MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dmfdmf | 2026-02-24 17:18:02+00:00
Yes, you can call it "finitist" if you like but that is an error too. Define "exist".

Not "most" but all real numbers are similar to Pi, i.e. they are symbols that stand for an infinite process to calculate a rational number. Both irrational numbers like Pi, e, etc. and reals exists and are legit and useful math concepts but infinite precision does not exist "in the wild" only in your mind as an abstraction. In any actual calculation or measurement your infinite series must stop and the dedekind cut must be made.

The ghost of departed quantities still haunts math. Is Pi 3.14 or 3.1416? Mathematically, it is neither and both because math intentionally abstracts from the precision of the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle. These open-ended (infinite) processes are ultimately used to define a rational number, a ratio of integers.The finitist -vs- infinitist is a false binary which ignore that actual measurement must use rational numbers.
by bikenaga | 2026-02-24 17:18:08+00:00
"Hassler" apparently has a technical meaning here ...

Full title: "Negative social ties as emerging risk factors for accelerated aging, inflammation, and multimorbidity"

"Abstract. Negative social ties, or 'hasslers,' are pervasive yet understudied components of social networks that may accelerate biological aging and morbidity. Using ego-centric network data and DNA methylation-based biological aging clocks (i.e., DunedinPACE and age-accelerated GrimAge2) from saliva from a state representative probability sample in Indiana, we examine how negative social ties are associated with accelerated biological aging and a broad range of health outcomes, including inflammation and multimorbidity. Negative relationships are not rare within close relationships, as nearly 30% of individuals report having at least one hassler in their network. These hasslers tend to occupy peripheral network positions and are more likely to be connected through weak, uniplex ties. Importantly, exposure to negative social ties follows patterns of social and health vulnerability, with women, daily smokers, people in poorer health, and those with adverse childhood experiences more likely to report having hasslers in their networks. Having more hasslers is associated with accelerated biological aging in both rate and cumulative burden: Each additional hassler corresponds to approximately 1.5% faster pace of aging and roughly 9 mo older biological age. Moreover, not all hasslers exert the same influence; kin and nonkin hasslers show detrimental associations, whereas spouse hasslers do not. Finally, a greater number of hasslers is associated with multiple adverse health outcomes beyond epigenetic aging. These findings together highlight the critical role of negative social ties in biological aging as chronic stressors and the need for interventions that reduce harmful social exposures to promote healthier aging trajectories."
by EQmWgw87pw | 2026-02-24 17:18:15+00:00
Hesitating to answer a question that may have nuance is not being “ambivalent”. He literally says “there’s multiple questions implicit here” in response to the question asked of him. I genuinely think people like you making sweeping assumptions about others are way more dangerous. People who refuse to critically think or analyze a situation and jump to conclusions.
by lesuorac | 2026-02-24 17:18:32+00:00
> It can take a long time just to source all the records of what's being argued over,

It seems to me that if you can't timely procure your own records in a court case the case should be allowed to proceed with any assumptions based on them in your opponent's favor. Whats really the difference between taking 2+ years to procure a document and deleting that document?
by jacquesm | 2026-02-24 17:18:43+00:00
Funny. We had a security guard that had memorized all the faces of the employees. If he knew you he'd buzz you through. If he didn't know you you'd have to be vouched for by someone that he did know or by showing your credentials. By day #3 he'd know you, and he also somehow knew when you were no longer with the company.

There never was a line and there were 1400 people in those buildings.

I never realized how incredibly that guy's contribution was but this story made it perfectly clear.

Also, I don't actually buy the story as related here. It would seem to me that within minutes of that queue building up the turnstiles + card system would be disabled because something clearly was not working.
by killerstorm | 2026-02-24 17:18:54+00:00
This seems to be too coarse-grained to be useful: all sciency content will be "analytical" and associate with sources like ArXiv.

But there might be bad, malicious articles on ArXiv, so it doesn't really say anything about veracity.

Perhaps this might help to detect some problems like prompt injection - but then it might be more interesting to see those examples.
by gigel82 | 2026-02-24 17:19:09+00:00
Besides the privacy argument (the claim that the UID can't be used for tracking via derivation is shaky at best, and not much different than MS's EK), there is the freedom argument: as in, who owns the device - the user, or Apple?

If Apple can remotely lock the device that an user bought mistakenly (for example because some corporation somewhere fat-fingers some entries), that fundamentally means the user doesn't own the device they bought and paid for. Add on top DRM and all the other evil that comes along with attestation.

Plus, you can still disable TPM2 (if you don't want to run Windows on your machine), you can never disable Apple's implementation.
by jazz9k | 2026-02-24 17:19:10+00:00
"The release of the files is also cause for concern because so much of the raw investigative material in them — untold layers of hearsay, unverified accusations and vague circumstantial connections — ought not be released for the public to pick over."

The only reason people wanted these released, is the hope they could use it to ruin Trump's career. Now that there has been essentially nothing implicating him besides some randos in 2020 calling in to the FBI with complete bullshit, the same weapon is being used against Democrats and their major donors.

This is why Biden didn't release these files. Nobody truly cares about the victims, only weaponizing it against their political enemies.
by umeedsto | 2026-02-24 17:19:22+00:00
I built a Chrome extension for MathGPT so students can solve math problems *without leaving the page they’re on*.

The idea is simple: tab switching breaks focus. A lot of students are reading notes, homework, or a practice page, then jump between tabs to get help. I wanted the help to stay inside the browser flow.

*What it does*

* Solve math from typed or pasted text
* Solve from screenshots / image uploads
* Give step-by-step explanations
* Keep the workflow in the same browsing session (less context switching)

*Links*

* Product page: https://mathgpt.today/extension
* Chrome Web Store: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/mathgpt-math-solver...

I’m actively improving it, especially around:

* screenshot/snipping UX
* speed
* side panel / popup usability
* explanation quality for harder problems

Would love feedback from students, teachers, and builders:

* What part of the flow feels slow or distracting?
* Would you prefer side panel only, popup only, or both?
* What math topics need better support first?
by 7402 | 2026-02-24 17:19:25+00:00
When I simply asked the question, the model failed, as did most of the others. It's a smaller model, that I could run locally, so obviously not as powerful.

I wanted to see if a prompt would do better that pulled into the analysis 1) a suggestion to not take every question at face value, and 2) to include knowledge of the structure of riddles.

These are part of the "context" of humans, so I speculated that maybe that was something missing from the LLM's reasoning unless explictly included.
by snowhale | 2026-02-24 17:19:25+00:00
the airport-as-island design probably helps more than people realize -- single terminal, no inter-terminal baggage transfers, and being purpose-built means the baggage sorter was designed into the infrastructure rather than bolted on later. most major airports lose bags on intra-airport transfers between terminals, not on flights. kansai just... doesn't have that problem by construction.
by zer00eyz | 2026-02-24 17:19:44+00:00
> "after its code was found tied to U.S. surveillance efforts" part is new ... Although most of us probably assumed it was true before too.

This makes me feel VERY old.

641A: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

Retroactive telecom immunity: https://www.eff.org/press/archives/2008/10/17

The government spying on what you do has been old news for 20 years. Snowden should not have been a shocking revelation to any one but it was, and that was 13 years ago.

Its less of a "assumed it was true" and more of a "oh look another one, not shocking".
by jodrellblank | 2026-02-24 17:20:01+00:00
> "Or a crane that will stall and drop its load randomly. It would have been sent to the scrapyard on the first day."

The only reason you have the concept that engines can "stall" is because people have bought engines that can stall by the hundreds of millions, instead of the earliest people refusing to buy them at all and all waiting for the perfect engine.

Container ships can sink with all the containers lost at sea. Still used.

Steam train engines could explode, derailing the train and killing some passengers and employees. Still used.

Buildings can collapse. Still used.

Pneumatic tyres can burst. Still used.

Here[1] is Tom Scott using a recreation walking crane from the 13th century, a technology going back to Roman times, which has no evidence that it ever had brakes on it historically. Look at that and tell me you think the rope never snappped, the wood never broke, the walker never tripped and the thing never unreeled the load back to the ground with the walker severely injured, because if it went wrong builders would refuse to use it? No chance.

Nothing functions like you're claiming; that's where we get the saying "don't let perfect be the enemy of good enough", as soon as stuff is better than not having it, people want to make use of it.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pk9v3m7Slv8
by kasey_junk | 2026-02-24 17:20:17+00:00
The reporting isn’t the drawbacks of being public, it’s the investors.

They get to _choose_ who they let in if they are private (by definition).

They don’t need the public’s money and don’t want the headache of dealing with the public. I’d completely agree if I were them.

Disclaimer: ex-stripe who is still an investor.
by ghc | 2026-02-24 17:20:27+00:00
That's actually brilliant! Most of my classes only taught what tools were needed to accomplish coursework, not generally useful tools. Even our OS class focused on the workings of the kernel, not the Unix philosophy and how it influenced what tools were included, and how to use them. Then again, 20 years ago the year of the linux desktop was much farther away than it is today...
by colesantiago | 2026-02-24 17:21:04+00:00
So someone who inherits $100 million (11 year old or not) doesn't have take the exam, but someone who knows about the industry inside out has take an exam to participate?

Seems "fair" to be honest.

I have a few friends that that have told me about certain companies they would like to invest in and they are knowledgeable about but they cannot access them but I can and not give them any shares.
by adrian_b | 2026-02-24 17:21:10+00:00
I agree with your point that you can already get some hairy explosions with "easy" to understand loops.

I also agree with you that even if have not use the word "flowchart" that was what I meant, i.e. the use of unrestricted GOTO results in the most general kind of flowchart, without any constraints. I also agree that with more or less effort any flowchart, i.e. any program can be understood, but the goal of a programmer is to never make a program harder to understand than strictly necessary for solving the given problem.

My main point however, is that allowing backwards GOTO and allowing loops is not the same thing, which is the reason why Knuth in his recommendations of how to combine GOTO with structured programming and the language MESA allowed loops, but not backwards GOTO.

A loop is terminated by a backwards GOTO, but the pairs formed by the implicit label from the beginning of a loop and the backwards GOTO from the end of a loop behave like pairs of parentheses, i.e. they may only be nested and they may not be interleaved.

An arbitrary backwards GOTO does not have this restriction, i.e. it can jump in the middle of an earlier loop, which is why it can create much more complex flowcharts.

On the other hand, unlike with backwards GOTO the use of forwards GOTO makes a program more clear than any alternatives that have been proposed. For example, several languages use loop labels to enable the termination of multiple nested loops.

This is worse than with GOTO. The loop termination statement must include the label of the loop that must be terminated, e.g. it must look like "break LABEL_7" or "exit LABEL_7. This is no improvement over "goto LABEL_7".

Moreover when you try to follow the flow of control in such a program, from the loop terminating instruction you must go back, frequently to another page, because you have several levels of loops, and then from the label you must scan forward for a matching end of loop. This is significantly slower than just going from the loop terminating instruction to the point where it actually transfers the control.
by adamzwasserman | 2026-02-24 17:21:26+00:00
The commonality breaks down at value assignment. You hear an unexpected sound and have a threat/delight assessment in 170ms. Faster than Google serves a first byte. You do this with virtually no data.

An LLM doesn't assign value to anything; it predicts tokens. The interesting question isn't whether we share a process with LLMs, it's whether the thing that makes your decisions matter to you, moral weight, spontaneous motivation, can emerge from a system that has no survival stake in its own outputs. I wrote about this a few years ago as "the consciousness gap": https://hackernoon.com/ai-and-the-consciousness-gap-lr4k3yg8
by bsza | 2026-02-24 17:21:26+00:00
https://www.pcmag.com/news/godot-game-engine-is-drowning-in-...

https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/01/overrun-with-ai-slo...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/LLVM-Human-In-The-Loop

https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on...

Just off the top of my head, I bet a lot of other repos are going through the same.
I built an AI browser with prompt-injection defense at 16 on an i5 with 8GB RAM
by latestinssan | 2026-02-24 17:21:29+00:00
URL: https://github.com/Preet3627/Comet-AI

TEXT:
Hey HN, I'm Preet, 16 years old, and I've been building Comet AI Browser for the past 2 months while preparing for JEE.
I want to be upfront about what this is and what it isn't.
What it is:
A cross-platform AI browser (Windows/macOS/Linux/Android/iOS) with a security architecture I couldn't find anywhere else. Most AI browsers trust LLM guardrails to prevent prompt injection. Comet doesn't — it enforces isolation at the system level:

The agent perceives pages via OCR only, never parsing raw HTML/JS. Injected scripts are invisible to it by design.
A syntactic firewall strips dangerous primitives (rm -rf, powershell.exe, sudo) before anything reaches the LLM.
Native OS actions require explicit human authorization — the AI generates intent, not execution.

I demonstrated a live prompt injection attack against it on YouTube: https://youtu.be/PRcE_O1oXIE
Benchmarks (all on the same i5-U, 8GB RAM, SATA SSD I developed on):

Speedometer 3.1: 12ms mean, ±1ms variance
BrowserAudit security score: 398/409
Adblock score: 100%

The Speedometer result surprised me too. The ±1ms variance matters more than the raw number — it means the Chromium CEF integration isn't fighting Electron overhead under load.
What's working:

Multi-provider AI routing (GPT, Claude, Gemini, Groq, Ollama local)
AI Action Chain engine with multi-hop research and memory persistence
Cross-device sync via WiFi/Bluetooth/QR — phone controls desktop, home screen widgets trigger desktop actions
Cross-app OCR clicking (natural language commands work across all applications)
8-layer OS authorization with zero-knowledge cloud verification for dangerous operations
CI/CD pipeline producing 5 platform binaries per release

What it isn't:
Production ready. It's a functional beta with known stability issues (context loss between agent steps, some empty extractions). The Electron base is also on the roadmap to replace with native Chromium.
Built on: Electron 40 + Next.js 16 + React 19 (desktop), Flutter/Dart (mobile)
MIT licensed, all source on GitHub.
Happy to answer questions about the security architecture specifically — that's the part I'm most uncertain whether I got right, and honest feedback from people who know this space would genuinely help.
by spwa4 | 2026-02-24 17:21:45+00:00
> If you look at copyright law, with its provisions like 70 years after the author's death, the Disney extension, ...

Sure but once again we have to conclude that "justice" according to the outcome US (and European) courts produced means YOU AND I get charged $30000 per copyright violation they catch you. Yet, it is apparently also entirely just, according to judges, that OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Alibaba, META, ... don't get charged anything for violating copyright on a scale so large it's difficult to even imagine.

So why would anyone follow the law or opinions of courts, congress, ... unless physically forced? As opposed to finding any creative way out of it? Obviously the outcome courts explicitly chose does not follow either mine, or US courts' own version of justice. They are just a way to guarantee big company and state profits using violence, and literally nothing more.
by artisin | 2026-02-24 17:21:50+00:00
My guess, is it boils down to legal liability. Every time I look into repurposing my old smartphones, I inevitably go down the "well, it probably won't burn my house down… but. " It's the same reason why I don't use Molex-to-SATA power adapters, even though I could save a few bucks. Regardless, Samsung ghosting iFixit is inexcusable.
by CydeWeys | 2026-02-24 17:21:57+00:00
I'm not really sure what the point of this article is. Yes, obviously, you need to implement systems that are secure and performant so that you don't get a backed-up line of people waiting an hour just to get into the office in the morning. But that's a notably rollout; millions of employees go into badge-in-required offices every day without issue. And it's kind of hard to imagine running a large office while lacking such basic physical security as "keep unauthorized people out of the building". Having electronic badges and readers is table stakes.
by bdangubic | 2026-02-24 17:22:05+00:00
this makes sense but EOD say you are in charge of recruiting, you are team lead and ultimately the buck stops with you - you are hiring for entry-level SWE position. you have two candidates from the same school, one is a CS grad and one has a degree in Biology or Chemistry. all else being similar-ish who do you hire? I can tell you from my experience that CS grad will get the nod. one of the best developers I have ever worked with had a degree in Physics and no "formal" hacking training so after my time in the industry I will carefully review the candidate through and through but I think overall the CS grad will get the nod. maybe things will be different in the future, our industry is rapidly changing in front of our eyes but as a Dad I can tell you that if my kid wanted a career like mine (God I hope not :) ) I would advise her to get a CS-ish degree
by adamzwasserman | 2026-02-24 17:22:12+00:00
The substrate argument is the wrong hill for Pollan to die on. The stronger version isn't "meat vs. silicon" — it's that brains are value-making machines operating under evolutionary pressure, and no current AI architecture has anything analogous to that. You can simulate the outputs of valuation without having the mechanism. The question isn't whether consciousness can exist in another substrate, it's whether you can get there without the thing that actually drives human cognition: spontaneous assignment of moral and survival value with no prior programming.
by kevinfiol | 2026-02-24 17:22:16+00:00
Usually, the strategy is to draw a false equivalence to the 1960 presidential election, specifically the recount in Hawaii [1][2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1960_United_States_presidentia...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_fake_electors_plot#1960_...
by jasonlotito | 2026-02-24 17:22:24+00:00
> Yet they refused to codify the "promise" it wouldn't be used for under 400k income families.

This is a lie. They didn't refuse. They didn't have it codified because they were trying to figure out how to define that. For example, one of the challenges IRS was having was someone reporting $390,000 but they actually earned $450,000. How do you deteremine that without an audit? Do you need a waiver? How does that get resolved without breaking the promise.

> Look at what they do, not what they say.

They were actively working on how to respect the promise in a reasonable way.
by AnthonyMouse | 2026-02-24 17:22:36+00:00
> You're saying auditing megacorps is hard, but somehow more staff won't help? I don't buy it.

It's not so much that it's hard, it's that it has a lower return on investment, because the IRS gets money from finding mistakes or intentional fraud. Megacorps have entire legal teams dedicated to preventing those things from happening, while lowering their taxes by finding lawful ways of reducing their taxes to almost nothing by pouring over the unfathomable complexity of the tax code to find obscure credits or chain together the right sequence of things so their profits end up in a jurisdiction where they're not taxed.

If you audit them you spend an enormous amount of resources because their accounts are so complicated and then only get money if they screwed up, which they're less likely to have done than someone with fewer lawyers, and even then it will typically be something like you found a credit they weren't allowed to take and they owe $50,000 but the thing where they have a hundred billion in revenue and 0.2% of that in taxable profit was all by the book.

Meanwhile smaller entities are far more likely to have screwed up because they have fewer resources to navigate the complexity of the tax code, and their accounts are less complicated, which makes it easier for the IRS to find mistakes and therefore get money. So if you give the IRS more resources and tell them to do audits to maximize recovery, those are the people they audit.

But that also involves auditing a ton of individuals and small businesses who didn't do anything wrong in order to find the ones that did, and they rightfully hate that because nobody is paying them for the actual costs of the audit where the IRS found nothing, which is why they keep lobbying to stop the IRS from getting more resources to do that to them. And if the IRS had to pay the taxpayer's side of the audit costs then their "recovery efficiency rate" would go way down.
by selridge | 2026-02-24 17:22:50+00:00
That's all true but it will fall before "[t]he agent has ambient access because it makes it more capable". Folks can shake their heads or worry or whatever, but feet are going to beat to where it is sweet. Users will follow capability.

It's why people are hooking Open Claw up to stuff and letting it rip--putting it into a sandbox in a VM in a jail is like getting a brand new smartphone and setting it on Airplane Mode first thing.