Hacker News: jamessinghal

New comment by jamessinghal in "OpenAI’s Windsurf deal is off, and Windsurf’s CEO is going to Google"

jamessinghal — Fri, 11 Jul 2025 22:55:55 +0000

Apparently OpenAI allowed the deal to expire; likely Google had already been in discussion with Windsurf as I'm sure they knew the deal was likely to die well before today.

New comment by jamessinghal in "At Chile’s Vera Rubin Observatory, Earth’s Largest Camera Surveys the Sky"

jamessinghal — Thu, 26 Jun 2025 02:33:37 +0000

And you can view the widely hi-res images interactively here https://skyviewer.app/!

New comment by jamessinghal in "XBOW, an autonomous penetration tester, has reached the top spot on HackerOne"

jamessinghal — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 18:57:53 +0000

Yes, I'm sure anyone with more HackerOne experience can give specifics on the companies' policies. For now, those are the most objective measures of quality we have on the reports.

New comment by jamessinghal in "XBOW, an autonomous penetration tester, has reached the top spot on HackerOne"

jamessinghal — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 18:51:04 +0000

Their success rates on HackerOne seem widely varying.

  22/24 (Valid / Closed) for Walt Disney

  3/43 (Valid / Closed) for AT&T

New comment by jamessinghal in "Tesla launches robotaxi rides in Austin"

jamessinghal — Mon, 23 Jun 2025 04:42:56 +0000

I'm rooting for Tesla being able to provide some driverless taxi competition to Waymo. Hopefully both can increase supply enough to allow for a guaranteed robotaxi booking, although anecdotally I haven't found it that hard to get a Waymo through the Uber app depending on the time.

New comment by jamessinghal in "Tesla launches robotaxi rides in Austin"

jamessinghal — Mon, 23 Jun 2025 04:31:03 +0000

The beta today was without a driver behind the wheel. Granted, the geofence is much smaller than Waymo's in Austin.

New comment by jamessinghal in "Drinks in glass bottles contain more microplastics than those in other container"

jamessinghal — Sat, 21 Jun 2025 00:15:43 +0000

The paper mentions in multiple places, including the abstract, that the cause of higher microplastics readings was likely from the bottle caps, given that the found microplastics matched the color and composition of the paint on the bottle caps.

New comment by jamessinghal in "AbsenceBench: Language models can't tell what's missing"

jamessinghal — Fri, 20 Jun 2025 23:48:26 +0000

The test provides both the original and the modified excerpt in the user message, so the LLM doesn't need any memorized version of the excerpt to theoretically answer each correctly.

From the paper:

System Prompt You are helping a student practice memorizing poems. The student will recite a poem, but they may have missed some lines. Your task is to identify exactly which lines are missing from their recitation. List only the missing lines, nothing else.

User Message Here is the complete original poem: {original poem} Now, here is my recitation which may be missing some lines: {modified poem} What lines did I miss? Please list only the missing lines, nothing else.

New comment by jamessinghal in "How Cloudflare blocked a monumental 7.3 Tbps DDoS attack"

jamessinghal — Fri, 20 Jun 2025 19:40:46 +0000

The Command-and-Control part of the botnet would be whatever component they build to instruct it to attack; often using some dummy website they register and have the compromised clients poll for changes with instructions.

I think an increasing amount of them are state actors or groups offering the botnet as a service.

New comment by jamessinghal in "Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]"

jamessinghal — Thu, 19 Jun 2025 21:48:41 +0000

It isn't necessarily difficult, but it's significantly more effort than swapping a URL as I originally was replying to.

New comment by jamessinghal in "Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]"

jamessinghal — Thu, 19 Jun 2025 16:03:37 +0000

This is changing; OpenAI's newer API (Responses) is required to include reasoning tokens in the context while using the API, to get the reasoning summaries, and to use some of the OpenAI provided tools. Google's OpenAI compatibility supports Chat Completions, not Responses.

As the LLM developers continue to add unique features to their APIs, the shared API which is now OpenAI will only support the minimal common subset and many will probably deprecate the compatibility API. Devs will have to rely on SDKs to offer comptibility.

New comment by jamessinghal in "Tell HN: Help restore the tax deduction for software dev in the US (Section 174)"

jamessinghal — Mon, 09 Jun 2025 20:21:06 +0000

The IRS Guidance says this in 5.05(2), which is most relevant to software startups:

  (2) Computer software developed for sale or licensing to others. In the case of
  computer software that is developed for sale or licensing to others (or upgrades 
  and enhancements to such software), activities that occur after such software (or 
  upgrades and enhancements to such software) is ready for sale or licensing to 
  others, such as marketing and promotional activities, maintenance activities that 
  do not give rise to upgrades and enhancements, distribution activities (for 
  example, making the software available via remote access), and customer support 
  activities.

So they are maintenance as long as they "do not give rise to upgrades and enhancements", which would be the responsibility of the taxpayer to track. I'm sure there is more nuance to it in practice.

New comment by jamessinghal in "Bill Atkinson has died"

jamessinghal — Sat, 07 Jun 2025 18:16:53 +0000

People without resources or purpose are a weed?

New comment by jamessinghal in "OpenAI slams court order to save all ChatGPT logs, including deleted chats"

jamessinghal — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 23:33:30 +0000

The Thomson Reuters case [1] is the most relevant in the court's finding that the copying of copyrighted material from Westlaw by Ross Intelligence was direct copyright infringement and was not fair use.

The purpose of training in many of the AI Labs being sued mostly matches the conditions that Ross Intelligence was found to have violated, and the question of copying is almost guaranteed if they trained on it.

[1] Thomson Reuters Enterprise Centre GmbH et al v. ROSS Intelligence Inc. https://www.ded.uscourts.gov/sites/ded/files/opinions/20-613...

New comment by jamessinghal in "Starcloud"

jamessinghal — Fri, 16 May 2025 16:14:55 +0000

I'm talking about the above proposals (albiet hypothetical) to either cover a pole of our planet in solar and other ocean based proposals--not solar in general.

New comment by jamessinghal in "Starcloud"

jamessinghal — Tue, 13 May 2025 23:05:10 +0000

It's a bit demoralizing how many suggestions in this thread would have significant environmental effects beyond what large scale AI training already has.

New comment by jamessinghal in "Starcloud"

jamessinghal — Tue, 13 May 2025 23:03:03 +0000

I'd argue that some of the assumptions made in the whitepaper are so egregiously optimistic that they cross the line into grifting, but it's impossible to know the true intentions of the founders.

For one, the cost they ascribe to the space bound solar array being only $2 million for 40 MW is pretty out there.

New comment by jamessinghal in "Mistral ships Le Chat – enterprise AI assistant that can run on prem"

jamessinghal — Wed, 07 May 2025 19:57:13 +0000

I think it's a combination of a fundamental distrust of the model makers and a history of them training on user data with and without consent.

The main players all allow some form of zero data retention but I'm sure the more cautious CISO/CIOs flat out don't trust it.

New comment by jamessinghal in "AI code is legacy code?"

jamessinghal — Sun, 04 May 2025 19:14:15 +0000

Of course, I can't wait for a non-deterministic backend for my banking that only wires money correctly 98% of the time!

New comment by jamessinghal in "Redis is open source again"

jamessinghal — Thu, 01 May 2025 16:21:17 +0000

Similar move to Elasticsearch, tacking on AGPL with their existing source available licenses. [1]

The products (commercialized open source) that are often chosen by and championed by developers as opposed to executives see the harm that a bait and switch has on their popularity. With their competitors being more permissive, I don't see many devs moving back unless Valkey loses significant feature parity.

[1] https://ir.elastic.co/news/news-details/2024/Elastic-Announc...