will crash) compared to something like Rust (program is not exploitable and will not crash because these issues are mostly* compile-time errors).

* "Mostly" since I mentioned integer safety which will be a runtime crash like the C safeguards, you can use unsafe, etc.
by RyJones | 2026-02-28 09:51:46+00:00
I built a demo of this back when I worked at Qualcomm in Seattle; match this with WiFi beacons and you can trace a person fairly well. It's been over a decade, but at the time both iOS and Android would send pings fairly frequently to all known WiFi networks looking to see if they should switch to a faster one. With your device ID, list of SSIDs you know, and your TPMS data, a person can learn a lot about you.

Like, where do you work? Where do you stay (Hotel SSIDs)? Who are your friends (other people's home SSIDs)?
by xlii | 2026-02-28 09:52:03+00:00
I agree with this (short and sweet) piece. I'm Rust user but the crab-hype turned me off for the long time.

Personally I'd prefer writing Haskell but there are sharp edges I can't overlook (like constantly breaking LSP of 11/10 difficulty on producing distributable binaries).

I cringe every time I spit out 50 lines of boilerplate just to get C done Rust, but it's best tool I found that's good enough in many scopes.
by jenkings | 2026-02-28 09:53:14+00:00
As I’m sure many have, I wrote a wrapper around AyncIterables so I could use them more succinctly. However I wasn’t concerned with performance as I was using it in a lambda handling small batches or scanning items from a DB and streaming pages back.

https://github.com/juliantcook/fluent-async-iterator

I had hoped we would have a better API by now.

It was also very useful for CLI tools utilising unix pipes.
by pseingatl | 2026-02-28 09:57:36+00:00
Bombing never wins wars, with one exception.

bombing of:
-N.Vietnam
-Germany
-Serbia
-Sudan
-Tunisia
-England

Exception:

-Japan

That is not to say bombing doesn't have its uses in war. The bombing of the oilfields of Ploesti in Romania severely damaged the German war machine. But it took Russian boots on the ground in Berlin to effect a German surrender.
by srh01 | 2026-02-28 09:57:47+00:00
I think it depends on the purpose of the comment. I can see why someone may get frustrated with AI text if they were say looking for advice on xyz, as you'd usually want someone with personal or senior experience. If I want career advice, AI will give me a predictable response similar to LinkedIn, but something from a successful person in the industry will have a lot more trust and substance in it.
by bawolff | 2026-02-28 09:57:50+00:00
> Is it a principled stand or not

I believe that anthropic is trying to frame it that way. My point is that if you accept their framing then this whole thing falls apart. That is true regardless of if its actually principled or not.

> Are you now acknowledging that it's a costly, risky action on Anthropic's part?

I'll acknowledge its a risky strategy. Whether its costly depends on the result of that risk.