MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by treechain | 2026-02-18 23:09:20+00:00
Hi HN — I'm the researcher behind this disclosure.
I discovered this while building the Polyglottal Cipher, an encryption system that operates across 133,387 Unicode characters and 202 languages. When you spend enough time at the byte level across every script, you start seeing things that security researchers approaching from the other direction don't.

The core issue is simple: Chromium reads the path field from native messaging manifests and executes it without NFKC normalization. Greek Rho (U+03A1) and Latin P (U+0050) are visually identical but resolve to different filesystem locations on ext4 and APFS. Drop a poisoned manifest in a user-writable directory, and the browser executes your binary instead of 1Password's. No root. No privilege escalation. Two hours on a Chromebook.

I disclosed to 12 vendors. Bitwarden triaged it and sent it to engineering. Cisco opened a formal PSIRT incident. Google marked it WontFix and said further discussion "will have no value." Vivaldi labeled my research "AI-generated" to terminate engagement.

The fix is a single function call — NFKC normalization on the path before execution. Every major language has it built in. Google chose not to.

Full vendor correspondence, PoC, and evidence:
https://github.com/btmaffiliate/chromium-homoglyph-0day
Full advisory: https://treechain.ai/white-papers/unicode-homoglyph-path-inj...
Google's public WontFix: https://issues.chromium.org/issues/482538021#comment6
Happy to answer technical questions.
— Brandon Myers, TreeChain Labs
by DiggyJohnson | 2026-02-18 23:09:57+00:00
Thanks for writing this out. I don’t agree at all but that’s fine.

What is your opinion of one of the most concerning counterpoint (in my opinion): that we are normalizing prescription stimulants and accommodations for individuals that otherwise don’t need them / could succeed without them.

Know that I don’t really care too too much from a fairness standpoint, especially in the professional workplace. I’m most concerned with subjecting a generation of people to a reliance of stimulants and secondly concerned about the affects on the ability for HS and university educators to assess and evaluate their students.

———

Edit: Third and less seriously, a hypothetical: if I learned that >40% of our elite students or young professionals were on Xanax, cocaine, ketamine, or encapsulated meth or required an assistant to take notes and record lectures I would be appalled. How would you interpret this?

My thought is that it is a clear signal of a social or cultural malady if our best and brightest - as a population - are strongly overrepresented in their reliance on disability accommodations or prescription drugs.
by ceroxylon | 2026-02-18 23:10:08+00:00
This was a couple of years ago, but I remember using ChatGPT to try and study for a certification by generating quiz questions.

It would always start to make every correct answer option "C" over time, no matter what I tried. Eventually I was so focused on whether or not it was stuck in a "C" loop that I started overthinking all of the questions and wasting time.

Flash forward to testing Sonnet 4.6 recently to try and see if it could effectively teach me something new, I got about 5 prompts in before I had to point out an oversight, and it gave me the classic "you're absolutely right, ignore that suggestion".

This is anecdotal of course, but at least LLMs are helping to build my skills of fact verification and citation checking!
by imiric | 2026-02-18 23:10:23+00:00
I agree with you to an extent, but the difference is in how the solution is derived.

The LLM has no understanding of the physical length of 50m, nor is it capable of doing calculations, without relying on an external tool. I.e. it has no semantic understanding of any of the output it generates. It functions purely based on weights of tokens that were part of its training sets.

I asked Sonnet 4.5 the bat and ball question. It pretended to do some algebra, and arrived at the correct solution. It was able to explain why it arrived at that solution, and to tell me where the question comes from. It was obviously trained on this particular question, and thousands of others like it, I'm sure. Does this mean that it will be able to answer any other question it hasn't been trained on? Maybe, depending on the size and quality of its training set, the context, prompt, settings, and so on.

And that's my point: a human doesn't need to be trained on specific problems. A person who understands math can solve problems they've never seen before by leveraging their understanding and actual reasoning and deduction skills. We can learn new concepts and improve our skills by expanding our mental model of the world. We deal with abstract concepts and ideas, not data patterns. You can call this gatekeeping if you want, but it is how we acquire and use knowledge to exhibit intelligence.

The sheer volume of LLM training data is incomprehensible to humans, which is why we're so impressed that applied statistics can exhibit this behavior that we typically associate with intelligence. But it's a simulation of intelligence. Without the exorbitant amount of resources poured into collecting and cleaning data, and training and running these systems, none of this would be possible. It is a marvel of science and engineering, to be sure, but the end product is a simulation.

In many ways, modern LLMs are not much different from classical expert systems from decades ago. The training and inference are much more streamlined and sophisticated now; statistics and data patterns replaced hand-crafted rules; and performance can be improved by simply scaling up. But at their core, LLMs still rely on carefully curated data, and any "emergent" behavior we observe is due to our inability to comprehend patterns in the data at this scale.

I'm not saying that this technology can't be useful. Besides the safety considerations we're mostly ignoring, a pattern recognition and generation tool can be very useful in many fields. But I find the narrative that this constitutes any form of artificial intelligence absurd and insulting. It is mass gaslighting promoted by modern snake oil salesmen.
by pheggs | 2026-02-18 23:10:48+00:00
> But the thing is these DO get exploited in the wild we see that again and again in high value targets like operating systems.

Yes but so do supply chain attacks. I mean we both know there's never a way to be absolutely secure and it's all just about probability. The question is how to determine what product may have better chances. All I am saying is that I personally prioritize fewer dependencies over memory safety.

I like your optimism, which I unfortunately struggle to share. I believe the quality of code will go down, there will be a lot of vibe code, and in general inexperienced people who don't put in the cognitive effort to pay attention to it. As software gets cheaper with AI, it will also become increasingly difficult to find the good things in a sea of slop. A good time for all the security engineers though ;)
by hiccuphippo | 2026-02-18 23:10:49+00:00
I thought this would teach you random facts in one-screen-sized tiles. This doesn't look like doom scrolling. But I like the idea of the user picking a subject, maybe combine both: pick a subject, it gives you facts about it, maybe a tile to ask for which path to take once in a while (swipe left to keep learning about find, swipe right to learn about xargs).
by arjie | 2026-02-18 23:10:49+00:00
Seems fine. The fund is Indian and is set up for open-source software. The money is going to come from India. If you're not in India you have to file paperwork. This is pretty normal stuff. If you don't want to file paperwork you can choose not to take money from the fund. Everything here is fine except this guy applied and only then realized the requirements. That's a mistake (because they'll now have to reallocate to someone they had to decline) but a very minor one.

The whole thing just seems in the realm of "I was going to pay for a car but then it cost too much" i.e. it's just stuff that you'd like to have but then you didn't want to do what it cost so you opted out. Quite a mundane thing.

Seems unnecessary to post about all this personal data this and stuff like that but in open-source software what you get in freedom you pay for in drama.
by lynndotpy | 2026-02-18 23:11:00+00:00
On the iPhone, the performance is much worse and my battery life is easily a less than 2/3 of what it was before Liquid Glass. This is on top of Apple forcing the OS updates in ways they haven't before.

It does not feel good that you can pay $2000 for a device and then see Apple unilaterally make it worse shortly later.
by bri3d | 2026-02-18 23:11:35+00:00
Even though I agree with the conclusion with respect to pricing, I don't think this comment is generally accurate.

Most* valuable exploits can be sold on the gray market - not via some bootleg forum with cryptocurrency scammers or in a shadowy back alley for a briefcase full of cash, but for a simple, taxed, legal consulting fee to a forensics or spyware vendor or a government agency in a vendor shaped trenchcoat, just like any other software consulting income.

The risk isn't arrest or scam, it's investment and time-value risk. Getting a bug bounty only requires (generally) that a bug can pass for real; get a crash dump with your magic value in a good looking place, submit, and you're done.

Selling an exploit chain on the gray market generally requires that the exploit chain be reliable, useful, and difficult to detect. This is orders of magnitude more difficult and is extremely high-risk work not because of some "shady" reason, but because there's a nonzero chance that the bug doesn't actually become useful or the vendor patches it before payout.

The things you see people make $500k for on the gray market and the things you see people make $20k for in a bounty program are completely different deliverables even if the root cause / CVE turns out to be the same.

*: For some definition of most, obviously there is an extant "true" crappy cryptocurrency forum black market for exploits but it's not very lucrative or high-skill compared to the "gray market;" these places are a dumping ground for exploits which are useful only for crime and/or for people who have difficulty doing even mildly legitimate business (widely sanctioned, off the grid due to personal history, etc etc.)

I see that someone linked an old tptacek comment about this topic which per the usual explains things more eloquently, so I'll link it again here too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43025038
by thesz | 2026-02-18 23:12:09+00:00
Then you get to definitions like ": open ( string -- handle 1 | 0) ... ;" which describes returning algebraic type Maybe Handle unboxed on the stack. Algebraic types are fun, they can easily represent Peano arithmetic and get us into the realm Goedel incompleteness theorem very quickly.

Or you can deduce signature for EXEC EXEC sequence. EXEC's stack effect can be described as ( \alpha (\alpha -- \beta) -- \beta), where \greekletter is a placeholder for a stack part of arbitrary length. Notice that this type comment has nested brackets and does not adhere to Forth stack-effect comment convention.

When I thought about this more than fifteen years ago, I've got at least two equally valid types for the EXEC EXEC: one where xt at top of stack consumes all its input and leaves no output ( \alpha (\alpha -- \gamma) \beta (\beta -- ) -- \gamma) and when first EXEC produces something for second to execute upon ( \alpha \beta (\beta -- \gamma (\alpha \gamma -- \theta) -- \theta).

One can argue that second type of EXEC EXEC subsume first one, if greek-letter-named-stack-parts are allowed to be empty.

Still it shows that typing Forth, at the very least, needs unification on the Peano's arithmetic level, implementing deduction from length zero to unbounded length.

So, in my opinion, for LLM to dependably combine typed Forth/concatenative definitions, it needs to call external tool like Prolog to properly deduce type(s) of the sequence of Forth's (or concatenative language's) definitions.

And here we enter a realm interesting in itself.

Here it is: https://github.com/stassa/louise

This is a Prolog system to learn programs in polynomial time. For one example, it can one-shot-learn a grammar, without being "trained" on millions of samples.

So, should one use a LLM that either needs a paid access or just slow to run, or freely go where "old school" systems like Eurisco [1] and Cyc went?

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

Eurisco demonstrated superhuman abilities in 1982-83. It also demonstrated knowledge transfer at the time, where rules from VLSI place-and-route algorithms were used to design winning Traveler TCS fleet.
by rl3 | 2026-02-18 23:12:19+00:00
Odd reply, but OK. For what it's worth I largely agree with everything else you said.

>>The problem, to me, is deeper and is rooted in our education system and work systems that demand compliance over creativity. Algorithms serve what Users engage with, if the Users were to no longer be interested in ragebait, clickbait, focused on thoughtful content -- the algorithms would adapt.

Technically that's true. Thing is, the UI/UX isn't built for long-form content. The platform, interface and algorithm when taken as a whole represent more of a dopamine delivery system heavily biased towards short-form content.

That dynamic in turn ends up being deleterious to cognition to the point it ends up fighting any external factors that which could change user behavior for the better.

In other words the algorithm is part of a larger format, and that format is arguably the real drag. Of course, the algorithm being properly transparent and accountable to its users would certainly help.
by magneticnorth | 2026-02-18 23:12:19+00:00
Ah, yeah, the aging population is a good point.

I can't find a citation now, but I recall reading at some point that weight gain with age (in adulthood) didn't used to happen very much before the obesity epidemic, though nowadays we take it as a given. I wish I could find a source for/against that idea, I'm curious now if it's true.
by bigbadfeline | 2026-02-18 23:12:41+00:00
> It's an echo chamber here, too... > Any comment that challenges [ whatever else you dislike ] and leftist politics gets downvoted into oblivion.

It's not. Downvoting here is much less of a conversation-breaking action than shadow banning, outright banning and trash-comment-polution on other soc. med. sites. Downvoting has it's place, the occasional abuse of it should not be a problem, it hurts you so much because you want your views to prevail but that's your personal problem, not a site problem.

I get downvoted quite often here too but these days I usually challenge rightist politics - mostly due to it being used as an excuse for some wrong action or inaction at the moment. However, most of the time I have no idea if what I'm objecting to is leftist or rightist, I have to think separately to figure that out... but I don't do it because it's actually hard.

> most people who hold the worldview that is enforced here often cannot see their own presuppositions.

I suppose you think you can see your own presuppositions and I'm ready to challenge that. I'm also ready to challenge the notion that only leftist worldviews are promoted here. The world "enforced" is quite misleading too, some tradition does exist on this site, but it's different and a lot more nuanced than central "leftist" enforcement.

> nor do they see that their views are political in nature.

So are yours... A lot of views are political in nature, some realize it, some not, that fact has no bearing on the viability of those views and bragging about it helps nobody.
by legitster | 2026-02-18 23:12:56+00:00
I kind of read the "WHATEVER HAPPENED TO GLOBAL WARMING???" in another way:

The issue seemed to completely drop from public discourse during the Biden presidency as even people on the far left attacked and complained about high gas prices. Musk himself flip-flopped and said it's not really a pressing issue. The Biden administration ended up admonished oil companies for slowing exploration.

The president can almost be excused for his naivety - he's literally lived in a coastal penthouse his whole life. So in a way he's right - as far as he's aware it's a dead topic so it must have been a hoax.
by jeroenhd | 2026-02-18 23:13:25+00:00
Recreating Aqua is the easy part. Recreating all the applications you would use day-to-day to fit the design language specified by Aqua is another. Apple's visual OS design was never that far ahead of the curve, but they managed to convince developers for their platform to stick to their guidelines rather than reinvent the wheel, making the entire computer feel more like one integrated system than a toolbox filled with differently branded tools.

This is also why most "windows style" themes fall flat: you can copy the window decorations, button backgrounds, and icons, but unless your applications are designed to look and work like the OS your mimicking, it'll all just look weird and off.

At this point "operating systems" in a commercial sense are so large that only relatively new entries can afford to rebuild their stock applications to fit the current UI theme (ChromeOS comes pretty close but you'd need to appreciate Google's design to enjoy that). macOS, Windows, and even Linux to some extent all have decades of old software to support so they can't redesign their core GUI stack without breaking everything.

In the days that an internet browser wasn't considered a core part of the operating system, there just weren't as many places to get the design wrong or off-template without Q&A noticing.
by sarchertech | 2026-02-18 23:13:49+00:00
There are a lot of code issues you can run into when actually installing and repairing wiring that your average EE wouldn’t know much about at all. And just because you can design the power system for a building doesn’t mean you have any how to fish romex through a wall.

That’s like saying a mechanical engineer should necessarily be able to work as a machinist. Some of them can for sure, but it’s not something they are required to learn.

Also in many places anyone can do electrical work on their own house.
by jppope | 2026-02-18 23:14:19+00:00
The author of this article is missing whats really going on:

Hard novel things are still hard and valuable, easy things are now super easy and really aren't valuable anymore.

Lets take an easy thing... like a meal planning app or a todo list or something. Its what we would all call a weekend project, but in 2022 it would be hard to develop, get the legal stuff reviewed, do the marketing, and do all the rest of the operations in a few weeks. That stuff is basically a series of prompts now.

Now lets look at a hard thing, such as decreasing the cost of titanium production (courtesy of orca: https://www.orcasciences.com/articles/there-has-to-be-a-bett...)... to be able to scale operations and bring the cost down you are going to have to do some real science and engineering... LLMs can certainly help you, but this challenge is a far cry from something that an LLM can handle.

*Novel things have just become MUCH MUCH more valuable, slop is way way less valuable*
by streetfighter64 | 2026-02-18 23:14:23+00:00
I mean, you're still restricted to selling it to your own government, otherwise getting wired a cool $250k directly would raise a few red flags I think. And how many security researchers have a contact in some government-sponsored hacking company anyway? Do you really think that convincing them to buy a supposed zero-day exploit as a one-off would be easy?

Say you're in the US. I'm sure there are some CIA teams or whatever making use of Chromium exploits "off the record", but for any official business the government would just put pressure on Google directly to get what they want. So any project making use of your zero-day would be so secret that it'd be virtually impossible for you to even get in contact with anybody interested to buy it. Sure they might not try to "screw you", but it's sort of like going to the CIA and saying, "Hey would you be interested in buying this cache of illegal guns? Perhaps you could use it to arm Cuban rebels". What do you think they would respond to that?
by goodmythical | 2026-02-18 23:14:41+00:00
I mean, I get that it sucks online, but in person? Who cares what the label says? I'm an adult. I can easily tell by looking at a garment how it's going to fit me.

That said, if we could just get the critical measure online that'd be fantastic. No need for sizes, I know how big inches and centimeters are.

And, as it turns out, my favorite retailers do in fact include measurements, but I'd rather have a few quality items than lots of garbage, which is also why I own a sewing machine because sometimes I really love a dress but the manufacturer doesn't accommodate my specific frame. I developed this practice when I was broke and shopping out of thrift stores. It allowed me to buy almost anything and tailor it to make it fit. Really broadens your fashion horizons.

With regard to why sizing is difficult, I'd guess it's just consumer laziness or cognitive dissonance. Although it's maybe a little bit of efficiency too. How many models should I produce (and how many lines do I have to run) to fit every woman just right instead of lying to all of them? For pants alone, if you really want it to actually fit, you're going to need ankle, calf, knee, thigh, inseam/outseam, glute, hip, and waist (and crotch to waistband if you're offering different rises). So if you've got even just 5 measurements (probably not enough as no way do all women fit tailored within 5 different calf sizes), you've got 5^9 different products (and therefore machine configurations) to cover just that space, because yes there are women with massive calfs and small thighs or same waist/hip or whatever combination you can imagine) and that's all just for literally one style. If you've got five different pants that's immediately 5^9.

Lots of (american) women are perfectly fine with their 36in underbust but would be shamed to admit they need a 46in hip with their 32in waist for all that ass. Much better to just lie and say I need an 8 which will not in any world ever make it over my butt.

Maybe we can compromise on a 'call it' measurement which is on average 2 less than the prevailing standard would suggest. If your countries' system would have you in a 8, you can 'call it a 6', and then we're all happy.
by wpollock | 2026-02-18 23:16:06+00:00
An interesting approach, Good luck with it!
A nit to pick: find is not a bash command. You can run it for example from a Windows DOS command line as:

wsl find ...

You can run all Linux commands this way. Also, pretty sure that find's "-o" is the Boolean "or", not "otherwise". (Yet another example of why learning from LLMs is dangerous, I suppose).
by vessenes | 2026-02-18 23:16:18+00:00
Chiming in from the decentralized world - there’s an adversarial / cooperative dynamic in the assignment of these IDs - and the selection of parents, not discussed in the original. I think you could possibly get to sub linear by allowing a small number of cooperative nodes to assign new IDs.

On the contrary, having the right to assign IDs is powerful; on balance, to my mind the right thing to do is some sort of a ZK verifiable random function, e.g. sunspot-based transformations combined with some proof of ‘fair’ random choice. In that case, I think the 800 bit number seems like plenty. You could also do some sort of epoch-based variable length, where for the next billion years or so, we use 1/256 of the ID space, (forced first bit to 0), and so on.