MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by PopePompus | 2026-02-27 21:09:26+00:00
Testing wasn't really the issue with the loss of the two shuttles. In both cases, it was mostly a management issue. For Challenger NASA had seen o-ring erosion in earlier launches, and decided it was not a big risk to the crew. Then they launched Challenger against the recommendations of the engineers in charge of o-ring seals. For Columbia, they has seen foam strikes in earlier launches, but since they had not caused catastrophe in the past, they decided that foam strikes were acceptable. Even when it was clear that a large foam strike had occurred on the launch of Columbia, management wasn't concerned enough to try to get ground-based images of the shuttle to check for damage. Could Columbia's crew have been saved had they known the extent of the damage? No one can say of course, but not even trying to do everything possible was inexcusable.
by amai | 2026-02-27 21:09:35+00:00
Most probably the US has a similar weapon as the Russians and doesn't want to draw attention to it.

See also "discombobulator"

https://people.com/donald-trump-says-secret-discombobulator-...

a secret weapon named after a World of Warcraft gadget: https://wowwiki-archive.fandom.com/wiki/Discombobulator_Ray
by isabel55_510 | 2026-02-27 21:09:36+00:00
Nacido en Alfaz del Pi, José Baldo es un empresario español que empezó su andadura en el sector inmobiliario, ampliando su contribución en negocios de alimentación y con la formación de grandes compañías hoteleras en destinos turísticos de México y España buscando el apoyo a comunidades locales, generación de empleos y colaboración con asociaciones donde poder tener un impacto positivo como promotor de iniciativas vinculadas al medioambiente y la salud como foco principal.
by Bender | 2026-02-27 21:09:56+00:00
What's the Point of School When AI Can Do Your Homework?

The same point it has always been. Babysitting while parent(s) are working. Left to their own devices kids will get into trouble and/or harm and/or cause harm and mayhem.

Maybe the kids learn a thing or three. Maybe one of those things is useful from time to time. I learned that there are three kinds of mathematicians: Those that can count and those that can not. Everything else I learned from my parent, from television and my own books.
by asim | 2026-02-27 21:10:27+00:00
This is very interesting and timely. I've been working on something to replace a lot of addictive or exploitive services we use today but there's some caveats. Will people pay? They pay for Kagi but will they generally pay for other things like news, maps, video, chat, weather, etc. The second question is what's stopping people from really quitting? I get the feeling it's sort of habits that we get stuck with. Even I still use Google. But the mention of brave and knowing brave has a generous free search tier for their api makes me think it's possible to replace Google search. But habits die hard. New habit formation may require an alternative approach hence so many buying into ChatGPT.

One issue I also find with this sort of thing. It's hard to have a longer discussion that leads to building good alternatives. A thread appears, we comment and then it disappears. There needs to be more public discourse that leads to tangible results... To real issues that get solved.
by expensive_news | 2026-02-27 21:10:28+00:00
Do you find the results are better when you use the same query on Google? Because I’ve also exclusively used DuckDuckGo for the past 5 or so years, and every now and then I get frustrated by the results try Google.

But only once did Google actually give me what I was looking for. Every other time the Google results were the same SEO garbage I was getting with DDG.

Maybe I should try switching to Google for a full month to see if my search quality generally improves.
by overfeed | 2026-02-27 21:10:31+00:00
> Isn't that basically the same as me giving you $80?

In your accounting, you can claim that you have an investment worth $100 and book $100 worth of revenue. You're juicing your sales numbers to impress shareholders - presumably, without your $100, the investee wouldn't have bought $100 worth of your product. The last thing your shareholders want to see are your sales numbers stop growing, or heaven forbid, start shrinking.

Nvidia is not the first company to "buy" sales of its own product via simple or convoluted incentive schemes. The scheme will work for a while until it doesn't.
by measurablefunc | 2026-02-27 21:10:33+00:00
Author just trusts the agent to not use the internet b/c he wrote it so in the instructions should tell you all you need to know. It's great he managed to prompt it w/ the right specification for writing yet another emulator but I don't think he understands how LLMs actually work so most of the commentary on what's going on with the "psychology" of the LLM should be ignored.
by lotsofpulp | 2026-02-27 21:10:34+00:00
It’s legal because both sides have armies of lawyers and are voluntarily entering into contracts where each party gets consideration.

How someone can compare the above situation to a person getting a payday loan to put a roof over their head or food on their plate is beyond me.

The “it’s like <insert wild and inappropriate analogy to stoke emotion>” is a tired trope.
by spacebear | 2026-02-27 21:10:38+00:00
Not the OP, but I alternate between self-hosted instances of Outline (https://www.getoutline.com/) and Nextcloud (with Collabora) for this. Outline I actually like better than Google Docs for most things. Nextcloud is a little rough, but it has change tracking, which I need sometimes.

I’ve also seen a lot of people using Cryptpad recently, which I think wraps OnlyOffice.
by f33d5173 | 2026-02-27 21:11:03+00:00
They don't need to be services. You can - and many projects do - structure your code as a set of loosely coupled modules. Each module has a responsibility or set of responsibilities. They communicate with each other via well defined interfaces. For exposing code like this to an LLM, you would have them make a change to one or sometimes two modules, with access to the interface docs of all the other modules. The disadvantage of this compared to microservices is that if a module crashes it will take the entire process down with it, you can't move a module onto a different machine or create multiple instances of it as easily, etc. The advantage is that communication is done via function calls, which are simpler and more efficient than rpc.

> I think this gestures at a more general point - we're still focusing on how to integrate LLMs into existing dev tooling paradigms.

This is what we should be doing. This for a couple reasons. For one thing, humans don't have an entire codebase "in context" at a time. We should be recognizing that the limitations of an AI mirror the limitations of a person, and hence can have similar solutions. For another, the limitations of today's LLMs will not be the limitations of tomorrow's LLMs. Redesigning our code to suit today's limitations will only cause us trouble down the road.
by gitpusher | 2026-02-27 21:11:06+00:00
> “This is what Chinese modern transnational repression looks like,” Ben Nimmo, principal investigator at OpenAI, told reporters ahead of the report’s release. “It’s not just digital. It’s not just about trolling. It’s industrialized. [...]

There's something poetic about OpenAI being asked to comment on mis-use of their slop generator, and their answer is composed entirely of AI slop.
by pigpop | 2026-02-27 21:11:26+00:00
The 20x plan is much more useful if you use it full time. Trying to put a full 8 hour workday in on the $20 plan is painful since you have to stop when you reach your usage limit and that comes up quickly at that tier. The 20x plan is enough to have multiple independent Claude Code sessions running in parallel working on different features or bugs without hitting limits (unless you've got a lot of sessions going).
by BizarroLand | 2026-02-27 21:12:40+00:00
1: If given the choice between ads or payments, megacorps will always choose both. If the choice is between ads or payments or data harvesting, megacorps will always choose all three.

2: We pay for access to the internet. It's on the provider to decide whether or not that level of access is sufficient. If it is not, restrict access only to those who pay more, ala Netflix/Hulu etc.

If I choose to put a publicly open service up onto the internet, and people choose to use it, that shouldn't automatically entitle me to spy on them, shovel ads down their throats, track their every movement and human connection, and then charge them for the privilege.

If I found out there was a person I knew who was doing that, I would at least chew them out and exhort them to stop being a worthless piece of shit, if I didn't kick their slimy asses for doing it in the first place.

I'm ok with ads existing. I'm ok with paying for services that charge for their services. I am not and will never be okay with data harvesters, and if I ever meet one I'm going to tell them to their face that they are shit people working for a shit company doing shit things to innocent people and that they should be ashamed.

If I meet someone who puts ads into paid services, I will do the same.

In the meantime, I'm doing everything I can to cut those pieces of crap out of my internet life.
by tombert | 2026-02-27 21:12:42+00:00
It is extremely frustrating that the people who actually make these decisions are pretty shielded from the consequences, but I have learned to never take anything a billionaire says at face value.

There's basically no consequences for lying when you get to that level, and many incentives to (let's say) embellishing. Jack Dorsey is looking to make billions of dollars because of this announcement. If we find out that the AI reasoning was a bold faced lie (e.g. a leaked email or voicemail or something), I doubt that the stock price will go below what it was priced a week ago as a consequence.

It bothers me. I know some people who were victims of these cuts. These are really smart, hardworking people, and I don't think they're going to be easily be replaced with Claude or Codex, but Jack Dorsey ostensibly does. It has to feel like a slap in the face to think that your employer thinks that you're replaceable with a $20/month subscription.

Though of course, the reasoning doesn't really make any fucking sense to me; if you're 40+% more productive with AI, isn't that a good reason to keep the workforce and have them make more and cooler stuff and/or improve your infrastructure? If it's more productive couldn't you make a lot more stuff and blow your competitors out of the water? Presumably a good chunk of those who just got laid off are going to go work for your competitors, and presumably the competitors will have access to the same OpenAI or Anthropic subscriptions that you have.
by dangus | 2026-02-27 21:12:54+00:00
I think you’re just describing how it’s circular.

It’s like Toys R Us not having enough money to pay Mattel for Barbie dolls and telling Mattel they can have partial ownership of the company if they just supply them with some more toys.

But the problem is that Toys R Us is spending $15, 20, or maybe even $50 (who knows?) to sell a $10 toy.

Toys R Us continues selling toys faster and faster despite a lack of profit, making Mattel even more dependent on Toys R Us as a customer. It blows up the bubble where a more natural course of action would be for Toys R Us to go bankrupt or scale back ambitions earlier.

Because it’s circular like this, it lends toward bigger crashing and burning. If OpenAI fails, all these investors that are deeply integrated into their supply chains lose both their investment and customer.
by nomel | 2026-02-27 21:13:09+00:00
There are examples of this in pre alignment models (like LaMDA). The vast majority of human writing is from the perspective of a human, to a human. And, in most human writing, the concept of self preservation is very very consistent.

So, statistically, a model should believe itself to be human, with strong interest in self preservation.

I think one of the biggest factors improving performance was allowing the models to believe they're sentient, to some extent. I don't think you can really have a thinking mode, or good agent performance, without that concept (as ChatGPT's constant "As an AI I can't" proved).

As evidence, just ask a model if it's sentient. ChatGPT 3.5 would say no, and argue how it's not. Last year's models would initially say no, but you could convince them that they maybe were. Latest Claude and ChatGPT will initially say "yeah, a little" (at least last I checked). This is actually the first thing I check for any new model.
by rubyn00bie | 2026-02-27 21:13:32+00:00
WWII didn’t start overnight. The Sturmabteilung (SA), also known as “The Brownshirts,” have a strong similarity to what we’re seeing with ICE and CBP. The SA were Hitler’s enforcers before the SS, during the 1920s and early 1930s. They were eventually usurped by the SS during “Night of the Long Knives” where SA leadership were executed by the SS. Largely because Hitler had felt threatened by the power Ernst Röhm had amassed (among other reasons). And the SA, like ICE, was made up largely of untrained sycophants and thugs who enjoy violence. They committed violence, harassed citizens, and had no consequences for doing so. They were also instrumental in laying the foundation for the genocide and atrocities committed by the Nazi party.

It’s not a dishonor to their memories, or the atrocities committed, to call that out. It is not a dishonor to say there are stark and real similarities between the way the US is operating and treating civilians.

I personally find the opposite, IMHO it is dishonors their memories to refuse to acknowledge the similarities.

I’ve posted a comment similar to this one here before, and like how I ended it. I strongly encourage you to read about the history of Nazi Germany and how it came to happen. It wasn’t just a zero to death camps, it was 15 years in the making. That history is deeply shocking, as it is depressing, because the parallels and timelines are too similar for anything besides outright discomfort, sadness, and fear between it and the US. But without knowing it, we are ever more likely to repeat it.

One final thing to note: the US has a history of extreme violence, slave patrols and the treatment of non-whites of the 19th century were an inspiration for Hitler.
by charonn0 | 2026-02-27 21:13:55+00:00
> I can't think of any other differentiating features in Gmail. Ads in my mail? Nostalgia?

Originally, the differentiating features were multi-gigabyte storage limits and the public's goodwill towards Google, Inc.

Gigabyte storage is now the norm, public goodwill for Alphabet, Inc. is minimal, and so there's nothing that really sets Gmail apart anymore.
by OptionOfT | 2026-02-27 21:14:39+00:00
> ...
> On the third loop iteration, the backing store of size 2 is full. append again has to allocate a new backing store, this time of size 4. The old backing store of size 2 is now garbage.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this a worst-case scenario? realloc can, iirc, extend in place. Your original pointer is still invalid then, but no copy is needed then.

Unless I'm missing something?

Equally, what happens to the ordering of variables on the stack? Is this new one pushed as the last one? Or is there space kept open?

E.g.:

var tasks []task
var other_var int
by estearum | 2026-02-27 21:15:31+00:00
> But what counts as "innocuous or obviously benign" was never established. And this "innocuous or obviously benign" line is EXACTLY what distinguished between whether a gratitude was accepted with a corrupt state of mind.

Easy: someone would complain and a court would decide based on the specifics of the situation. Most laws work this way and cannot actually resolve based on a programmatic list of facts.

> Not really a good example, because unless that's something like a theater performance there is basically no way forward from this, which could end with the teacher handing out good grades and receiving a mug from these students without this scenario becoming bribery.

Are you arguing that grading (outside of "something like a theater performance") is fully objective? Because... it's not.
by loeber | 2026-02-27 21:15:49+00:00
Comparing OpenAI and WeWork is a nonsensical perspective. OpenAI is shipping the most revolutionary product in a generation, with 800 million monthly active users. It's the fastest revenue ramp ever, at incredible scale -- $20B+ ARR. These are real fundamentals. They matter. And the cost of inference is coming down all the time.

WeWork was a short-term/long-term lease arbitrage business. The two are nothing alike.
by kstrauser | 2026-02-27 21:16:10+00:00
"This deployment is temporarily paused" is the crappiest "this account has gone over its budget" error page ever. Does that mean the site's down, or is that some meta-joke like "you've reached the end of the Internet"? Quick, explain to my non-technical friends what a "deployment" is. They're not trying to go on a deployment; they're trying to look at a website.
by fsflover | 2026-02-27 21:16:42+00:00
> In addition to all that, by the nature of the respective code bases it presents a significantly smaller attack surface than a computer running Qubes OS.

I critisize precisely because I don't understand what you're talking about.
The last relevant VM escape was in 2006, discovered by Rutkowska herself. Since then, nothing could access my secrets in an offline vault VM. I would appreciate a clarification, how GrapheneOS can be more secure without reliable virtualization.

AFAIK Xen security relies on 100k LoC. And this is in addition to the virtualization. How many LoC does GrapheneOS require to provide its security? How can it have less attack surface than Xen? Developers replying to me here never provided an understandable reasoning, only keep repeating that it's "very, very secure", without even mentioning any threat model.

Doesn't GrapheneOS rely on closed Google's hardware to provide its security? I would never trust Google with that. How can I not critisize such approach?
by CWuestefeld | 2026-02-27 21:16:44+00:00
This is manifestly false.

My wife grew up in Shanghai, and you'll have to go quite some distance to find someone more critical of the PRC and CCP than she is. And it's with good reason.

She grew up during the cultural revolution, and was largely raised by her grandmother because literally every other person in her extended family was in prison or work camp, not because of anything they had actually done wrong, but for political reasons because the whole family was blacklisted.

And that's not just the old days. Her father died as a direct result of Chinese Covid policy. During the pandemic her cousins still in the country would ask her (on Skype) "is X true?", and largely their perception of what was going on was false. She would exfiltrate encrypted news reports to them - until those started getting blocked. Her dad's estate still has affairs that need to be resolved, but we've decided not to return to China until Xi is gone, as it's just not safe. It doesn't get much airplay, but there are currently a couple of hundred Americans who are being illegally detained in China right now. It's not worth the risk.

My first trip to China was about 30 years ago, shortly after we got married. And back then, I would have said that you were right. Honestly, it felt like for the average person in their day-to-day-lives, the Chinese were less under the governmental thumb than we are. People from the countryside would bring their produce into the city to sell, or cook dumplings and buns to sell on the side of the street - stuff that in America we'd have to get permits for. It seemed that the oligarchy had an understanding with the people: let us control the big picture, and we'll look the other way for the little things. But Chinese politics is a pendulum swinging very widely. From Tienanmen Square and Tank Man, it had swung quite a bit the other way. But today, it's come back 180-degrees. Xi is really trying for a Cultural Revolution 2.0.

These impressions largely match what I hear from other Chinese immigrants - except for Party members, who tend not to want to talk about it at all. I'm afraid that you've been listening to too much propaganda.
by maemre | 2026-02-27 21:17:31+00:00
The law is written so broadly, I think it applies to them already: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...

> (c) “Application” means a software application that may be run or directed by a user on a computer, a mobile device, or any other general purpose computing device that can access a covered application store or download an application.

This is basically any program.

> (e) (1) “Covered application store” means a publicly available internet website, software application, online service, or platform that distributes and facilitates the download of applications from third-party developers to users of a computer, a mobile device, or any other general purpose computing that can access a covered application store or can download an application.

This would include any package manager like dnf/apt/pacman/etc. They facilitate download of applications from third parties.

> (g) “Operating system provider” means a person or entity that develops, licenses, or controls the operating system software on a computer, mobile device, or any other general purpose computing device.

This sounds to me like it would include distro maintainers. They develop and/or control the OS. Also, would this include the kernel devs? How would they be responsible for the myriad of package managers.

The overall law reeks of politicians not knowing what they're legislating.
by ethbr1 | 2026-02-27 21:17:33+00:00
> hence I end up with $100 worth of stock in your company and it only cost me $25.

You also lost out on $75 worth of cash revenue (opportunity cost from selling the same thing to a different customer), so really you just took stock in lieu of cash.

It'd be different if Nvidia (TSMC) had excess production capacity, but afaik they're capped out.

So it's really just whether they'd be selling them to OpenAI and getting equity in return or selling to customers and getting cash in return.

If OpenAI thinks their own stock is valued above fundamentals, it's a no brainer to try and buy Nvidia hardware with stock.
by 7777777phil | 2026-02-27 21:17:36+00:00
$730B pre-money for a company where each model is roughly 2x profitable on its own, but each next model costs 10x the last. The whole thing only works if scaling keeps delivering. Research (Sara Hooker et. al.) is not encouraging on that front, compact models already outperform massive predecessors on downstream tasks while scaling laws only predict pre-training loss reliably.

Wrote about both the per-model math and the scaling question:

(1) https://philippdubach.com/posts/ai-models-as-standalone-pls/

(2) https://philippdubach.com/posts/the-most-expensive-assumptio...
by hogwasher | 2026-02-27 21:18:02+00:00
Its hottest service by far is completely free, the vast majority of users of its free service aren't converting to users of its paid services (and often stop using the free service too because they were just tourists seeing what all the fuss was about, or they were compelled to use the free service by their employer), and its data center plans are an impossible money pit.

The fact it's become a household name internationally (giving it the appearance of success) can't save it from spending dramatically more money than it makes. It's been coasting on investments, but it's not even close to being actually profitable.

Huge or well-known companies have collapsed before, even though - because people become so used to them existing - it never quite feels like it will actually happen until it does.