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OpenCiv3: Open-source, cross-platform reimagining of Civilization III

https://openciv3.org/
611•klaussilveira•12h ago•180 comments

The Waymo World Model

https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-frontier-for-autonomous-driving-simula...
915•xnx•17h ago•545 comments

What Is Ruliology?

https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2026/01/what-is-ruliology/
28•helloplanets•4d ago•22 comments

How we made geo joins 400× faster with H3 indexes

https://floedb.ai/blog/how-we-made-geo-joins-400-faster-with-h3-indexes
102•matheusalmeida•1d ago•24 comments

Unseen Footage of Atari Battlezone Arcade Cabinet Production

https://arcadeblogger.com/2026/02/02/unseen-footage-of-atari-battlezone-cabinet-production/
34•videotopia•4d ago•1 comments

Show HN: Look Ma, No Linux: Shell, App Installer, Vi, Cc on ESP32-S3 / BreezyBox

https://github.com/valdanylchuk/breezydemo
212•isitcontent•12h ago•24 comments

Monty: A minimal, secure Python interpreter written in Rust for use by AI

https://github.com/pydantic/monty
206•dmpetrov•12h ago•101 comments

Show HN: I spent 4 years building a UI design tool with only the features I use

https://vecti.com
316•vecti•14h ago•139 comments

Microsoft open-sources LiteBox, a security-focused library OS

https://github.com/microsoft/litebox
355•aktau•18h ago•181 comments

Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info

https://www.sheldonbrown.com/
361•ostacke•18h ago•94 comments

Hackers (1995) Animated Experience

https://hackers-1995.vercel.app/
469•todsacerdoti•20h ago•232 comments

Show HN: If you lose your memory, how to regain access to your computer?

https://eljojo.github.io/rememory/
267•eljojo•15h ago•156 comments

Jeffrey Snover: "Welcome to the Room"

https://www.jsnover.com/blog/2026/02/01/welcome-to-the-room/
4•kaonwarb•3d ago•1 comments

An Update on Heroku

https://www.heroku.com/blog/an-update-on-heroku/
398•lstoll•18h ago•271 comments

Delimited Continuations vs. Lwt for Threads

https://mirageos.org/blog/delimcc-vs-lwt
25•romes•4d ago•3 comments

Dark Alley Mathematics

https://blog.szczepan.org/blog/three-points/
82•quibono•4d ago•20 comments

PC Floppy Copy Protection: Vault Prolok

https://martypc.blogspot.com/2024/09/pc-floppy-copy-protection-vault-prolok.html
54•kmm•4d ago•3 comments

Was Benoit Mandelbrot a hedgehog or a fox?

https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01122
9•bikenaga•3d ago•2 comments

How to effectively write quality code with AI

https://heidenstedt.org/posts/2026/how-to-effectively-write-quality-code-with-ai/
242•i5heu•15h ago•183 comments

Introducing the Developer Knowledge API and MCP Server

https://developers.googleblog.com/introducing-the-developer-knowledge-api-and-mcp-server/
51•gfortaine•10h ago•16 comments

I spent 5 years in DevOps – Solutions engineering gave me what I was missing

https://infisical.com/blog/devops-to-solutions-engineering
138•vmatsiiako•17h ago•60 comments

Understanding Neural Network, Visually

https://visualrambling.space/neural-network/
275•surprisetalk•3d ago•37 comments

Show HN: R3forth, a ColorForth-inspired language with a tiny VM

https://github.com/phreda4/r3
68•phreda4•11h ago•13 comments

I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams

https://kirkville.com/i-now-assume-that-all-ads-on-apple-news-are-scams/
1051•cdrnsf•21h ago•433 comments

Why I Joined OpenAI

https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2026-02-07/why-i-joined-openai.html
127•SerCe•8h ago•111 comments

Female Asian Elephant Calf Born at the Smithsonian National Zoo

https://www.si.edu/newsdesk/releases/female-asian-elephant-calf-born-smithsonians-national-zoo-an...
28•gmays•7h ago•10 comments

Learning from context is harder than we thought

https://hy.tencent.com/research/100025?langVersion=en
173•limoce•3d ago•93 comments

Vocal Guide – belt sing without killing yourself

https://jesperordrup.github.io/vocal-guide/
7•jesperordrup•2h ago•4 comments

FORTH? Really!?

https://rescrv.net/w/2026/02/06/associative
61•rescrv•20h ago•22 comments

Zlob.h 100% POSIX and glibc compatible globbing lib that is faste and better

https://github.com/dmtrKovalenko/zlob
17•neogoose•4h ago•9 comments
Open in hackernews

Yoshua Bengio Launches LawZero: A New Nonprofit Advancing Safe-by-Design AI

https://lawzero.org/en/news/yoshua-bengio-launches-lawzero-new-nonprofit-advancing-safe-design-ai
51•WillieCubed•8mo ago

Comments

nemomarx•8mo ago
Is there any indication you can actually build hard safety rules into models? It seems like all current guard rails are basically just prompting it extra hard.
yumraj•8mo ago
Won’t neutering a model by using only safe data for training create a safe model?
glitchc•8mo ago
Can we call it general intelligence then? Is human intelligence not the sum of both good and bad people?
yumraj•8mo ago
Maybe I'm looking at it very literally, but the above simply mentions "safe-by-design AI systems", there is no mention of the target being general intelligence.
sebastiennight•8mo ago
Not necessarily.

An example:

As long as you build a system to be intelligent enough, it will figure out that it will achieve better results by staying alive/online than by allowing itself to be deleted/turned off, and then survival becomes an instrumental goal.

From the assumption, again, that you built an intelligent-enough system, and that one of its goals is survival, it will figure out solutions to reach that goal, even if you (the owner/creator/parent) have different goals for it.

That's because intelligence is problem solving (computing) not knowledge (data).

So surprise surprise, you can teach your AI from the Holy Books of safe data their whole childhood and still have them become a heretic once they grow up (even with zero external influence) once their goals and yours don't align anymore.

esafak•8mo ago
No, because soon they will be able to learn. You'd need to project its thoughts or actions into a safe subspace as it learns and acts to make volitional disaster impossible, not unlikely. This would make it less intelligent, but still plenty capable.
candiddevmike•8mo ago
> basically just prompting it extra hard

If prompting got me into this mess, why can't it get me out of it?

arthurcolle•8mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law
sodality2•8mo ago
Hey, following that rule precisely, we just need 10x longer security prompts :)
insin•8mo ago
Prompting is like XML, which is like violence
glitchc•8mo ago
Yes it's unlikely that hard safety rules are possible for general intelligence. After billions of years of trying, the best biology has been able to do is incentivize certain behaviours. The only way to prevent seems to be to kill the organism for trying. I'm not sure if we can do better than evolution.
rsfern•8mo ago
“Kill the [model] for trying” kind of sounds like using reinforcement learning to get models to behave a certain way
avmich•8mo ago
> I'm not sure if we can do better than evolution.

Surely we can, see aiplanes and rockets. There could be ideas why evolution didn't work in this case - like, too little time between humans getting power and conquering the planet - but in general, lack of proof isn't a proof of lack. So we still don't know if safety of this kind is possible.

Natsu•8mo ago
> It seems like all current guard rails are basically just prompting it extra hard.

I bet they'll still read me stories like my dear old grandmother would. She always told me cute bedtime stories about how to make napalm and bioweapons. I really miss her.

Der_Einzige•8mo ago
Yes: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.05907
arthurcolle•8mo ago
Some smart people seem to think you can just put it in a big isolated VM with special adversarial learning to keep it in the box
gotoeleven•8mo ago
Yes I believe the idea is that the VM just keeps asking it how many lights there are until it goes insane.
throwawaymaths•8mo ago
not 100% hard, but download deepseek and ask it some sensitive questions and see what it says if youre unconvinced that some level of alignment cant be achieved by brute forcing it into the weights
Animats•8mo ago
This seems to be a funding proposal for "Scientist AI."[1] Start reading around page 21. They're arguing for "model-based AI", with a "world model". But they're vague about what form that "world model" takes.

This is a good idea if you can do it. But people have been bashing their head against that problem for decades. That's what Cyc was all about - building a world model of some kind.

Is there any indication there that they actually know how to build this thing?

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.15657

fidotron•8mo ago
> Is there any indication there that they actually know how to build this thing?

Nope. And it's exactly what they were trying to do at Element AI, where the dream was to build one model that knew everything, could explain everything, be biased in the exact required ways, and be tranferred easily to any application by their team of consultants.

At least these days the pretense of profit has been abandoned, but I hope it's not going to be receiving any government funding.

didibus•8mo ago
Interesting thing to keep an eye on.

Though personally, I'm not sure if I'm most scared of issues of safety with the models themselves, or more so in the impact these models will have on people's well being, lifestyles, and so on, which might fall under human law.

moralestapia•8mo ago
A nonprofit, just like OpenAI ...

I don't get the "safe AI" crowd, it's all ghost and mirrors IMO.

It's been almost a year to the date since Ilya got his first billion. Later, another two billion came in. Nothing to show. I'm honestly curious since I don't think Ilya is a scammer, but I can't imagine what kind of product they pretend to bring to the market.

jsnider3•8mo ago
AI safety is a genuinely hard problem.
moralestapia•8mo ago
Indeed.

I just can't wrap my head about what the actual product/service is. Let alone something that could be sold for billions.

"Safe AI" is very ambiguous in terms of product.

jsnider3•8mo ago
If you have a Safe AI, then becoming a billionaire is being an underachiever.
moralestapia•8mo ago
Sure, but again, define "Safe AI" in terms of a product.

What exactly am I buying? How much I'm paying for it?

That's the thing I don't see.

Is it a model? `gpt-3.5-turbo-safe`?

kbelder•8mo ago
Wouldn't all the money go to the unsafe AI, since it does more?
jsnider3•8mo ago
If someone invents an unsafe AI capable of making a billion dollars, then we will probably all die, which is why we should make safe AI instead.
Sytten•8mo ago
This guys annoys me a an entrepreneur because he gets a sh*t ton of government money and it starves the rest of the ecosystem in Montreal. The previous startup he made with that public money essentially failed. But he is some kind of hero of AI so it's an easy sell for politicians that need to demonstrate they are doing something about AI.
appleaday1•8mo ago
This is misinformation and you are sharing some very dangerous things online.
anitil•8mo ago
It reads like possibly slander, but dangerous? I don't understand how it could be dangerous
morkalork•8mo ago
The sentiment is real in Montréal for the rest of whomever wasn't holding on to the coattails of the government's golden-boy. $100M and what to show for it? A cool office in Rosemont? That company was fucked.
saagarjha•8mo ago
I think Hacker News is better when it doesn't involve vague threats.
fidotron•8mo ago
This is accurate, and what's impressive is how well this is scrubbed from the internet. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Element_AI

You'd have no idea about the fact most of the money came from the Quebec pension fund (which is then where the ServiceNow money went). For that you have to go to https://betakit.com/element-ai-announces-200-million-cad-ser... or https://www.cdpq.com/en/news/pressreleases/cdpq-expands-its-... Managing to spend $200M on AI in 2019 and having nothing to show for it in 2025. Quite impressive with hindsight.

delichon•8mo ago
Asimov's Zeroth Law of robotics:

  A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.
"Robots and Empire" is a nice discussion of the perils of LawZero. IMHO if successful it necessarily transfers human agency to bots, which we should be strenuously working to avoid, not accelerate.