MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wizzwizz4 | 2026-02-04 09:39:11+00:00
Child sexual abuse material is literally in the training sets. Saying "banning AI" as though it's all the same thing, and all morally-neutral, is disingenuous. (Yes, a system with both nudity and children in its dataset might still be able to produce such images – and there are important discussions to be had about that – but giving xAI the benefit of equivocation here is an act of malice.)
by pyrale | 2026-02-04 09:39:36+00:00
Quote from US doj [1]:

> The term “child pornography” is
currently used in federal statutes and
is defined as any visual depiction of
sexually explicit conduct involving a
person less than 18 years old. While
this phrase still appears in federal
law, “child sexual abuse material” is
preferred, as it better reflects the
abuse that is depicted in the images
and videos and the resulting trauma
to the child. In fact, in 2016, an
international working group,
comprising a collection of countries
and international organizations
working to combat child exploitation,
formally recognized “child sexual
abuse material” as the preferred term.

Child porn is csam.

[1]: https://www.justice.gov/d9/2023-06/child_sexual_abuse_materi...
by rendx | 2026-02-04 09:39:41+00:00
If you have time on your hands which is basically free for you, and you run the relay at home too, there's no extra cost involved. You don't need a VPS to run a (non-exit) relay. Even if you do, the VPS will be associated with you much more directly than a third party exit, which is unlikely set up to log IPs. The VPS IP might also already be publicly associated with you, if you use it e.g. also for web hosting.

And could it possibly be that people exist that do things for pure enjoyment of the exercise? Looks like they learned quite a bit throughout the process. This may even land them a job at Tor, since they can demonstrate that they understood what it is doing and where to find the relevant pieces of information to "circumvent" the protection.
by beAbU | 2026-02-04 09:39:59+00:00
It has always been illegal and morally reprehensible to create, own, distribute or store sexually explicit material that represents a real person without their consent, regardless if they are underage or not.

Grok is a platform that is enabling this en masse. If xAI can't bring in guardrails or limit who can access these capabilities, then they deserve what's coming to them.
by ErroneousBosh | 2026-02-04 09:40:33+00:00
Wasn't the whole point of the Sten gun that it could be made out of readily-available materials (steel plumbing pipe mostly) with simple hand tools, and really only needed two of the 50 or so components to be machined?

So, unless your garage is down to a pair of rusty pliers and a dried-out Biro then you're probably still up there.
by yieldcrv | 2026-02-04 09:40:53+00:00
man, setting up worktrees for parallelized agentic coding is hard, setting up containerized worktrees is hard so you can run with dangerous permissions on without nuking host system

deciding whether to use that to work on multiple features on the same code base, or the same feature in multiple variations is hard

deciding whether to work on a separate project entirely while all of this is happening is hard and mentally taxing

planning all of this up for a few hours and watching it go all at once autonomously is satisfying!
by davidcann | 2026-02-04 09:40:57+00:00
The same concept is possible on Linux, but I don't think anyone has created a nice UI for it yet. There was a post yesterday about doing it on the command line in linux:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46874139

One of the nice things in Multitui is that it monitors what is blocked and gives you a way to add a read/write rule from the UI.
by factorialboy | 2026-02-04 09:42:38+00:00
Relevant question: How many YCombinator portfolio companies issue stable coins.
Stablecoin-adjacent YC companies:

• Bridge (acquired by Stripe for $1.1B) — stablecoin infrastructure, now offers "Open Issuance" platform for others to launch stablecoins

• PrimeVault (S2022) — helps enterprises issue & manage digital assets/stablecoins

• BlindPay (W2025) — stablecoin API for payments

• Coinbase (S2012) — issues USDC (with Circle)
by longtermop | 2026-02-04 09:42:41+00:00
Very cool project! The MCP surface area here (110 tools) is a great example of why tool-output validation is becoming critical.

When an AI agent interacts with binary analysis tools, there are two injection vectors worth considering:

1. *Tool output injection* — Malicious binaries could embed prompt injection in strings/comments that get passed back to the LLM via MCP responses

2. *Indirect prompt injection via analyzed code* — Attackers could craft binaries where the decompiled output contains payloads designed to manipulate the agent

For anyone building MCP servers that process untrusted content (like binaries, web pages, or user-generated data), filtering the tool output before it reaches the model is a real gap in most setups.

(Working on this problem at Aeris PromptShield — happy to share attack patterns we've seen if useful)
by andix | 2026-02-04 09:42:59+00:00
I think Musk is backed into a corner financially. Most of his companies don't have that much revenue and their worth is mostly based on hope.

They might be closer to collapsing than most people think. It's not unheard of that a billionaires net worth drops to zero over night.

I think it's mostly financial reasons why they merged the companies, this space datacenter idea was born to justify the merge of SpaceX and xAI. To give investors hope, not to really do it.
by PaulRobinson | 2026-02-04 09:43:30+00:00
It's worth pointing out that in France and the UK, the authorities involved are arms length independent of the political bodies - it's not like the US where if you give the President good vibes you can become head of the FBI, and all you have to do in return is whatever he says. There are statutory instruments (in France, constitutional clauses), that determine the independence of these authorities.

They are tasked - and held to account by respective legislative bodies - with implementing the law as written.

Nobody wrote a law saying "Go after Grok". There is however a law in most countries about the creation and dissemination of CSAM material and non-consensual pornography. Some of that law is relatively new (the UK only introduced some of these laws in recent years), but they all predate the current wave of AI investment.

Founders, boards of directors and their internal and external advisors could:

1. Read the law and make sure any tools they build comply

2. When told their tools don't comply take immediate and decisive action to change the tools

3. Work with law enforcement to apply the law as written

Those companies, if they find this too burdensome, have the choice of not operating in that market. By operating in that market, they both implicitly agree to the law, and are required to explicitly abide by it.

They can't then complain that the law is unfair (it's not), that it's being politicised (How? By whom? Show your working), and that this is all impossible in their home market where they are literally offering presents to the personal enrichment of the President on bended knee while he demands that ownership structures of foreign social media companies like TikTok are changed to meet the agenda of himself and his administration.

So, would the EU like more tighter speech controls? Yes, they'd like implementation of the controls on free speech enshrined in legislation created by democratically appointed representatives. The alternative - algorithms that create abusive content, of women and children in particular - are not wanted by the people of the UK, the EU, or most of the rest of the World, laws are written to that effect, and are then enforced by the authorities tasked with that enforcement.

This isn't "anti-democratic", it's literally democracy in action standing up to technocratic feudalism that is an Ayn Randian-wet dream being played out by some morons who got lucky.
by stared | 2026-02-04 09:44:12+00:00
Interesting to see Ghidra here!

A friend from work just used it (with Claude) to hack River Ride game (https://quesma.com/blog/ghidra-mcp-unlimited-lives/).

Inspired by the, I have it a try as well.
While I have no prior experience with reverse engineering, I ported an old game from PowerPC to Apple Silicon.

First, including a few MCPs with Claude Code (including LaurieWired/GhidraMCP you forked from, and https://github.com/jtang613/GhidrAssistMCP). Yet, the agent fabricated as lot of code, instead for translating it from source.

I ended up using headless mode directly in Cursor + GPT 5.2 Codex. The results were the best.

Once I get some time, will share a write-up.
by bambax | 2026-02-04 09:44:15+00:00
I tried many different suppliers, for the objects themselves and for the packaging (which involved 3-4 different parts); some were better than others (esp. regarding delays) but no one tried to take advantage of me. And I was just one guy from Europe making small batches: the ideal target for a scam. Yet it never happened; quite the opposite in fact.

At some point given the cost of transport by air or by sea I tried train+truck. The shipment ended up stopped in Mongolia for about 3 weeks. The factory in China, which didn't have anything to do with the shipping company (except that they selected it; but it was a completely different entity) went out of their way to find out where the goods were and what was happening, and eventually made sure they were delivered to my door.

> HN loves downvoting. It's Nerd Reddit. Don't sweat it.

Yeah I know, I've been here a long time. But it was instantaneous and that surprised me.
by Bengalilol | 2026-02-04 09:44:26+00:00
Here is another index, produced by US organizations. Take a look at the overall rankings. "Come one". I'm not sure why such an index isn't produced annually: it seems surprising. Most US data and reports tend to focus primarily on the United States (and not including any other economy), which is a separate discussion.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Innovation_Index>

> Europe's issue is that it only considers itself.

That may be one perspective. A similar point could probably be made about the US in some contexts. Europe, after all, is not a single entity but a collection of individual countries.

Bonus:
A last index, done by IMD World Competitiveness Ranking.
It is not an "exclusively American produced" indicator, but it is independent of European institutions and relies on international data.

<https://www.imd.org/centers/wcc/world-competitiveness-center...>

ps: Netherlands is ranked 8 in the list (IDK why you asserted it was absent). Moreover it is well covered in the first link I provided.
by m_nalikowski | 2026-02-04 09:45:14+00:00
Marek from bunny.net here. Another advantage is our global network: Bunny Database is available in 41 regions, so if your app has global users (or users in specific locations), you can avoid workarounds to hide latency from the DB.

We actually ran a benchmark to see how read latency degrades with distance from the database:
https://bunny.net/blog/how-database-location-affects-far-awa...
by KaiserPro | 2026-02-04 09:45:20+00:00
The law is concrete on this.

In the UK, you must take "reasonable" steps to remove illegal content.

This normally means some basic detection (ie fingerprinting which is widely used from a collaborative database) or if a user is consistently uploading said stuff, banning them.

Allowing a service that you run to continue to generate said illegal content, even after you publicly admit that you know its wrong, is not reasonable.
by ibestvina | 2026-02-04 09:45:20+00:00
I don't see why his involvement, explaining to his team how exactly to build a piece, is any different from a developer explaining to an LLM how to build a certain feature, when it comes to the level of "being hands on".

Obviously I am not comparing his final product with my code, I am simply pointing out how this metaphor is flawed. Having "workers" shape the material according to your plans does not reduce your agency.
by muyuu | 2026-02-04 09:45:21+00:00
this also used to happened to me when I in a position that involved a lot of research earlier on and then after the product was a reality, and it worked, it tapered off to be small improvements and maintenance

I can imagine many positions work out this way in startups

it's important to think hard sometimes, even if it means taking time off to do the thinking - you can do it without the socioeconomic pressure of a work environment
by graemep | 2026-02-04 09:45:30+00:00
It also ignores a similar phenomenon among the poor. Decreased self-supply.

In a rich country this might mean paying for childcare so you can work. Your expenditure has gone up, but you are only better off by the increased post tax income less the cost of childcare. Even worse is paid childcare has substituted for family provided (e.g. grandparents) childcare.

In a poor country it might mean buying food instead of growing it. An industrial worker will buy their food, a subsistence farmer will grow their own. There is a huge increase in expenditure, but they might well end up with a worse diet.

This is not new. The initial workforce for the industrialisation of Britain (the first country to industrialise) was available because of the enclosure of common land forced people to seek work in cities.
by summarity | 2026-02-04 09:45:49+00:00
Ive been using it (the original 15 tool version) for months now. It’s amazing. Any app is suddenly “open source”. I can track down bugs. Get a deeper understanding of any tool, and even write plug-ins or preload shims that mod any app. It’s like I finally actually _own_ the software I bought years ago.

For objective C heavy code, I also use Hopper Disassembler (which now has a built in MCP server).

Some related academic work (full recompilation with LLMs and Ghidra): https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3728958
by globular-toast | 2026-02-04 09:45:55+00:00
I think a lot of people are struggling with this. Look at the obesity epidemic. Nobody is forcing you to buy ultraprocessed foods. Nobody is forcing you to overeat. You can still cook with fresh vegetables at home. But many/most people in Western countries struggle with their weight.

An even better analogy is the slot machine. Once you've "won" one time it's hard to break the cycle. There's so little friction to just having another spin. Everyone needs to go and see the depressed people at slot machines at least once to understand where this ends.
by noodleweb | 2026-02-04 09:46:03+00:00
I miss this too, I have had those moments of reward where something works and I want to celebrate. It's missing too for me.

With AI the pros outweigh the cons at least at the moment with what we collectively have figured out so far. But with that everyday I wonder if it's possible now to be more ambitious than ever and take on much bigger problem with the pretend smart assistant.
by cubefox | 2026-02-04 09:46:15+00:00
> Also, X seem to disagree with you and admit that CSAM was being generated

That post doesn't contain such an admission, it instead talks about forbidden prompting.

> Also the reason you can’t make it generate those images is because they implemented safeguards since that article was written:

That article links to this article: https://x.com/Safety/status/2011573102485127562 - which contradicts your claim that there were no guardrails before. And as I said, I already tried it a while ago, and Grok also refused to create images of naked adults then.
by 1313ed01 | 2026-02-04 09:46:30+00:00
I only know about this game because it was in some Humble Bundle. Have the Linux version from that. Not sure how old it is. Looks like the screenshot of one of the remastered versions. Remember installing it and playing for a few hours but then forgot about it.

Last Humble Bundle update from 2019, but I can't get it to run on my current Ubuntu. Runs in my Ubuntu 16 QEMU vm, but no audio for some reason.

Pretty much expected level of success for old binary-only Linux games. Can probably be fixed, but usually just playing the Windows version in WINE is easier and plays better.
by nim_chimpsky | 2026-02-04 09:47:41+00:00
Let us all be very happy about "The World" since the libertarians at the Economist tell us we are living in a egalitarian world. It is only a minor anomaly that a very small group of Billionaires decide our political agendas and tell our Governments what to do. And now that "Big Governments" are being down sized even the wildest dreams of the libertarians at the Economist are coming true. What could be better than this ?
by joe_mamba | 2026-02-04 09:47:53+00:00
No, because the comment is in bad faith, it just introduced an unrelated issue (poor sentencing from authorities) as an argument for the initial issue we are discussing (AI nudes), derailing the conversation.

If this type reasoning is accepted, then we can keep endlessly derailing the conversation towards other unrelated topics just because AI was somehow involved in them, even if the AI was not the perpetrator or issue.

I don't accept this as good faith argumentation.
by darepublic | 2026-02-04 09:48:32+00:00
>You can still jump on a camel and cross the desert in 3 days. Have at it, you risk dying, but enjoy. Or you can just rent a helicopter and fly over the damn thing in a few hours. Your choice. Don't let people tell you it isn't travelling.

its obviously not wrong to fly over the desert in a helicopter. its a means to an end and can be completely preferable. I mean myself I'd prefer to be in a passenger jet even higher above it, at a further remove personally. But I wouldn't think that doing so makes me someone who knows the desert the same way as someone who has crossed it on foot. It is okay to prefer and utilize the power of "the next abstraction", but I think its rather pig headed to deny that nothing of value is lost to people who are mourning the passing of what they gained from intimate contact with the territory. and no it's not just about the literal typing. the advent of LLMs is not the 'end of typing', that is more reductionist failure to see the point.
by jhanschoo | 2026-02-04 09:48:35+00:00
Maybe you would be more persuasive by discussing a concrete example where manufacturing was decimated by imports and yet more liberalization would be more economically beneficent thae protectionism (modulo say IMF, world bank policies), rather than parrot an ideological talking point without substantiating it with the concrete examples that form the empirical evidence for such general rules.
by SPICLK2 | 2026-02-04 09:49:09+00:00
CREE offer a variety of LED types with efficiencies 150lm/w (eg CMB, XT-E), up to 230lm/w (eg, 5050).

While 100lm/w is typical for domestic LED lighting, it's going to cause problems when the total power is several orders of magnitude higher but the form factor is approximately the same size.
by Cthulhu_ | 2026-02-04 09:49:14+00:00
Insults / name calling aside, can products like this even be manufactured domestically? Is there a US based LED manufacturer, for starters? Cables / connectors? Final assembly? And do the ones that make the bespoke parts and final assembly even take orders for 500 units like this one?

I want to support local manufacturing too, but in many cases the choice isn't there. The Trump dictatorship's tariffs are an attempt to "encourage" this manufacturing back to the US, but redeveloping the factories and supply chains will take years - if there's even people willing to commit to it, because despite high import tariffs, it's still cheaper to import things. And even if it wasn't, it'd still be cheaper and easier to go through a 3rd party and back channels, or to a country not affected as much by the import tariffs. Whole manufacturing lines are / have been moved to e.g. Vietnam or India to avoid the tariffs, and that's still cheaper than moving to the US.
by KaiserPro | 2026-02-04 09:49:18+00:00
Again its all about reasonable.

Firstly does the open model explicitly/tacitly allow CSAM generation?

Secondly, when the trainers are made aware of the problem, do they ignore it or attempt to put in place protections?

Thirdly, do they pull in data that is likely to allow that kind of content to be generated?

Fourthly, when they are told that this is happening, do they pull the model?

Fithly, do they charge for access/host the service and allow users to generate said content on their own servers?
by balamatom | 2026-02-04 09:49:21+00:00
And programming languages are designed for clarifying the implementation details of abstract processes; while human language is this undocumented, half grandfathered in, half adversarially designed instrument for making apes get along (as in, move in the same general direction) without excessive stench.

The humane and the machinic need to meet halfway - any computing endeavor involves not only specifying something clearly enough for a computer to execute it, but also communicating to humans how to benefit from the process thus specified. And that's the proper domain not only of software engineering, but the set of related disciplines (such as the various non-coding roles you'd have in a project team - if you have any luck, that is).

But considering the incentive misalignments which easily come to dominate in this space even when multiple supposedly conscious humans are ostensibly keeping their eyes on the ball, no matter how good the language machines get at doing the job of any of those roles, I will still intuitively mistrust them exactly as I mistrust any human or organization with responsibly wielding the kind of pre-LLM power required for coordinating humans well enough to produce industrial-scale LLMs in the first place.

What's said upthread about the wordbox continually trying to revert you to the mean as you're trying to prod it with the cowtool of English into outputting something novel, rings very true to me. It's not an LLM-specific selection pressure, but one that LLMs are very likely to have 10x-1000xed as the culmination of a multigenerational gambit of sorts; one whose outset I'd place with the ever-improving immersive simulations that got the GPU supply chain going.
by trashb | 2026-02-04 09:49:56+00:00
As others point out this is a bad idea.

Asside from the other excellent comments on power consumption, cooling and radiation. One point I didn't see being made in the comments much is maintenance costs.

Now I don't find myself in the facility of a data center often in daily life, however I do know that medium to big data centers require 24/7 hardware replacement. I believe this is what those 5 guys with the bikes and scooters are doing in every data center. That would be very difficult, near impossible in space (with the current space fairing infrastructure).
by palata | 2026-02-04 09:50:17+00:00
> FOSS is gemeinnützig, even if the producers are paid.

That's exactly what I question. Let's say I develop an open source firmware specific to hardware I produce. It's not compatible with anything else, it's my proprietary hardware. The hardware is a tamagotchi (you wouldn't consider a tamagotchi "gemeinnützig", would you?). I use tivoisation, such that nobody can flash a different firmware than the one I write. Still the source code of that firmware is open source.

Is that gemeinnützig?
by cess11 | 2026-02-04 09:50:46+00:00
It typically doesn't, it just implements compliance with laws and regulations in your jurisdiction.

Withdrawal and transaction limits are commonly such a thing, politicians get hounded because some people were frauded out of their monies and they feel a need to show that they're doing something about it.

Banking is very international, you can put your money in some other jurisdiction if you'd like to. Many transnational banks are connected to the usual payment providers, you can probably figure something out if you put your mind to it. One way to do it is to start a company, business accounts at banks generally have different limits and then you pay a lawyer or bean counter to clear how to do the books and pay appropriate taxes.