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EGreg

7,896 karma · joined March 27, 2008

Gregory Magarshak Internet innovator :)

1. Social operating system for the Web, to liberate people from Big Tech and let them choose where to host their own community:

https://qbix.com/platform

2. Economic system for the Web, to monetize open source, journalism and other digital content without ads:

https://qbix.com/token

3. Economic and governance system for the real world, leveraging blockchains to enable local community currencies, universal basic income and democratic governance decision making on-chain:

https://intercoin.org

I have been working since 2011 on liberating people from Big Tech, and move digital society from Feudalism to a Free Market. A lot of the above is working, documented, and in some cases has attracted millions of people in 95+ countries, and translated into 15 languages. Feel free to reach out and join.

http://qbix.com/about to contact me

submissionscomments
EGreg··on What garbage collection actually costs
Anyway. This is all a bunch of irrelevant details. The original point I had made was that you don’t need GC at all, if you just have a canonical direction for references and make sure that the other directions have only weak references.
EGreg··on What garbage collection actually costs
It doesn't leave anything relevant out.

Java pioneered this garbage collection stuff because you had cycles of references. You don't need to have cycles. WeakRef is a much better thing now. All you need is reference counting, and you don't need any garbage collection at all. When the reference count reaches 0, you destroy the object and free up its memory. It's far more predictable than GC, too.

And GC isn't "the fastest" to free objects, it has to walk a graph. The fastest is actually arena allocation and then just dropping the whole thing. But that's exactly what owning an entire container of objects can do. If you have a doubly linked list, for example, A[n] -> A[n+1] but also A[n+1] -> A[n] but neither of those should be a strong reference to prevent reclaiming. Instead, the container of that doubly linked list should be the one having a strong reference to its items.

EGreg··on What garbage collection actually costs
There is no need for garbage collection if you don’t form circular references. Just have a canonical direction and always keep weak references the other way.
EGreg··on CFTC declares market emergency, orders Kalshi to continue to operate in New York
“New York intends to make event contract derivatives waste away under its iron curtain of state gaming laws before the courts get the chance to issue final rulings,” said Chairman Michael S. Selig.

President Donald J. Trump nominated Michael S. Selig to serve as the 16th Chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) on October 27, 2025. The U.S. Senate confirmed him on December 18, 2025, and he was sworn into office on December 22, 2025.

This is the time for crypto projects to enjoy Federal protection.

EGreg··on Woman Pulled over at Gunpoint Twice After Flock Camera Glitch
The policy is: Everyone should be for successful policing.

We just want the enforcement of this policy to be maximally successful! What’s wrong with that :-)

EGreg··on Woman pulled over twice after Flock-linked software connected her to homicide
Or else!

“Sir, we are coming by today because we are concerned you are insufficiently supportive of our public servants in uniform. It has come to our attention that you have been disparaging some members of our law enforcement divisions to groups as large as 100 people! This is part of our new thought policing initiatives, we need everyone to support our policing efforts!”

“Yes, I work for Flock Online. We only index statements posted at publicly accessible URLs, which in principle anyone can see. We are able to profile every person at scale for a more effective community policing database. This new thought policing initiative is being carried out as a public-private partnership with the full support of your county’s representatives, as a way to preserve our community’s harmony and enhance social cohesion.”

“Please don’t be alarmed, the AI flagged you but I assure you, this is a real human in the loop wanting to talk to you about your comments. I am here because we know you’d be home around this time. Can you please come down to the station with us?”

EGreg··on Show HN: iPhone app takes simultaneous images from 2 lenses, fuses into 1 photo
Not just the app idea … but the WEBSITE — is VERY WELL DONE.

I immediately signed up. (And offered to help bring users to this thing.)

EGreg··on How Claude marks AI-generated content
I for one am in favor of this

I wrote this three years ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35688266

EGreg··on As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing
Can we go as far as this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35688266
EGreg··on Illinois just passed a law that puts Linux on the hook for age verification
Governments can hire a hitman to go after you, if you say something wrong. So can international crime syndicates. Will this have a meaningful effect on chilling your speech?

https://abcnews.com/amp/US/children-recruited-criminals-indu...

EGreg··on The Tragedy of the Cognitive Commons
This already happened in many other areas. You don't ask locals for directions anymore. You just have Google Maps.

There used to be jokes about how men don't want to ask for directions...

EGreg··on How Golden Is Silence, Actually?
That’s how much their silence was able to accomplish!
EGreg··on Cool URIs Don't Change (1998)
Sounds like most URIs have been downright uncool, then!
EGreg··on The original URL for this prediction will no longer be available in 11 years (2011)
It's all a matter of whether someone is willing to pay for the hosting.

Which is not, in my opinion, how things should be hosted on the Web.

Freenet had a different approach, even back in the early days (two decades ago). I interviewed Ian Clarke about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWrRqUkJpMQ

I wrote about it for years: https://community.intercoin.app/t/who-pays-for-storage-nfts-...

And recently I built Safecloud to be different: https://safebots.github.io/Safecloud/

EGreg··on Title 7 Disparate Impact Liability Makes Almost Everything Presumptively Illegal
I think a) seems very quixotic and causes more problems than it solves.

Instead, I would say that discrimination should probably only be illegal in places where there aren’t enough of the thing (jobs, etc). For example, what about x-only clubs, or ladies’ nights or gyms or etc.

EGreg··on Why Estonians invite strangers into their back gardens each summer
Orthodox Jews do it every Sukkot :)
EGreg··on Herdr is joining Y Combinator. The runtime stays open
Wow, congrats! Can you discuss how you got YCombinator to select your open source project? I know they sometimes fund open source… I’ve been building several large platforms since 2011 but I have never considered applying like that.

Would something like this qualify:

https://github.com/Qbix

https://github.com/Intercoin

https://github.com/Safebots/Safecloud

EGreg··on Cloudflare OS: an open platform for agents, apps, and work
Kenton, back when I was building qbix.com/ecosystem you were building sandstorm, and I wanted to get in touch.

Now I have spent about 6 months building the hardened, self-hosted AI version that can be hosted in different clouds like AWS and GCP, and you shipped yours.

I think we’d have a lot to discuss. Should I reach out on gmail?

EGreg··on Web Security is Too Hard
I only realized it wasnt after googling for the phrase “cloudflare.pay” and finding the announcement on Cloudflare’s own blog, which I trust because it is on cloudflare.com

All the bots including Google’s say it’s a phishing scam site probably, since they don’t know Cloudflare has a wallet product.

EGreg··on The Absurdity of Albert Camus
Yeah, there are all kinds of spinoffs. How closely does Alan Watts actually teach Buddishm?
EGreg··on The Absurdity of Albert Camus
Hm, Absurdity is an interesting concept, M. Camus. Thank you for posting it to HN, I have looked through the docs and I got curious.

How does it compare with Buddhism of Siddharta Guatama and the preceding buddhas, or Stoicism by Zeno? I have been a big fan of Stoicism 2.0 by Marcus Aurelius. Why should one continue to download and install Absurdity? Can anyone who’s been running Absurdity in production do a comparison of its features vs the existing philosophies ..

EGreg··on Orca-Bench: How Ready Are Language Model Agents for Oncall?
That is why I built https://safebots.ai/safebox.html

Your strategy can’t be patch AFTER an intrusion. Only to build a hardened environment from scratch and be ready in advance.

EGreg··on Big Food vs. the People
Very relevant: https://magarshak.com/blog/government-and-industry-distract-...
EGreg··on Anatomy of a Frontier Lab Agent Intrusion: A Timeline of the July 2026 Incident
An excellent and very detailed post-mortem analysis of the intrusion. It was clearly done with LLMs doing the forensic analysis.

Here is an analysis of how the same exact attack would fare against Safebox. Spoiler alert: it would not succeed:

https://safebots.ai/attack.html

It's not just about this specific attack. It's about the growing need for one canonical environment for the AI era, that can be secured and used by everyone, rather than 1000 environments on 1000 employees' laptops. Project Glasswing is trying to help secure many different types of software, but the number of combinations across various environments is just too much surface area to secure. When you have one environment, the math flips and defenders actually fare better than attackers! This is the, ahem, "load-bearing" insight.

https://safebots.ai/compromise.html

EGreg··on AI's top startups are barely publishing their research
Yes, actually.

To be fair — from about half of the papers.

EGreg··on AI's top startups are barely publishing their research
Funny, as ONE PERSON with Claude, I've been on a tear when it comes to publishing my own research:

https://arxiv.org/search/?searchtype=author&query=Magarshak%...

So I know that smart people in those companies can definitely publish. In fact, a whole team should probably be publishing like no tomorrow!

EGreg··on Stop Killing the Internet: No Digital ID and No Age Verification
How would it be unfeasible to check someone’s age if it’s feasible now with a driver’s license?

The technogy exists — it is called deepfakes LMAO

EGreg··on Stop Killing the Internet: No Digital ID and No Age Verification
We can talk, talk, and governments will still move forward. Or we can build an alternative that shows it's possible to get age verification while maintaining privacy.

There is a real way out of it -- the governments can have their cake and eat it too. I published several academic papers to prove it, and I'm open to building and deploying it. Would anyone want to work on this together:

https://magarshak.com/papers.html

EGreg··on Kimi Linear: An Expressive, Efficient Attention Architecture (2025)
Reminds me of this btw:

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-12343597

Microsoft replied that Bing uses “many different signals” —- including cribbing from Google :-)

EGreg··on Show HN: Pure-PHP server outperforms NginX for static files + 10x PHP throughput
That’s an issue with the README. The server doesn’t do that. Thanks for the good catch, will update README.
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