Hacker News: InkCanon

New comment by InkCanon in "How Terry Tao became an evangelist for AI in math"

InkCanon — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 09:59:55 +0000

The checking has nothing to do with AI, despite the (massively funded) marketing done to make you think so. It is based on formal methods/theorem provers.

New comment by InkCanon in "“Too dangerous to release” or just too expensive?"

InkCanon — Fri, 15 May 2026 14:51:45 +0000

Also, slightly stretching the definition of terms consecutively, so the multiplicative meaning is really far from the truth. For example, 271 vulnerabilities were really mostly bugs - generally incorrect states, but which almost never led to any exploit.

New comment by InkCanon in "“Why not just use Lean?”"

InkCanon — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 12:26:32 +0000

Wait till you hear what Rocq was originally called!

New comment by InkCanon in "The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code"

InkCanon — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 10:16:51 +0000

The Stinger is an anti air weapon, the Javelin is an anti tank weapon.

New comment by InkCanon in "There Will Be a Scientific Theory of Deep Learning"

InkCanon — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 12:20:24 +0000

The field is massively hampered by the wishful mnemonics and anthropomorphization of LLMs. For example, even the hallucination idea arbitrarily assigns human semantics to LLM results. By the actual mathematical principles by which LLMs work, any hallucination is another output, with no clear definition between it and every other output.

New comment by InkCanon in "Qwen3.6-Max-Preview: Smarter, Sharper, Still Evolving"

InkCanon — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 06:26:46 +0000

The more accurate version is only Chinese companies (plus Facebook briefly) really open source their frontier models. The rest are non frontier. They are either older or specialized for something.

New comment by InkCanon in "How We Broke Top AI Agent Benchmarks: And What Comes Next"

InkCanon — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 14:24:55 +0000

I do think there's value in science communication, but it does take an intelligent understanding of it on a case by case basis as to whether it's genuine or hype marketing.

Side note: talking to someone from such a "elite" university, I discovered many labs in these unis have standing orders by PIs to tweet their papers/preprints when published. Varies by field, in AI it is by far the most common.

New comment by InkCanon in "Exploiting the most prominent AI agent benchmarks"

InkCanon — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 12:33:49 +0000

I strongly disagree with the claim that it's a phenomenal paper on exploits, the exploits themselves are nowhere near significant in the cybersecurity research sense. It's saying that implementations of these benchmarks has exploits on the way they conduct their tests. It doesn't discover that current LLMs are doing it (they highlighted several other exploits in the past), they only say it's a possible way they could cheat. It's a bit like they've discovered how to hack your codeforces score.

What they claim as exploits is also deeply baffling. Like the one where they say if you exploit the system binaries to write a curl wrapper, you can download the answers. This is technically true, but it is an extremely trivial statement that if you have elevated system privileges, you can change the outputs of programs running on it.

I'm actually deeply confused about why this is a paper. This feels like it should be an issue on GitHub. If I were being blunt, I'd say they are trying really hard to make a grand claim about how benchmarks are bad, when all they've done is essentially discovered several misconfigured interfaces and website exploits.

New comment by InkCanon in "The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing"

InkCanon — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 12:56:59 +0000

Often at the start yes. So the students gets a bit of recognition, a bit of experience and a bit of knowledge.

New comment by InkCanon in "Ask HN: Can WASM be used as a means of sanitizing native code?"

InkCanon — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 06:55:39 +0000

Yes, and it's a very interesting use case for Wasm. Firefox has a sandbox called RLbox built on this, and has been published in a few papers.

Performance is one benefit, but the real killer feature is Wasm's guarantees are incredibly strong and formally proved. So by definition, you won't get out of bounds memory reads, memory corruption etc, assuming the implementation is correct. And because of the thorough specification, these kinds of exploits are far rarer in wasm runtimes.

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2020/02/securing-firefox-with-weba...

New comment by InkCanon in "False claims in a widely-cited paper"

InkCanon — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 09:16:43 +0000

I think a more useful version of the law is

"Any good measure requires a good person."

For example, a good measure of research is to have an intelligent faculty member or members read it and decide if it's good. Converting it to a mechanical calculation is fundamentally bad.

New comment by InkCanon in "Grace Hopper's Revenge"

InkCanon — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 11:30:32 +0000

Whenever I see a sentence of the form:

"X isn't A, it's (something opposite A)" I twitch involuntarily.

New comment by InkCanon in "Enhancing gut-brain communication reversed cognitive decline in aging mice"

InkCanon — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:17:40 +0000

I only have marginal knowledge about neuroscience, but one of my neuroscience professors in class would tell us

"You can cure anything in mice."

I don't know the mechanism why, but you can find tons of papers with incredibly strong results for curing of mitigating dementia, cognitive decline, addiction, etc in mice, but these almost never seen to work on people.

New comment by InkCanon in "Google closes deal to acquire Wiz"

InkCanon — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 06:35:14 +0000

How is this even legal? I'd think even basic conflict of interest rules between vendor and purchases would stop this.

New comment by InkCanon in "IRS Tactics Against Meta Open a New Front in the Corporate Tax Fight"

InkCanon — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 18:12:12 +0000

Meta is actually at a huge disadvantage here. The IRS has a litigation success rate of 93%. It's an astoundingly successful legal entity.

New comment by InkCanon in "America vs. Singapore: You can't save your way out of economic shocks"

InkCanon — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 05:03:52 +0000

Property taxes also apply in Singapore and I believe in practice eminent domain is rarely exercised. But the home ownership rate is the thing I feel the most I should correct. It is very heavily pushed that Singaporeans own their homes. But legally they are renters. By a proper definition, probably something like 90% of Singaporeans are renters, not home owners.

New comment by InkCanon in "America vs. Singapore: You can't save your way out of economic shocks"

InkCanon — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 17:27:05 +0000

The main difference is SS bonds are bought at market rates. CPF bonds are not.

New comment by InkCanon in "America vs. Singapore: You can't save your way out of economic shocks"

InkCanon — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 17:25:41 +0000

I think whether houses should be sold on a 99 year lease vs property is a large and separate question. The vast misunderstanding of it still remains - the idea that a house is owned, not rented. Selective properties might be bought back. But the fundamental invariant of this whole situation is that all 99 year leases will worth 0 eventually. Any rise in prices now only increases the eventual depreciation. And add on that massive loans are taken out on depreciating assets, so it's not an investment, it's a liability. And the significant majority of Singaporeans bears this liability on their books.

New comment by InkCanon in "America vs. Singapore: You can't save your way out of economic shocks"

InkCanon — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 17:18:17 +0000

Yes. Bluntly put, the government maximizes residence of high net worth individuals, and a 37% forced purchase of low interest bonds would be outrageous to them.

New comment by InkCanon in "Gemini 3.1 Pro"

InkCanon — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 16:50:53 +0000

I think they all output that bold lettering, point by point style output. I strongly suspect it's part of a synthetic data pipeline all these AI companies have, and it improves performance. Claude seems to be the least of them, but it will start writing code at the drop of a hat. What annoys me in Gemini is that it has a really strange tendency to come up with weird analogies, especially in Pro mode. You'll be asking it about something like red black trees and it'll say "Red Black Trees (The F1 of Tree Data Structures)".