I agree that that's the point he's making, but I don't see how that would work practically. His attitude is that malloc(1<<63) should immediately crash the system, every time? How is that better?
No, if a process allocates an infeasible amount, malloc fails and the process needs to deal with the failure (which is what already happens, "malloc doesn't fail on Linux" is only really true for smaller-than-page-size allocations). The point being made is that the system should account conservatively for all memory that can be used, not just the optimistic underestimate that overcommit enables (i.e. the plane should always carry enough fuel for contingencies, and landing with extra fuel is a good outcome).
You never need to crash the system if you remove overcommit. You just crash the one process. Practically speaking, you don't even need to crash here; you just return null (which malloc is always free to do) and let the consequences speak for themselves.
But the second clause doesn't follow from the first!
I don't think Linux was plausibly going to remove the OOM killer in 2004 or later. So the right solution for Linux is very much to tweak it to be less painful.
Often the frontpage will include a new submission with few votes at the top, I recall others in other threads speculating that this is an intentional way (rather than an edge case in the ranking algo) of getting new posts evaluated without people having to visit /newest
The preceding comment indicates that the intent is to support other compilers. I think a better approach is to define __glibc_attribute__ based on compiler support and to stick to that within glibc since there's no reason to think that another compiler's attributes have the same semantics as GNU C's.
I'm curious why you think that creating a for-profit subsidiary is objectionable, since it is extremely common for large nonprofits. A good example for this forum would be Mozilla, but many more were mentioned during the trial.
Also curious what conflicts of interest you have in mind.
Just because other organizations do it doesn't make it not objectionable, and there have been many threads on HN criticizing Mozilla's structure along similar lines.
In this case, my understanding is that e.g. Altman is on the nonprofit board and also makes big $$$ from the for-profit, which seems like a pretty big conflict of interest.
HN is of course not a monolith, but from my recollection most of the frustration and criticism w/r/t Mozilla is about its product strategy and executive team, not its corporate structure. Some other examples of nonprofits with for-profit subsidiaries include National Geographic, the AARP, and most research universities.
On Altman, the trial showed that Altman does not have any equity in the for-profit. He does have some indirect exposure through his investments in YC, since YC has a small position in OpenAI.
- in 2025, OpenAI’s for-profit entity recapitalized from a capped-profit entity with residuals flowing to the nonprofit to a traditional public benefit corporation with traditional equity
This is the egregious part. Before full for profit conversion it was worth $300B. Then after $850B.
A true fiduciary would set an auction and that would set the price for for profit valuation. And then all existing investors would keep the value of their positions, but would be diluted because capped profit is worth much less than unlimited profit and residuals.
But, they sold it to themselves for a bargain basement price. The nonprofit lost out on $300B or so. Maybe more.
It was not an arm’s length transaction. It was self-dealing.
I may not be fully understanding it, but if the value went from $300B to $850B because of the conversion, then you can’t claim that the additional value was stolen from the nonprofit. As long as the entity was unconverted, there was a limit to what the market would value it at. Is this off?
worse than that is the $60 million sale price, which was comically and absurdly low. Elon himself said he was willing to buy it for significantly more than that and the fact that it wasn't able to go to the highest bidder just shows that it was bullshit
Elon's purchase offer was in 2025, after the success of ChatGPT showed that OpenAI's IP (much if not most of it developed after 2019) could be commercially valuable. I think it is also debatable whether Elon's purchase offer was in good faith.
It was not clear in 2019 that OpenAI's IP would ultimately be worth billions. That was well before the current AI boom.
Wait, no, not at all. A non-profit shouldn’t have to take the highest bidder regardless. The whole _point_ of a non-profit is to act beyond purely short-term financial gains.
“Elon buying this doesn’t align with the mission” is a completely normal, reasonable, and healthy response for most non-profits.
What’s great is that we don’t need to speculate about a counter factual. He did end up building a chatbot! Whose defining differentiating feature is revenge porn.
A non-profit should act in its own individual best interest. If I had a non-profit for sheltering animals and one contractor told me it would cost a million dollars to build a new shelter, and another contractor, conveniently largely owned and controlled by me, said the same shelter would cost $20 million, don't you think there's a problem if you go with the $20 million option? I imagine this scenario is highly illegal.
But the decision is still subject to heavy scrutiny; in fact, more than with normal for profit corporations. It does not seem like the board acted in the best interests of the nonprofit here, they acted in their own.
How much did people on the board benefit from OpenAI going for-profit? Either directly by owning shares of the new for-profit, or knowing they eventually would, or by business connections to the new for-profit entity? I imagine most or all of them.
No, I think I just find it reductive. The fact that some ideas are independently thought by multiple people does not feel like a compelling argument for normalizing copying someone else's work verbatim and trying to pass it off as your own.
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