MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by eszed | 2026-03-05 21:33:20+00:00
English nerd (and former English teacher) here, and I think for high school students that's a good idea. It's not actually an impossible text, and an introduction to the real thing is useful and interesting, but forcing teenagers to go through everything in the original is too much of an obstacle for most students.

Also: only reading the "boring" bits. When I was in high school I was excused English classes (took English 101 at the local college instead - told you I was a nerd), but overheard my classmates hating their way through "The Wife of Bath's Tale", or "The Knight's Tale" - one of those - and introduced them (nerd!) to "The Miller's Tale" - broad scatalogical comedy - which they loved. Later I did something similar for them with Gulliver's Travels, by showing them the bit where he has fairly graphic sex with the giantess. (I think that's an actual kink, but I certainly didn't know that at the time!)
by xpe | 2026-03-05 21:33:21+00:00
> It would be like a spouse proposing restrictions and terms of their access to your phone contingent on you marrying them.

It is easy to cherry pick one metaphor. We owe it to ourselves to think better than that.

What happens when you analyze this overall situation in all of its richness from multiple points of view and then seek synthesis? Speaking for myself, I would want to know your (1) probabilistic priors: the Bayesian equivalent of "disclosing your biases"; (2) supporting information; (3) conflicting information: I want to know that you aren't just ignoring it; (4) various theories/models you considered; (5) overall probabilistic take. All in all, I'm uninterested in analysis disconnected from the historical particulars.

Few people have the skillset and time to dig in properly. I suggest starting with "A Tale of Three Contracts" by Zvi Mowshowitz [1] In my experience, you would be hard-pressed to find anything around AI of this quality in the usual mainstream publications.

[1] https://thezvi.substack.com/p/a-tale-of-three-contracts
by qingcharles | 2026-03-05 21:33:36+00:00
Most county jails don't do any identity checks as they release detainees (except ask their ID number and birth date), they are usually small enough for the staff to know all the prisoners.

I remember one incident at the Cook County Jail where two prisoners "swapped identity":

https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/escaped-inmate-jahquez-...
by garethsprice | 2026-03-05 21:33:43+00:00
Humans are status-seeking creatures, and status is expressed through signaling. If you're rich and so are the people around you, money alone ceases to be a differentiator. Ultra-luxury brands appeal to this by adding hoops that money alone can't clear: time, loyalty, relationships. The signal shifts from "I can afford this" to "I was invited to spend my money here."

Lines outside Louis Vuitton are more down-market, aspirational luxury - an ultra-wealthy person wouldn't be caught dead queuing on a sidewalk. Patek and Ferrari operate at the level above, where the signal isn't wealth but access. (HBS calls Ferrari's version "deprivation marketing.")

Is it a game worth bothering with? Enough people think so to sustain billion-dollar brands.

(Of course, PG writing an essay about being too smart for fancy watches - while knowing a lot about them - is its own signaling game, just aimed at a different audience)
by senko | 2026-03-05 21:33:46+00:00
Just tested it with my version of the pelican test: a minimal RTS game implementation (zero-shot in codex cli): https://gist.github.com/senko/596a657b4c0bfd5c8d08f44e4e5347... (you'll have to download and open the file, sadly GitHub refuses to serve it with the correct content type)

This is on the edge of what the frontier models can do. For 5.4, the result is better than 5.3-Codex and Opus 4.6. (Edit: nowhere near the RPG game from their blog post, which was presumably much more specced out and used better engineering setup).

I also tested it with a non-trivial task I had to do on an existing legacy codebase, and it breezed through a task that Claude Code with Opus 4.6 was struggling with.

I don't know when Anthropic will fire back with their own update, but until then I'll spend a bit more time with Codex CLI and GPT 5.4.
by ZuoCen_Liu | 2026-03-05 21:34:11+00:00
I've been obsessed with a single question: Why do "visually stunning" simulations from engines like Isaac Sim, MuJoCo, or world models like Marble often fail the moment they are deployed on real robotic hardware?

The Theory: I am proposing the Non-Associative Residual Hypothesis (NARH). By auditing 7-DoF trajectories, we can detect the underlying physical consistency—or lack thereof—in these systems.

In plain terms: Simulators break physics into discrete computational steps (collisions, friction, constraints). In a continuous world, the order of these operations shouldn't matter. But on GPUs, swapping the execution order creates tiny, systematic differences: Non-Associative Residuals. These pile up as "Physical Debt," leading to massive sim-to-real drift in complex scenarios.

The Project: I built SIPA (Spatial Intelligence Physical Audit), an engine-agnostic tool designed to quantify this "Physical Debt" based on the NARH framework.

The Anomaly: Interestingly, within 72 hours of pushing the codebase to GitHub, it was shadow-cloned by 120 unique institutional entities via CLI, with near-zero web UI traffic. It seems the "big players" are already hunting for a way to measure the "physical honesty" of their models.

I’m sharing the full methodology and the math on ROS Discourse. I’m inviting the community to clone SIPA, test your datasets, Let's audit the truth.

Technical Post & Discussion: [https://discourse.openrobotics.org/t/sipa-quantifying-physic...]

Source & Tool: [https://github.com/ZC502/SIPA.git]
by SpicyLemonZest | 2026-03-05 21:34:23+00:00
I think you're misinterpreting the discussion here. Democrats are precommitting that they are going to do the same awful thing; when the time comes, I will be contacting my legislators demanding that they do to OpenAI or SpaceX whatever is done to Anthropic now. It's outrageous that Sam Altman would step in to try and benefit from the political persecution of his main competitor and we must ensure that he regrets this.
by netinstructions | 2026-03-05 21:35:05+00:00
This designation is usually reserved for foreign adversaries/companies, and so this is crazy to apply it to US company over a sudden contract dispute... that was previously agreed upon by all parties.

This should make any US company nervous about entering into an agreement with the government. Or any US company that already has a contract with the government. If they one day decide they don't like that contract, they can designate you a supply chain risk.

Not 1) rip up the existing contract and cease the agreement or 2) continue (but not renew) the existing contract or 3) renegotiate terms upon renewal but instead a full on ban of doing any business with an entire industry/sector.
by cheesecompiler | 2026-03-05 21:35:31+00:00
After cloning a test suite you're still left with ongoing maintenance and development, maintaining feature parity etc. There's a lot more than passing a test suite. If the rewrite is truly superior it deserves to become the new Ship of Theseus. But e.g. I doubt anyone's AI rewrites of SQLite will ever put a dent in its marketshare.
by mothballed | 2026-03-05 21:36:13+00:00
The Kurds soundly control a mountain land corridor between Iraq and Iran, and have controlled that since even before the recent attacks. Iran is not in a position anytime soon to close that without air power that they don't have.

I don't think staging light infantry will be a problem but I don't think they'll successfully break out of the mountains, certainly not into any land that isn't already ethnically Kurd (or Baloch, but that's in the other corner of the country).
by mikehostetler | 2026-03-05 21:36:18+00:00
The original version where I laid down the overall patterns was all hand coded. This was mid 2024.

I used Claude to learn & refine the patterns, but it couldn’t write this level of OTP code at that time.

As models got better, I used them to find bugs and simplify - but the bones are roughly the same from that original design.
by sorenjan | 2026-03-05 21:37:25+00:00
Seems like a way to use a sledgehammer to hammer in screws, and inviting nondeterminism in important systems. Besides being way larger and more complex than what most specialized industrial processes need, they are also vulnerable to adversarial attacks.

https://www.lakera.ai/blog/visual-prompt-injections

https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/8/22319173/openai-machine-vi...
by WorldMaker | 2026-03-05 21:38:31+00:00
To some extent, yes, it is deeply for the love of the game: planned obsolescence, single use products, nothing built to last, "razor blades and ink cartridges" where worse user experiences sell more products, intentional over-production to drive over-consumption through consequent demand for artificially low priced goods ("the Wal-Mart effect"), and so forth.

If we don't find ways to price in externalities into the markets and/or the regulations, companies find ways to push things to externalities to cut corners and artificially increase sales and/or profits or have easy ways to market "cheaper" products versus better quality products.

You may want to point fingers at the demand side, but even the most basic, simplified micro-economics is all about how supply-and-demand is a complex dance, supply has more tools up its sleeve than it seems, and a lot more control than demand. Consumers can demand more durable, more reliable products until they are blue in the face, but suppliers are free to just not supply them because cutting corners makes more profits and somewhat happy return customers are more profitable than a very satisfied one-and-done-for-life customer.
by Scramblejams | 2026-03-05 21:38:40+00:00
I'd love to see this in the bootloader, along with a selection of binaries useful for recovery. Might sound silly but over the years I have had many a remote system get to the bootloader and then no further after an upgrade. Nowadays we've usually got a nicely sized EFI partition, why not stuff it all in there? Gimme a full Linux userspace from the bootloader, it would feel luxurious when I'm up at 3 am trying to recover a broken system halfway across the country.

Or is there already a solution to this that I've been missing? (Yeah, KVM/IPMI/etc, I know, but not all hosters make it easy to get to that.)
by teddyh | 2026-03-05 21:38:44+00:00
If you want to be able to reboot remotely, and non-interactively (i.e. while you sleep), I (and one other person) created Mandos for this purpose: <https://www.recompile.se/mandos>. It gets the password over the network. If this seems insecure to you, read the FAQ: <https://www.recompile.se/mandos/man/intro.8mandos>

Mandos works with initramfs images created by both initramfs-tools and dracut, and is present in Debian since 2011, so no need to use a third-party package.
by zppln | 2026-03-05 21:38:50+00:00
From what I understand it cannot be used to perform work on contracts where the DoW is on the other side. [1]

In practice I would suspect companies with such contracts would play it safe by outright banning the use of Anthtropic products, even if they could technically be used for work on contracts with other parties.

[1] https://www.anthropic.com/news/statement-comments-secretary-...
by ezst | 2026-03-05 21:38:53+00:00
> You have fallen headfirst into the "Not now, so never" fallacy.

Perhaps. Though we have empirical evidence of how much we can quantize and distillate models to the point of practical uselessness. That sets a bar for how large a local model needs to be for general-use as to compete with the could ones. We are talking in the area of 60GB for GPT-OSS/Qwen3.5, which is what enthusiasts are running on 32GB DDR5 + 24GB VRAM RTX 3090.

> As if consumer hardware won't get more powerful

Now I will let you, with that last fact in hand, plot a chart of how much it's been costing to provision that over the past 2 years and use it to prove me wrong about the affordability of local models.
by tomjakubowski | 2026-03-05 21:38:55+00:00
> But this commit doesn't even have to belong to the preceding repository. You can reference a commit on a fork. Great way to sneak in an xz-utils style backdoor into critical CI workflows.

Wow. Does the SHA need to belong to a fork of the repo? Or is GitHub just exposing all (public?) repo commits as a giant content-addressable store?
by Calzifer | 2026-03-05 21:38:55+00:00
> Because initramfs is just a (mostly) normal Linux system, that means it has its own init PID 1. On Arch, that PID is in fact just systemd.

Debian has (or had; at least my Devuan still has) a simple shell script as first init. Was an interesting read and helped me understand were to add my remote rootfs decryption.

https://salsa.debian.org/kernel-team/initramfs-tools/-/blob/...
by RoddaWallPro | 2026-03-05 21:39:10+00:00
Actually, that is not what is happening here. What is happening here is that the govt is saying "Okay, we will not buy your widgets. Also, anyone who _does_ buy your widgets, regardless of what they are doing with them, we the government will not do any business with them." Which is waayyyy beyond just not buying widgets. That is outright retaliation and using your power to attempt to destroy a company.
by nancyminusone | 2026-03-05 21:39:33+00:00
For whom are you speaking? It certainly isn't me. My phone plan shares 3 lines on a single 2gb of data/month. I'd have to pay more for even the current base plan, but I don't feel like it. This is because the mobile experience is worse in almost every way.

But that's a moot point, because advertisers will still track you on any device you use.
by bdangubic | 2026-03-05 21:39:36+00:00
> when fortunes are made by those who just happen to be in close proximity to power, it's not good for the country

When was the last time this wasn't the case? Back in the 1960's maybe? I started following politics around the time I started college - 1993 - and this has been true in my entire "following politics" part of life
by a_t48 | 2026-03-05 21:41:20+00:00
I'm well aware of `COPY --link`, it doesn't solve the problem. I'm a heavy heavy user of it, combined with throwaway build stages. `COPY --link` won't help my `apt install` commands.

The use case here isn't `FROM python:3.10`, it's `FROM ubuntu; RUN apt install -y vim wget curl software-properties-common python3.10`/`RUN rosdep install`/`RUN --mount=type=cache,target=/root/.cache/uv --mount=type=bind,source=uv.lock,target=uv.lock --mount=type=bind,source=pyproject.toml,target=pyproject.toml uv sync --locked --no-install-project`. All of those dependencies get merged onto a single layer that isn't shared with anything else. You'd better hope something like tensorflow isn't one of those dependencies.
by tinfoilhatter | 2026-03-05 21:41:31+00:00
Ethiopia is in the process of implementing a nationwide digital ID program called Fayda ID. Fayda ID is an implementation of the open source platform MOSIP [1].

The Bill & Melinda Gates foundation is a strategic partner and funder of the MOSIP technology platform. [2]

The digital ID is required by citizens for access to banking, obtaining a drivers license, obtaining SIM cards, and other essential services citizens rely on. [3]

The government of Ethiopia is now receiving funding from NGOs such as the World Bank to implement their national digital ID program. [4]

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

[2] https://www.gatesfoundation.org/ideas/articles/mosip-digital...

[3] https://id.et/benefits

[4] https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2023/12/13/w...
by jdndbdjsj | 2026-03-05 21:42:11+00:00
If I were to download those weights I can't run them unless I spend $100k on a cluster, so the privacy advantage is not there yet.

We already have Groq, Celebras and AWS Bedrock and others in the inference of open models space, so the model is usable that way.

Is Claude better than Llama, Gwen etc. Probably. For now.

But for how long? Dissolving means relying on Meta or Deepseek etc. to pick up and carry on tuning. Otherwise it'll be as useful as a GPT2 or Atari ST eventually in a competitive environment.

Also open sourcing the weights is handing it over to DoD (aka DoW).

Complicated question but probably not the best move. Keep going means keep working on safety research.
by CryZe | 2026-03-05 21:42:12+00:00
I've been using both Opus 4.6 and Codex 5.3 in VSCode's Copilot and while Opus is indeed 3x and Codex is 1x, that doesn't seem to matter as Opus is willing to go work in the background for like an hour for 3 credits, whereas Codex asks you whether to continue every few lines of code it changes, quickly eating way more credits than Opus. In fact Opus in Copilot is probably underpriced, as it can definitely work for an hour with just those 12 cents of cost. Which I'm not sure you get anywhere else at such a low price.

Update: I don't know why I can't reply to your reply, so I'll just update this. I have tried many times to give it a big todo list and told it to do it all. But I've never gotten it to actually work on it all and instead after the first task is complete it always asks if it should move onto the next task. In fact, I always tell it not to ask me and yet it still does. So unless I need to do very specific prompt engineering, that does not seem to work for me.
by asabla | 2026-03-05 21:43:40+00:00
I really don't have any numbers to back this up. But it feels like the sweet spot is around ~500k context size. Anything larger then that, you usually have scoping issues, trying to do too much at the same time, or having having issues with the quality of what's in the context at all.

For me, I would say speed (not just time to first token, but a complete generation) is more important then going for a larger context size.
by mediaman | 2026-03-05 21:44:24+00:00
10 USC 3252 has only been used once, against Acronis AG, a Swiss company with Russian connections.

Acronis did not have DOD contracts.

Other companies (Huawei) have been deemed risks under different laws, or by Congress, but they also didn't have direct DOD contracts.

Do you have any evidence for your assertion? Did you check if it is true before posting?
by Karrot_Kream | 2026-03-05 21:44:59+00:00
The Bay Area/NYC and founder adjacent folks I know are mostly on group chats and messaging apps. Fundamentally the signal on this site is too low to be of use in those conversations. It's difficult to discuss decisionmaking in a forum full of random Fortune 100 employee deep in a torrid company hierarchy complaining about what their management hierarchy wants them to do.

There's also a tension between the increasing "community building" happening on HN and the Bay Area/NYC crowd. A lot of them have an extant community largely based on in-person relationships. The more HN builds its own community, the more you alienate this set of people. In other words, Slashdotification is happening more and more to HN where a set of very online tech people who don't really make decisions generate most of the chatter on this site.
by garethsprice | 2026-03-05 21:45:11+00:00
It being an "acquired taste" is part of the appeal. A lot of high-end stuff is ass-ugly on purpose. If everyone liked it because it simply looked nice, you couldn't tell who's "in the club" of other rich people. Brands will attach elaborate stories and histories to objects to make people feel cultured that they have invested time in acquiring the knowledge, but really it comes down to in-group object recognition.
Show HN: StockMRRket – trade indie startup "stocks" priced from real MRR data
by stemonteduro | 2026-03-05 21:45:11+00:00
Hey HN,
I built stockMRRket, a side project where you can buy/sell shares of real indie startups with virtual money.

The core idea: prices are derived from real startup metrics (mainly MRR), so it behaves like a tiny market for internet startups.

It’s built on top of trustMRR APIs, which made this possible. Thanks to Marc Lou for making this data available.
by embedding-shape | 2026-03-05 21:45:42+00:00
Different team "manages" the overall blog than the team who wrote that specific article. At one point, maybe it made sense, then something in the product changed, team that manages the blog never tested it again.

Or, people just stopped thinking about any sort of UX. These sort of mistakes are all over the place, on literally all web properties, some UX flows just ends with you at a page where nothing works sometimes. Everything is just perpetually "a bit broken" seemingly everywhere I go, not specific to OpenAI or even the internet.
by scottLobster | 2026-03-05 21:45:51+00:00
"If you aim well enough" is doing a ton of work there. Precise real-time optical tracking of a satellite from a moving platform is an extremely difficult problem. Even if the satellite itself is geostationary, it would also have to rotate to keep the "cylinder" pointed in the right direction to maintain signal.

I suppose you could make a "cylinder" or "cone" broad enough that, if the threat was static, could blot-out attempted jamming from only certain regions while staying open facing toward friendly zones.
by jongjong | 2026-03-05 21:45:58+00:00
This is scary. I always reject PRs from bots. The idea of auto-merging code would never enter my head.

I think dependency audit tools like Snyk should flag any repo which uses auto-merging of code as a vulnerability. I don't want to use such tools as a dependency for my library.

This is incredibly dangerous and neglectful.

This is apocalyptic. I'm starting to understand the problem with OpenClaw though... In this case it seems it was a git hook which is publicly visible but in the near future, people are going through be auto-merging with OpenClaw and nobody would know that a specific repo is auto-merged and the author can always claim plausible deniability.

Actually I've been thinking a lot about AI and while brainstorming impacts, the term 'Plausible deniability' kept coming back from many different angles. I was thinking about impact of AI videos for example. This is an angle I hadn't thought about but quite obvious. We're heading towards lawlessness because anyone can claim that their agents did something on their behalf without their approval.

All the open source licenses are "Use software at your own risk" so developers are immune from the consequences of their neglect.
by wcfrobert | 2026-03-05 21:46:03+00:00
I disagree. It's worth asking why some people find brand watches beautiful? Where did they get their sense of aesthetic? Were they born with a congenital preference for RM 16-01 Citron?

Culture shapes our taste. Companies pursue on multi-decade billion-dollar campaigns to shape our culture. We like certain things because famous actors or athletes endorse them; because hip hop artists rap about them; because influencers talk about them; because Hollywood portrays them a certain way. This extends to all form of modern aesthetic preferences from architecture to watches to cars to furniture to dating.

I think the argument pg is making is that brand-obsessed cultures are not maximally truth/beauty-seeking and gets really weird. e.g. Japanese Ohaguro, Chinese foot binding, various cranial deformation practices from the Mayans to the Huns, high-heels, ugly (to outside observers) watches.

I think it's a really thought-provoking essay. But it's too heterodox and "autistic" to share with most of my friends. Socially speaking, it's best to outwardly embrace the current zeitgeist.
by sinzone | 2026-03-05 21:46:46+00:00
software is becoming like the fashion industry. you go to Prada vs Hermess because you think one does better shoes and the other better bags. But is not because neither could do better shoes or bad it isb ecause your mind positioning is set.

Software. everyone can do it now. but you still buy lets say Crowdstrike for security, because is in your brain for years as security software.