skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Pencils are harmful if misused. They make for effective stabbing.

Is this about the chance about being inadvertedly misused to the point they’re harmful.

I dunno, by all means, don’t sell them to kids, but should we really forbid a 15 year old unless they can show some form of ID? They’re not any more likely to do something dumb with it than an 18 year old.
Well, has anyone heard of someone escaping appropriate repercussions?

For example, maybe the company found out, but decided not to involve the police or demand repayment.

For another example, maybe an employee found evidence that suggested such a thing happened, but not far up the chain of command decided that investigating and escalating it wasn't worthwhile to the company.

My reason for asking, is that my initial reaction was that is just a bad idea. Then I wondered whether it was a bad idea that was nevertheless happening.
Not OP, but I'll bite.

I, firstly, don't think it's fair to say "they get significantly better every year" after 2 years. I honestly think GPT 3/3.5 (maybe optimized for cost or speed but not retrained) would have been adequate for a significant chunk of the general purpose tasks that are asked of LLMs. I think most of the other gains we've seen since are related to fine-tuning on intentional application-specific tasks. IMO the only real "significant" improvement is the native multi-modal models.

That said, I think that RL+thinking and long-context models will start to present enough combined incremental improvements towards my next points to be even more useful and capable at a wider variety of tasks, but there is (in their current usable forms like chat bot apps and public APIs) a fundamental limit on their implementation preventing them from being AGI.

I think that models, even the "thinking" ones, fail to truly perform novel rationalization around general-purpose task solving. We have a ton of evidence that they're useful for a ton of tasks when it's trained in. Even going a tiny bit in a unique direction drops the model output quality a ton. Available thinking models today are really good at math, because they were RLed into solving math like a school child - rote practice. But that doesn't mean they're capable of even applying the same logical tools (they should have learned along) the way to novel mathematic and logic questions.

Another impediment to being treated even as an application-specific "mini AGI" is their naïveté and hallucinations. This makes their use as agents suspect for anything important. They can't distinguish or even output a true confidence on what they "don't know", and this blind confidence is a setback. Humans are known to say incorrect things confidently, but they're also known to reflect on their lack of knowledge and recognize their limits. Humans have real memory to be able (imprecisely) associate an event with their learning, to aid confidence in recall. Similarly, LLMs trusting nature on input (eg. prompt injection attacks) prevent them from "intelligently" acting in the real world even when they're not hallucinating. Tools like "DeepResearch" are really useful, and impressive improvements on traditional human searching for processing the vastness of the internet. BUT the model can't genuinely distinguish between good and bad sources, and often can't intelligently reflect on the patterns and social context of the sources they sell.

I can totally see a world where an LLM can output a confidence metric which is used to drive the tokens, and potentially suppress output, and I can totally see a world where long context and thinking (w/ RL) gives it enough reflection on everything to question to function even more autonomously. But I remain skeptical that it will be able to "think" and rationalize deeply enough to be a "super intelligence" on tasks it wasn't taught.
I agree that aren't valuable, that's my point. Cheating has been rampant and easy for a long time. Though, it's not just the cheating causing it.
I'm not familiar with bcachefs, so maybe I'm misunderstanding, but the b-tree discussed here also doesn't need to talk locks except for when data is written?

I'm curious about the per-CPU locks you mention though, do you mean that e.g., nodes are owned by certain CPUs and can only be written from those CPUs (and hence can get away with a CPU local lock?), or something else?
I wonder how this compares to Generally Intelligent / Imbue (renamed), whose hiring ads were regularly appearing in HN for months, but I've not seen that lately.
They could exist with government funding but "socialism bad hurr durr"
It could even have been another employee putting the idea into his head and encouraging him.
Cisco Launches Agntcy AI Framework
In follow up news, UK lawmakers are considering banning Aluminum Foil from sale without ID after an unidentified GCHQ employee was heard lamenting that their son misplaced their phone on the tube.
I don't understand where this idea that Microsoft doesn't kill projects.

Zune, Games for Windows Live, Skype, Encarta, CodePlex, Windows Phone, Internet Explorer.

https://killedbymicrosoft.info/
It's essentially portfolio management. You win some, you lose some.

And you work at a phone company, and phone companies have interesting problems. I'm sure at some point everyone there felt somewhat obligated to do something to contribute. And there's plenty of interesting things to do at the phone company.
My new hobby, labelling my unused code as zero contention, because if it's not running there's zero contention :-)
> It would absolutely be possible to implement that stuff in a fully privacy-preserving way, with nothing but basic cryptography, and the government could absolutely enforce that implementation.

What are some implementation(s)?

Different implementations vary in effectiveness. Anyone can give a minor access to their device, or a minor can steal their device. So in order to prevent access then, you'd need something like constant face monitoring (via a local model, possible to do anonymously, but expensive and fallible), or legal threats (impossible to do anonymously, because you must track the adult who gave their kid access; and many people are dumb with technology even when it matters, so you either have to fine or jail many people or selectively enforce).

The easiest implementation I can think, which I'd recommend, is to make locked-down kid devices, require ID or even just a credit card (18+) to purchase a normal device, put the burden on adults to not share their device with kids, and only police merchants (for selling normal devices without ID) and websites (for serving adult content without blocking kid devices). Like what we do with alcohol, except not even trying to police people for sharing, because it would be ineffective and messy. Like alcohol, many kids will get access anyways, although less than now.

I like this approach because, IMO importantly, kids who don't try to see adult content will be far less likely to, and parents who try to restrict their kids from adult content will be far more successful. I don't think you can stop determined kids with neglectful parents without drawbacks.
Here's the repo: https://github.com/agntcy
and docs: https://docs.agntcy.org/pages/abstract.html
Numerous is greatly overstated.

1) only matters if you're a very high value target who is being manually target. Doesn't apply to 99.999% of people, who only need to worry about credential stuffing and brute force.

2) Similarly, it's not hard to come up with an algorithm that satisfies 99.9% of websites.

3) To a lot of people, managing a password manager sucks.

I personally do use a password manager and automatically generated passwords, but also understand that for many people it's the better option.
Your example proves my point. If there are no judges, the government has to let you go free. They don’t force anyone to become a judge.

What about the victims' right to justice and to be secure against violations of their rights (bodily integrity and health, property, freedom of movement and flourishing)? If there are no judges and all the criminals are left to roam the streets, they are free to continue victimizing anyone they choose. Seems to me that these rights have a lot of mutually incompatible features. You can't provide for one person's rights without compelling action from another.
https://archive.is/rIP67
I feel like 30 years from now, many of today’s AI labs will be regarded with the same reverence as Bell Labs or Xerox PARC. They have a lot of the same ingredients—backing from massive monopolies, virtually unlimited funding, and a wave of public interest in what they’re doing.

Sure, LLMs are impressive, but they don’t yet feel as foundational as Unix, transistors, GUIs, editors, or word processors. But give it a few decades, and who knows? In hindsight, we might look at OpenAI, Anthropic, or DeepMind with the same awe we reserve for Bell Labs and PARC today.
What sort of prescription is right for Oculus?
Remember this is an executive order. The next president can sell them all to pay for a pet project.
It was a nice way to organize things so you could find stuff serendipitously. I remember clicking around in my neighborhood (where I had my N64 cheat codes website) and finding some cool website with lots of slick looking 3D renders. It's rare to stumble across unplanned-for things like that nowadays.
Not true.

"On August 15, 2010, an anonymous hacker exploited a critical vulnerability in Bitcoin, allowing them to generate 184.467 billion Bitcoin."
The soviet ideology was just a coat of paint, functionnally, it was the same as Putin.
Thanks! Cursor definitely helps me speed things up haha.
This electricity nonsense is just a fad. The future will be powered by steam.
Something that could plausibly looks like an unintentional bug, but that's a lot harder to come up with.
What a busy beaver you are.
Kinda of agree. There are some research places funded by private donation, such as Simons Foundation. Wonder if those are properly managed to attract the right people ...
> Mervin Kelly used to often tell new hires at Labs, “You get paid for the seven and a half hours a day you put in here, but you get your raises and promotions on what you do in the other sixteen and a half hours.”

Oh but how true this still is today!
I don't think Iran is buying anything that can be turned off.

There is no trust between players in the axis of evil.
I'm certainly showing my age, but
despite it being an interesting topic I really struggled with the English style in the piece.
Related: https://gwern.net/doc/science/1986-hamming#the-importance-of...
I thought similarly and went with the most expensive lenses with the largest "corridor" for my first pair of progressives. They're great for up close and distance, but for me so far, the middle distance region for screens is a sham. There's almost no spot where the monitor is both clear and non-straining, and the tiniest shift of my head causes warping or blurring. I've had them redone but it didn't solve the fundamental problem.

Maybe my astigmatism correction is causing problems, though it's a small correction. Do you have any astigmatism in your prescription?
> In other countries, the army would be sent to break prolonged strikes by shooting at strikers.

This happened in West Virginia as well:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain
The economic turmoil is making the people with the knowledge very rich, every day. This is the lesser spoken role of the volatility this gov is creating.

Kill confidence, buy 25% dips, hint at future announcements, sell at 35% gains. The inner circle with the timeline are just consolidating that wealth at the expense of a lot of the most vulnerable - the blind hopeless follower gambling beyond logic.
whence
If you think of technical and nontechnical as a spectrum, the types of nontechnical people in 1999 that were online were miles ahead of today's nontechnicals.

And there was only so much to learn, too, at least as far as web development went-- not like geocities was gonna let you hook up to a SQL database.

Today I think those types of nontechnical people are pursuing far more lucrative niches in product management, design, ux, marketing and stuff like that over basic webdev work.
I think it’s more of “if they didn’t do it then somebody else would have,” the outcome from Bell was inevitable regardless of the name.

Consider that fusion power is an inevitability, but you don’t know who’s name will be associated with it, nor the correct stock to invest in prior to their success.

Hindsight is always 20/20, remember?
It all depends on the goals of the software that is written. It seems the examples shown are from the perspective of readability, and perhaps modularity (in a way that makes the code easy to understand, which goes back to readability). Within certain limits I think readability is highly overrated and large orgs (aka enterprise software) tends to over-engineer in favor of readability.

IMHO, software should prioritize something tangible. Usually it would be performance, but it could also be extensibility or portability. These are often at odds with readability, and what are you really gaining from super readable code, really? Maybe a few minutes? Compare that to the gains of having performant code or an architecture that scales easily, readability should be the first thing to be sacrificed.
> Even a film that portrays war in the most brutal unromanticized way still ends up glorifying it simply by engaging with these themes

I think this is plain wrong. Unless you count "glorification" to mean anything that makes a subject compelling to watch. But I think that's stretching the meaning of the word past it's breaking point.
Meh. We don't look at Yahoo or ebays attempts in the same way. Adtech was an interesting space but it turns out to have poor explanatory power for whether ads actually have an effect beyond basic notification (poor Coca Cola shareholders...). AI labs may be respected by insiders, but the raw engineering prowess of Bell labs, along with the joint basic and applied research initiatives, are "gone from our sight."
Unlikely, given that he confessed and that in other attack, he damaged the machine only he had access to.

I mean, it is theoretically possible there were two disgruntled employees, and second one pinned his crimes to the first one, but I think this is pretty unlikely, given the observeed lack of common sense.
is that not enough? It's also inexpensive and works very well on all platforms.
> What does it get me? A fancier "bios" menu that supports a mouse. Big whoop.

My compaq pentium 75 had bios setup that looked like windows 3. Mouse support in bios wasn't cool or necessary then, and it isn't now. :p
Other employee, reddit story, AI chatbot, crime show... it does not matter who put the idea in the head, all that matters is who did the deed.
What in the actual hell
The Bellingcat Open Source Challenge Is Back
Those projects from the ship of harkinian are not recomp. Those are based on completed decompilation projects. So they're not translating the mips assembly to an unreadable C being recompiled. They're true ports from as close to the real source code as you can get.
> and you can't wear it on a shirt

The widespread proliferation of attire bearing so-called "ahegao" faces demonstrates otherwise.
> Sounds like a wealth transfer to anyone holding Bitcoin.

Don't forget XRP, solana and whatever else David Sachs is involved with.
I dunno, the ethics depends on the situation, right?

If the customer asks for shoddy workmanship in a system that will have some safety critical application that will hurt the general public, you have a the engineer’s ethical obligation to blow the whistle.

If the customer asks for shoddy workmanship because they don’t care to prioritize documentation and robustness in their ad system, that’s management’s prerogative. The customer can be trusted to represent themselves.
It dies so often too.
Only slightly less well known.
Modern STEM workforce churn is actively causing damage. The “switch or stagnate” mindset makes it hard to hold on to a problem when you’re constantly thinking about switching jobs just to get a promotion or avoid a layoff.

Also, companies would rather spend money on acquisitions than retention, and that choice keeps reinforcing the cycle.
Suleyman is a fraud lol
It reduces sell pressure. I don't know how to estimate what that's worth.
SQLite is really a terrible example of anything other than what you can accomplish when you pour enormous resources into a single C library. Its `SQLITE_INTERNAL` error code is atypical in my experience. My recollection is that its tests are an order of magnitude bigger than SQLite itself. It is nowhere near a typical example.

I don't think `SQLITE_INTERNAL` is how C libraries are typically designed, and even when they are, that doesn't mean they aren't risking UB in places. PCRE2 has its own `PCRE2_ERROR_INTERNAL` error value too, but it's had its fair share of UB related bugs because C is unsafe-everywhere-by-default.

More to the point, the fact that hitting UB-instead-of-abort-or-unwinding is normal C library design is kinda the point: that's almost certainly a good chunk of why you end up with CVEs worse than DoS. How many vulnerabilities would have been significantly limited if C made you opt into explicit bound check elision?

> but the message that began that thread seems to advocate for that

I agree it is poorly worded. I should have caught that in my initial comment in this thread.

The problem here really is the extremes IMO. The extremes are "libraries should never use `unwrap()`" and "libraries should check every runtime invariant at all points and panic when they break." You've gotta use your good judgment to pick and choose when they're appropriate.

But I have oodles of `unwrap()` in my Rust libraries. Including in the regex crate's parser. And for sure, some people have hit bugs that manifest as panics. And those could in turn feasibly be DoS problems. But they definitely weren't RCEs, and that's because I used `unwrap()`.
One of my first part time jobs was as a "pornzapper" for Tripod, one of Geocities' competitors.

We had a tool called the "fleshfinder" that looked for accounts with lots of images and then lots of those images had lots of flesh tones, and would dump them into a moderation queue where we human pornzappers would glance over the images and then press a button to terminate their account or mark it as within terms of service.
I agree with this so much! I recently started using patito, which is a typesafe pydantic based library for Polars. I’m not really deep into it yet, but I prefer polars syntax and the extra functions that Patito adds to the dataframes.
(https://patito.readthedocs.io/en/latest/)

Otherwise, it feels so broken to just pass a dataframe around. It’s like typing everything as a “dict” and hoping for the best. It’s awful.
I applied :D just now hehehe
Laundering it would be very difficult. NK can do it because they have a nation state that will protect them. That's the only way to be able to spend that money. So sure steak the keys and live a life of luxury in north Korea I guess.
I am working for an enterprise customer of a niche Microsoft product. They haven’t killed it yet, despite us being possibly their only customer.

However, their documentation and support is really scant.
Maybe an anonymous post or anecdotal data would be good.
Centralizing everyone’s credentials after all these years still seems like the most risky idea ever. The only thing possibly more attractive to a hacker would be free sex and drugs, but only for a little while, and then they’d go back to trying to steal everyone’s credentials.

Some other targets: everyone’s PII, info on friends, family, pets, answers to security questions, mobile IDs, PIN numbers, account numbers, signatures, photos, fingerprints, voice patterns, facial and retinal scans, gaits, DNA, mitochondrial RNA.
Why should that action be controlled?
>when time is brain (i.e starting fibrinolytics)

Why not take fibrinolytics before the scan, just to be on the safe side? Ambulances could be equipped with fibrinolytics, for instance.

Is it because fibrinolytics could actually be harmful, depending on the stroke type?
I think he is trying to set us up and also occupy the news cycle to distract. We retaliate with tariffs, he blames us for his domestic economic woes and increases tariffs, we retaliate with electricity and potash for leverage, public support for Canada slowly drops. Thus he slowly moves the goal posts eventually to seize these resources because they are of national importance. A stretch? Maybe but look at Panama, Greenland, Ukraine minerals actions.

There is no going back to the previous relationship because Canadians feel betrayed after years of big sibling adoration and blame pre-existing, worsening unrelated domestic issues on Trump’s actions. My honest take of public sentiment is it has taken such a dive at this point if 9/11 happened in this era the passengers landing in Canada could camp out on the runway huddling for warmth by barrels until busses home are arranged.
Hard times sitting on hundred of billions? Really? He uses his wealth and power to cause problems for regular people.
The author seems to use many qualifiers in each sentence.

So for example, rather than succintly stating: "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog", this author adopts the style more akin to: "The quick brown fox, which grew up Oakville near the rushing river, jumped, or, leaped mightily, over the lazy dog rather than simply walking around the dog like most would do normally".

Similar to Blaise Pascal's sentiment: 'I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter.'

Indeed, Thomas Jefferson writes about this skill: “The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.”
Part of me thinks that that before they gave the $130M they knew exactly how they'd get it back (thru some pre-arranged M&A) if it doesn't work out. Or at least that would be the smart thing to do.
Huh, the autosuggested story here ( https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/02/c_creator_calls_for_a... ; "C++ creator calls for help to defend programming language from 'serious attacks'" ) seems more interesting than this one.
> I think most of the other gains we've seen since are related to fine-tuning on intentional application-specific tasks. IMO the only real "significant" improvement is the native multi-modal models.

Let me say, as someone with no connection to OpenAI, that Deep Research mode is an absolute game-changer for my use and well worth the money. Obviously, YMMV, but for really does do deep research and organize it all in an excellent way.

I haven't yet noticed an error in its output when researching general subjects. It doesn't solve the problem of not necessarily using code examples from the relevant version of a Rust library, so it has a good ways to go for Rust coding. But I am very, very impressed with its usefulness for general research.

My point is only, if you haven't tried it, don't assume that there isn't already a game-changer out there for many uses.
dang replaced it with an archive link and pinned a comment at the top telling the story. What a G.
I’m not making any judgement on this particular event but your rigid way of thinking that because it’s a crime it’s wrong is, well, too rigid.

If I was a citizen of North Korea and I assassinated the great leader technically speaking I just committed a crime too. You see the nuance here? Maybe you think because the laws are American and Americans can do no wrong. Extraordinary rendition was completely legal and a thousand times worse than what this guy did. 10 years for this, 0 years for torture.

I want to hear his side of the story. How did they fuck him over after he gave them years of work.
Exactly. It ain't a fallacy to call out the folks actively greasing down the slope.
Derek Lowe: The Continuing Crisis, Part VII: An Overview