MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by weatherlite | 2026-02-24 07:07:13+00:00
There are very very few people wired like Tao; how many child prodigies like that are there ? He seems to be one in a million but its pretty much impossible to assess IQ at those levels.
Sure, it's not enough. YOu need the obsession for math, but lets not trivialize his intellectual ability - he's definitely not only top 1% that would just put him in the smartest 2-3 kids in his class. No, he was probably among the smartest 10-20 kids of his age group in the whole United States.
by wickedsight | 2026-02-24 07:07:56+00:00
> Do you think 30% of your friends or family members can't answer this question? If not, do you think your friends or family are all better than the general population?

That actually would be quite feasible. Intelligence seems to be heritable and people will usually find friends that communicate on their level. So it wouldn't be odd for someone who is smarter than the general population to have friends and family who are too.
by panstromek | 2026-02-24 07:08:00+00:00
Lot of DOM APIs are like that. You have methods like element.[parent|children]() which implies circular structure, and then you have APIs like element.click(), which emits a click event that bubbles through the DOM - which means that element has to have some mutable reference to the DOM state. Or even element.remove(), which seems like a super weird api to have on an element of a collection, from Rust API design point of view.

You can model these with reference counting, but this turned out unfeasible in browsers. There's a great talk from when Blink (Chrome) transitioned from reference counting to GC, which provides a lot more details about these problems in practice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uxmEyd6uxo

> I'd get it if they were writing the UI in this, but the rest of this post is about the JS engine.

I think this might be the reason they started with the JS engine and not with some more fundamental browser structures. JS object model has these problems, too, but the engine has to solve them in more generic way. All JS objects can just be modeled as some JSObject class/struct where this is handled on the engine level.

DOM and other browser structures are different because the engine has to understand them, so the browser developers have to interact with the GC manually and if you watch the talk above, you'll see that it's quite involved to do even in C++, let alone in Rust, which puts a bunch of restrictions on top of that.
by snowhale | 2026-02-24 07:08:06+00:00
sympy handles the common cases well but there's still a gap on things like definite integrals with special functions, differential equations with complicated boundary conditions, or formal power series to arbitrary order. for most practical LLM use cases you're probably right that sympy is enough. wolfram's real edge is the breadth of its mathematical knowledge base, not just the CAS engine -- knowledge of special identities, physical constants, unit conversions. that's harder to replicate.
Ask HN: How do you prove a privileged infra change ran as approved?
by ahmedmostafa16 | 2026-02-24 07:08:36+00:00
A Terraform apply, a DB migration, a secret rotation, a break glass access grant. These are the kinds of mutations that can cause real damage if they go wrong, or if you later need to explain exactly what happened.

In many environments, evidence of these changes ends up scattered across logs, CI systems, ticketing tools, and control planes. Reconstructing a single change months later can mean querying multiple systems that may not retain state indefinitely.

I am exploring a simple idea: treating each privileged mutation as something that emits a portable, signed receipt. The receipt would tie together what was authorized, who approved it, what ran, and what the resulting state was. The goal is that it could be verified offline, without querying the original system.

There is a draft spec here: https://github.com/reciprium/spec

It defines a receipt format using JSON Schema, CDDL, and Protobuf, with test vectors and worked examples for Terraform, GitOps workflows, database migrations, secret rotation, and break glass access.

I would appreciate perspective from people who operate infrastructure at scale:

1. How do you currently record that a privileged change was authorized, executed as approved, and verified afterward?

2. Could you reconstruct a complete audit of a specific change from six months ago without relying on your CI or control plane?

3. During audits or incidents, how do you demonstrate that a change matched its approval?

4. Would a signed, portable receipt for each mutation materially simplify anything for you, or does this problem already feel solved?

5. Where in your workflow would something like this naturally attach, if at all?

I am trying to understand whether the problem exists in the form described, or whether practitioners have converged on better patterns. Critical feedback is especially useful.
by jeroenhd | 2026-02-24 07:08:58+00:00
Someone else here suggested having an AI write a filter driver to intercept hardware communications on Windows and try to write a driver based on that, I presume macOS can also be coerced into loading such a driver?

That approach could work, though it'll require a lot of brute-forcing from the AI and loading a lot of broken kernels to see if they work. Plus, if audio drivers are involved, you'd probably blow out the speakers at least once during testing.

Still, if you throw enough money at Claude, I think this approach is feasible to get things booting at the very least. The question then becomes how one would reverse-engineer the slop so human hands can patch things to work well afterwards, which may take as much time as having humans write the code/investigate hardware traces in the first place.
by AnthonyMouse | 2026-02-24 07:09:50+00:00
> they refer to "device-based" age verification, where you verify your identity once to say, Google or whoever. Then your device proves your age. Fewer middlemen. One source of truth.

This is still an absurdity. You don't need the device to prove the age of the user to the service, you need the service to provide the age restriction of the content to the device. Then the device knows if the user is an adult or a kid and thereby knows whether to display the content, and you don't need Google to know that.
by LiamPowell | 2026-02-24 07:10:08+00:00
I would absolutely love to hear your reasoning that leads to type systems being considered a "restriction of end-user computing freedoms".

For those that don't know what trusted types are: Simply put, it splits the string type in to unsanitised_string_from_user and safe_escaped_string where unsafe strings can not be used in function parameters that only take a safe string That's heavily simplifying of course, but it's the basic idea.
by daniel_roedler | 2026-02-24 07:10:25+00:00
You’re making a valid point. There probably isn’t a silver bullet that makes an autonomous agent completely secure. But depending on the use case, you can still meaningfully reduce risk.
Security is often about process and layered defenses rather than perfect isolation. The goal isn’t to eliminate compromise entirely, but to reduce the attack surface and limit the blast radius when something goes wrong.
For example, if an OpenClaw agent needs to process emails, one strategy could be to introduce a locked-down preprocessing subagent. That agent would have minimal permissions: no write access to long-term memory, no API keys, and no external capabilities beyond parsing and classification. Only messages that pass this stage would be forwarded to the agent that can actually take actions.
Is this 100% secure? Obviously not. A sufficiently clever injection might still find a path through. But separating responsibilities and privileges makes exploitation significantly harder and limits what an attacker can achieve even if one component is compromised.
by nananana9 | 2026-02-24 07:10:57+00:00
"I don't like having my time wasted" does not imply anything about one's skill in a field.

It's not 1995. Most of the internet is noise, and if you're showcasing something it's good form to immediately show your readers what actually is, and why they may or may not care about it.

Not showing the syntax of a programming language on the homepage of a programming language is poor communication. If you're OK with that - great, but not valuing your time and willingness to have it wasted in no way implies that you're an "expert".
by petesergeant | 2026-02-24 07:11:10+00:00
You're being down-voted because it's a low-effort comment which comes with a large burden of proof that you've not included. Specifically:

> mozilla is basically a google subsidiary

"Everyone" knows that Mozilla has a heavy financial reliance on Google. So are you bringing this up to suggest that Mozilla also consistently acts to benefit Google and its ad network? If so, where's the proof? If not, what's the point you're making?

> firefox telemetry is almost comparable to chrome

Comparable to Chrome what? Telemetry? Something else? What is Firefox using that data for? In the service of or against users? What's the point you're trying to make? If you're making assertions, where's the proof?

You're making a lot of imprecise comments, most of interpretations of which carry a large burden of proof, and then complaining that people are just down-voting and moving on.
by silisili | 2026-02-24 07:11:47+00:00
An enterprising person, great with children, would see an opportunity to make 72k a year to watch three kids. And another might offer to do it for 60k, and so on.

Regulations prevent that, and kill the free market. Now everyone pays a crapton to some facility where the owner jumped through all the hoops to get certified, while hiring minimum wage people to care for the kids. Not that some aren't great, but is it really a better system?
by jader201 | 2026-02-24 07:12:00+00:00
> “We have no cure. I don’t want to know.”

> If astronomers announced that a large asteroid might strike Earth in twenty years, and that we currently had no way to deflect it, nobody would respond by saying, “Come back when you already have the rocket.”

I don’t think the analogy fits, for a couple reasons.

1. People not wanting to know whether they have Alzheimer’s is because of the fear of a fate worse than death — living with Alzheimer’s.

2. People not wanting to know whether they have Alzheimer’s is not the same was not wanting a way to detect it. As you said, being able to measure it may help lead to a cure/treatment. I doubt people are against improving detection — they may just not want the detection to be applied personally.
by csmantle | 2026-02-24 07:12:22+00:00
> I could recompile it but compiling firefox is a pain in the ...

Would second this. Mach uses Python, and the dependencies they use are a pain whenever no pre-built wheels are available. Especially so when you see that an "optional" Mach dependency for build system telemetry is what busting the configuration (not build) stage...
by rustyhancock | 2026-02-24 07:12:43+00:00
It says "accuracy". For the overall assessment.

I.e. it needs the original 75% accuracy or so and boosts it another 20%.

The problem is that the assessment itself is slow, expensive and requires skill.

What we really want from a test is high specificity (a positive test means you have accuracy) and high sensitivity (if you get a negative test you don't have it).

This is how we can offer screening.
by k310 | 2026-02-24 07:13:08+00:00
This is all about the benefits of mindfulness, which are well known, and concludes with a discussion of how we construct reality and cling to things in a world which is nothing but change, that is, everything is process. Turning around the usual assumptions leads to a different outlook, which can improve one's quality of life substantially, and relationship with others as well.

This is entirely within the Hinayana tradition (use of Pali and so on) and there is, IMO, zero "spiritual" content in it.

Some Buddhists take on symbolic names. Many if not most western names are derived from previous spiritual, historic and mythological names. Mine is. Is yours?

Power and hierarchy almost always corrupt. My own group has no robes, no priests and no temples. Hypocrisy is rampant in every hierarchy because it's so hard for people to use power to serve others without crossing that "golden rule" line. The rarest substance on earth is humility.
by MrOrelliOReilly | 2026-02-24 07:13:23+00:00
I think you might be underrating the value of even that enabling work. Some parents would not have the financial resources to provide those learning materials. And some parents would take a normative stance on how an 8 year old ought to behave.

More importantly, it's not as though individuals like Clements or Erdos was corresponding with Terrence directly to arrange a meeting. His parents clearly played an important role in facilitating and allowing these encounters. That deserves a lot of credit!
by hombre_fatal | 2026-02-24 07:13:23+00:00
On the other hand, a worse implementation in the stdlib can make it harder for the community to crystalize the best third-party option since the stdlib solution doesn't have to "compete in the arena".

Go has some of these.

Maybe a good middle-ground is something like Rust's regex crate where the best third-party solution gets blessed into a first-party package, but it is still versioned separately from the language.
by snowhale | 2026-02-24 07:13:38+00:00
the kill switch framing is interesting because it treats AI features as a coherent unit you'd want to disable together. in practice most AI features in browsers are pretty granular -- autocomplete, summarize page, translate. the users who want to disable AI usually mean 'stop sending my browsing data to a model endpoint,' not 'disable the local spell checker.' a per-feature data-flow disclosure might be more useful than a binary kill switch.
by OneMorePerson | 2026-02-24 07:13:54+00:00
For me it was similar, but I think it was more about a lack of a natural friction. Normally when coding there was the "hit" of seeing something work, but the actually planning/coding/debugging would eventually wear me out, so I'd stop for the day. Now it can all just be endless "hit" of success and nothing that makes me feel tired or annoyed.

The reason I believe this is because I recently went through a really annoying battle with Claude trying to get it to stop being so strict with its sandbox. I wanted it to simply load some sanitized text from a source online, and it just would not do it. The sessions when I was sorting that out were so much easier to stop and moderate than the ones where everything just kept flowing effortlessly.
by TheCapeGreek | 2026-02-24 07:14:15+00:00
PSA to those with family affected by dementia/Alzheimer's at a relatively early age (say <70yo): Get them tested for STDs, specifically Syphilis.

Left untreated for a very long time (decade+), it spreads to the brain and causes dementia among other things. Older generations with stigmas, taboos, or from lower educational backgrounds seem (to me) less likely to get tested, so it seems plausible.

Source: Have recently discovered this myself with a family member from their neurologist.
by JasonADrury | 2026-02-24 07:14:27+00:00
This list is pretty telling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Mexico_most-wanted_drug_l...

They're all dead or captured, you could make a new list like that every 10 years. Things do not improve.

> They make an actual step towards destroying the cartels, and you complain

That's a lie. If this was "an actual step towards destroying the cartels" the countless similar instances in the past would have taken us in that direction, instead the cartels keep growing and not shrinking. There's simply no way a reasonable person could conclude that this is a step towards destroying the cartels.
by aurareturn | 2026-02-24 07:14:30+00:00
I downloaded Figma recently. I've been a Sketch user.

One shocking thing I learned is that you have to generate the HTML/CSS/Javascript first, then Figma will import that into a design file.

Why can't Figma just have an AI to generate the design inside Figma and then have an AI build off of the design?

Why the other way around?
by choeger | 2026-02-24 07:14:32+00:00
That would be great, but Rust relies on compile-time monomorphization for efficiency (very much like C++, if you consider templates polymorphic functions/classes).

This means that any Rust ABI would have to cater for link-time specialization. I think this should be doable, but it would require a solution that's better than just to move the code generation into the linker. Instead, one would need to carefully consider the usage of the "shape" of all parameters of a function.
by mmooss | 2026-02-24 07:14:59+00:00
Another requirement is the emotional capacity at 8 years old to focus, feel confident, and feel safe.

I think that is the main obstacle to most people doing highly effective work and putting in long hours. You hear some call people who don't 'work hard' lazy, but my impression is that it's emotional capacity, and a lot of that comes from family.

I wonder if there is a correlation between prodigies and emotionally stable, healthy, present parents. It's hard to imagine children under a lot of stress - e.g., from abusive parents, highly unreliable parents (e.g., overwhelmed by addictions to drugs), emotionally unstable parents (e.g., narcissists), highly neglectful parents (e.g., who abandon their kids) ... - it's hard to imagine those kids doing what Tao did, regardless of their talent.
by nullsanity | 2026-02-24 07:16:11+00:00
To the guy above who wondered why we just downvote without arguing, here is your reason right here.

Pessimistic arguments that boil down to "everything sucks therefore I'm right, and any argument to the contrary is just naive and juvenile, and therefore lesser"

I can't speak for anyone else, I'm just honestly done with these people. Get off the internet, don't have kids, and die alone feeling smug - but save the rest of us from with your worthless drivel.
by jeroenhd | 2026-02-24 07:16:23+00:00
If I were to design an OS from the ground up today, that's probably the approach I'd take. Separate risky drivers off into virtual machines with limited attack surface and a controlled I/O system so that a hacked driver can't infect the rest of the system. Plus, if the code crashes, the kernel doesn't go down with it.

Windows and Linux have been moving drivers towards userland to deal with kernel instability and security risks but with modern virtualisation capabilities, I think going one step further only makes sense. Windows itself is already using something called "virtualisation based security" to leverage VMs to secure the kernel and this is just the logical next step.

Qubes does this stuff too, though it works with fully-featured Linux kernels rather than minimal driver interfaces, for exactly the same reasons. A hacked wifi driver may be able to inspect and redirect traffic, but it can't do much more than that, which combined with a strong VPN can protect from quite complicated attack scenarios that normal people have no other recourse against.
by andsoitis | 2026-02-24 07:16:58+00:00
> Every AI product is converging on the same interface: a chat box. Maybe a chat box with some tool use. Maybe a chat box with some RAG. But at bottom, a text input and a text output, differentiated by branding and minor UX choices and which model is running underneath.
The chat box won because it ships fast, and Moloch rewards speed over design.
Building a novel interaction paradigm takes months or years of research, iteration, user testing.

Any good examples of AI systems that do not use a chat box as primary input mechanism?
by fc417fc802 | 2026-02-24 07:17:33+00:00
If the metric is publication and citation count and funding is awarded by panels of experts, how is that better than cutting out the flawed metric and continuing to award funding via panels of experts? Either it's a good ol' boys club or it isn't but I don't think a horribly flawed metric is going to change that.

That said, as far as I'm aware those metrics aren't explicitly considered by said panels (NIH for example). Any issue in that regard is presumably due to either unconscious bias or laziness on the part of said experts when exposed to such metrics.
by dijit | 2026-02-24 07:17:40+00:00
there is already so much “space stuff” that launching spacecraft is increasingly difficult.

The next comment will be “but they can have short orbits” but that betrays the fact that they can collide with other objects and if its so cheap we will launch thousands for bandwidth.

As always: technical solutions to political problems is a band-aid and makes everything worse, lets beat our politicians to death (metaphorically) instead.
by raincole | 2026-02-24 07:17:55+00:00
> Compared with the final diagnosis, the pre-biomarker diagnosis was maintained in 71/200 cases (75.5%) (Kappa = 0.576), while the post-biomarker diagnosis was maintained in 189/200 cases (94.5%) (Kappa = 0.906).

Even without this method, the doctors have been able to give diagnosis with 75.5% accuracy (according to the paper's claim).
by bpavuk | 2026-02-24 07:18:27+00:00
I can't believe that some people are enjoying MFG, however small that group is. me personally? I hate that cognitive dissonance of "it looks like 120 FPS yet input lag is more like 40-60 FPS". plus, FG itself has performance tax, which in my case means input lag tax.

it's input lag that defines experience, not frame time. I am comfortable with 30 FPS (sometimes less frames even fits the style of the game, e.g. Dishonored 2, Clair Obscur) as long as the game responds instantaneously.
by TeMPOraL | 2026-02-24 07:18:30+00:00
Thing is, there's a large (or at least certainly vocal) contingent
of users (and mostly techies, to boot) that view "AI" as the Devil, and transformer models as the original sin, and they want to refuse to partake, wholesale.

This feature seems to be a nod to people with this worldview.

EDIT: See e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47133786 liking AI features to defecating on your food. It's not a technical objection, it's a principled one.
by tonyedgecombe | 2026-02-24 07:18:50+00:00
>Dynamic COM (DCOM) is used to provide interoperability with Visual Basic.

DCOM is Distributed COM not Dynamic COM[1].

COM does have an interface for dynamic dispatch called IDispatch[2] which is used for scripting languages like VBScript or JScript. It isn't required for Visual Basic though. VB is compiled and supports early binding to interfaces.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_Component_Object_M...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDispatch
by OneMorePerson | 2026-02-24 07:19:28+00:00
This is something people always claim, but this explanation assumes that everyone is "colluding". The guy who wants to get a promotion and get paid 50% more cause he has 3 kids isn't going to play along, he is going to at least put in 4 hours a day of real work, and then everyone else is going to look 20x less productive. There are teams where people are mailing it in so hard that they will find ways to kick out the hard workers, but this doesn't exist across entire orgs/companies/industries.
by geocar | 2026-02-24 07:19:35+00:00
> "I don't like having my time wasted" does not imply anything about one's skill in a field.

I have no idea what you think you just said, but I did not say anything like that.

> Most of the internet is noise, and if you're showcasing something it's good form to immediately show your readers what actually is

So you say, but without responding to either of my suggestions for not doing this, and after saying something that doesn't sound relevant at all.

Of what exactly are you trying to convince me to do? I'm not the author of this page, I'm not confused by what TAL is, and I'm not going to agree that you don't deserve to have your time wasted when you're here wasting mine, so what is it?