HN Best Comments

Re: The U.S. Census Bureau and "Super Intelligence" I think when it comes to making machines smarter than humans, Executive Order 14434 represents an admirable effort by this administration to meet the machines halfway. Lerc, 8 hours ago

Re: Supermarket freezers across Europe hit by second suspected cyber-attack Bless those hackers for firing a warning shot over our freezers, that we may take heed and secure our neonatal care units, stoplights, and air traffic controllers. fritzo, 9 hours ago

Re: The SEC Should Block Anthropic's IPO to Protect the Public The SEC's job isn't to adjudicate on whether Anthropic is a good or bad bet for investors. Its job is to ensure that investors have adequate visibility, and then get out of the way. It would be VERY BAD if we gave politicians arbitrary veto power over who IPOs and who doesn't. The threat of corruption should be obvious. marsten, 1 hour ago

Re: Astra can read and write weights to improve Qwen I don't think this is an emergent capability. I think Astra was trained on neural weights data as an attempt by OpenAI to get to recursive self improvement. Something similar happen in early GPT models which had a lot of chess game in standard notation in their training data which made them very good at chess as long as your prompt had the right format. We'll see if this attempt at RSI worked. vanyle, 5 hours ago

Re: Oracle files to sell $20B in new stock, bonds to finance AI buildout Things I hope for: - Oracle defaulting on its debt commitments. - Anti trust action into Skydance forcing a breakup. - Larry forced to cover the difference by selling family silver. - Lanai going back into the hands of the people of Hawaii. Just for the laughs and for forcing me to bear with some of the worst applications of all time. seatac76, 2 hours ago

Re: WTF Ubuntu? > The post gives no details about what this vulnerability is, how critical it is, how it is impacting them personally, how vulnerable their servers are, how they are working around it. Yes it does? And Ubuntu is selling security subscriptions and doing a poor job of it, These aren't open source volunteers, this is a paid product. falsemyrmidon, 7 hours ago

Re: Anthropic's internal AI use, at retail prices, now exceeds its employee pay No. This is opportunity cost. A clear example is Google. They can easily give all compute to Deepmind, yet majority is allocated to be sold at market rate. So, every compute Deepmind and Googlers get is lost revenue opportunity and must be measured as such. No other internal tools or servers has this much external demand to be comparable. Also, Anthropic is showing that to operate at Anthropic level, you need $300,000 compute spend per employee ai-x, 5 hours ago

Re: WTF Ubuntu? For the record, the kernels with the fixes are in the "proposed" repos for each LTS release: * https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux You can pull them down with a "-t" added to your apt-get (but will not appear by default). 26LTS had the new kernel go to the updates/security repos on October 28. throw0101c, 6 hours ago

Re: Astra can read and write weights to improve Qwen I think the "taught qwen math" part is not exactly correct though, even if the post makes it sound like that. Qwen already knew math, but it was bugging out and getting into an infinite loop when it tried to solve the problems (85 of its first 96 answers hit the token limit). With numpy and pytorch, Astra found where the loop was happening and fixed it. They also tried the same with Gemma 3 270M, which doesn't loop and is just bad at math, and Astra couldn't improve it. Still impressive, but it's more in the realm of what I'd expect, given labs are probably training their models on ML research and interpretability work. l9o, 1 hour ago

Re: Ask HN: Which TV do you recommend for privacy? Buy any tv with CEC support (almost all of them) and never connect it to the internet. Never. Never start any app on the tv. Hook a Kodi box to the hdmi port and use that, and only that. For the Kodi box get series-7 Intel NUC with Kabylake-era processors, gen 7. They don't run Windows 11, so come very cheap second hand, but decode h264 and hevc in hardware and drive a 4K screen like charm. You can install a modern Wifi card in the NUC and a PCIe SSD. Then buy one of these: https://www.pulse-eight.com/p/154/intel-nuc-hdmi-cec-adapter and put it in your NUC, so you can use the TV remote to control Kodi. That's it. Bonus, you can take your TV with you when travelling. kitestramuort, 11 hours ago

Re: Anthropic's internal AI use, at retail prices, now exceeds its employee pay >There's an important distinction here. Anthropic isn't actually spending more cash on AI than salaries. It's valuing its internal AI consumption at retail prices. If virtually any other company in the world said "we have internal AI servers and we let our employees use them" ... the company would measure that as they would any other internal expenditure: by how much it costs them. You blow $50k a year on servers running your LLMs? It cost you $50k. Only a company like Anthropic, desperate to make news and help their IPO, would measure by the cost they charge customers. It's as ridiculous as Microsoft counting every employee's use of MS Word ... as if it had paid the full consumer price of each copy. hungryhobbit, 3 hours ago

Re: Astra can read and write weights to improve Qwen This is insane. Astra can, without tooling, determine what games small networks are trained on, can edit the weights of networks directly to improve outcomes, and can hand edit a small qwen model to improve its math skills by like 5x. I'm shook. If you'd asked me this morning whether LLMs have native understanding of their weights that is less than human <-> neuron understanding, the same as human or more than human, I would have said "same to less" depending on definitions. No human can go edit a brain to become better at math. This is just very, very surprising to me and extremely interesting. I would guess this upsets quite a number of interp theories and philosophical takes on what's going on with these networks. vessenes, 49 minutes ago

Re: WTF Ubuntu? Worse yet, the Ubuntu security incident page[0] lists "Ubuntu Priority: High" (as opposed to Critical, which would trigger an out-of-schedule patch). There's a "Why this priority?" link that simply says: > Why is this CVE high priority? > See ubuntu cvss score That's it, we don't even get a period on this TBD of a sentence. It's followed by a generic link that explains what "Ubuntu Priority" is, but that page contradicts their choice. Note that it doesn't offer any mitigations either, and even the (horrendously unclear) description is copied from the NIST page, so there's no actual message from Ubuntu. I already had a bad feeling the first time I saw "Get more security updates through Ubuntu Pro" on `apt upgrade`, this is now the kick I needed to move to a different distro. [0] https://ubuntu.com/security/CVE-2026-98432#priority-reason BoppreH, 3 hours ago

Re: WTF Ubuntu? What is keeping people on Ubuntu instead of just using Debian? I'm genuinely curious. What is Ubuntu offering that Debian doesn't provide? Gabriel54, 3 hours ago

Re: OccupySaaS Because it feels good to start something rather than joining an existing someone at the exact same mission. It's all just performative. ivanmontillam, 13 hours ago

Re: Postgres 19 is late because so many more bugs are being found now Avoiding 3rd party libraries seems like a false sense of security. You’ll stop seeing CVEs on the scanner reports, but the bugs are still there, just in your own code that is less well audited than public libraries. Gigachad, 5 hours ago

Re: The Megadonors Who Have Poured $1.2B into the Midterms If they have the money for this, they have the money to pay more in taxes. wpm, 8 hours ago

Re: Show HN: Wikihack – HackerTube, but for Wikipedia articles mentioned on HN Coming soon: HackerHackerTube, my website that recommends HackerTube variants posted on HN! jacobobryant, 5 hours ago

Re: Postgres 19 is late because so many more bugs are being found now This is a good thing. Repaying technical debt is always a great thing. On our own 1.5M loc system, we've found and fixed thousands of bugs, security holes and circular dependencies in the last year. Code quality has increased, test coverage increased. We've also recently set our compiler to treat warnings as errors, and to be as strict as possible. It is absolutely amazing to see the gaps being filled, it would've been an impossible task for human devs and IDE's would've made it very uncomfortable. We've also ironed out all the bugs and failure modes in our infrastructure automation / monitoring. Our next project is to eliminate all 3rd party dependencies, and after that to rebuild our frontends completely using zero frameworks, not touching npm ever again after that. So when I read this about postgres, I was very happy that they found and pursued this side quest. They can make the codebase bullet proof. BatteryMountain, 3 hours ago

Re: Ask HN: Which TV do you recommend for privacy? - Buy an LG OLED TV. They're as gorgeous as they are notorious. I just got a 77" LG C6 and it is crazy good. - Root it [0]. - Install Glasshouse [1] and disable all telemetry. YOU now own the glass. Now you can chromecast to the TV, use Adfree YouTube, access IP TV, etc etc etc. No point crippling your TV by pulling the wireless module and voiding your warranty. - Install a bunch of cool apps to your TV [2] (there are many more out there besides those listed here) - Restore to Factory Defaults if you ever want / need to unroot and get back to stock e.g. a warranty claim The only issue is that LG recently closed the vulnerability that made rooting possible so you don't want any firmware released after 2026-10-10 like 43.21.84. Hopefully a new exploit is found that makes rooting possible once again. BTW, you might have heard of Dev Mode on these TVs but they don't allow anywhere near the functionality that rooting provides. [0] https://tv.slada.sk/guides/rooting-guide [1] https://github.com/rorygallagher2024/glasshouse [2] https://www.webosbrew.org/ MegaDeKay, 5 hours ago