MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by freejazz | 2025-06-19 21:04:48+00:00
>Are you sure you're not painting this group with an overly-broad brush?

"Aren't these the people who"...

> And writing essays about the dangers of overconfidence? And measuring how often their predictions turn out wrong? And maintaining webpages titled "list of things I was wrong about"?

What's the value of that if it doesn't appear to be reasonably put to their own ideas. What you described otherwise is just another form of the exact kind of self-congratulation often (reasonably, IMO) lobbed at these "people"
by FpUser | 2025-06-19 21:05:58+00:00
I write high performance backends in C++. Works approximately as described in article and all data are in RAM and in structures specialized for access patterns. Works like a charm and runs 24x7 without a trace of problem.

I've never had a single complaint from my customers. Well I do have bugs in logic during development but those are found and eliminated after testing. And every new backend I do I base on already battle tested C++ foundation code. Why FFS would I ever want to change it (rewrite in Rust). As a language Rust has way less features that I am accustomed to use and this safety of Rust does not provide me any business benefits. It is quite the opposite. I would just lose time, money and still have those same logical bugs to iron out.
by evolve2k | 2025-06-19 21:06:18+00:00
Logically you don’t want the tool to be sending on harsh or nasty messages or even just disregukatung and retaumatising participants.

As such you want the tool to filter what is said and not pass everything on by design. This seems to be the problem domain, what to pass on what to withhold, what’s appropriate?

I’d suggest that it’s framed as messages of care something like “care for your loved ones” and frame it as some sweet old aunt that is a bit forgetful but well meaning. In that way the aunt can add words of encouragement also.
by fasthands9 | 2025-06-19 21:06:41+00:00
In college (about 15 years ago) I worked for a professor who was compiling precint level results for old elections. My job was just to request the info and then do manual data entry. It was abysmally slow.

This application seems very good - but still a bit amazing that lawmakers haven't just required that all data be uploaded via csv! Even if every csv was slightly different format, it would be way easier for everyone (LLM or not).
by mitthrowaway2 | 2025-06-19 21:06:48+00:00
Yes, I do think that these hedging statements make them immune from the specific criticism that I quoted.

If you want to say their humility is not genuine, fine. I'm not sure I agree with it, but you are entitled to that view. But to simultaneously be attacking the same community for not ever showing a sense of maybe being wrong or uncertain, and also for expressing it so often it's become an in-group signal, is just too much cognitive dissonance.
by browningstreet | 2025-06-19 21:07:01+00:00
When I started in computers, the CTRL key is where CAPS sits nowadays. At some point it moved.

To me, it makes no sense to me to make less-reachable the key that gets used the most. To reach the current CTRL key, I have to bend and twist my hand so that the pinky finger can reach the CTRL key. I never use the CAPS LOCK key, which is sitting under and adjacent to where the pinky rests.
by jeffhwang | 2025-06-19 21:07:15+00:00
If only I could +1 this more than once! I have learned valuable things occasionally from people in the rationalist community but this overall lack of humility —and strangely blinkered view of humanities and important topics like say history of science relevant to “STEM”—ultimately turned me off to the movement as a whole. And I love science and math! It just shouldn’t belong to people with this (imo) childish model of people, IQ, etc.
by ziml77 | 2025-06-19 21:08:30+00:00
Respawn enabled Linux support for EAC for Apex Legends and then later turned it back off due to there being too many cheaters.

> The openness of the Linux operating systems makes it an attractive one for cheaters and cheat developers. Linux cheats are indeed harder to detect and the data shows that they are growing at a rate that requires an outsized level of focus and attention from the team for a relatively small platform. There are also cases in which cheats for the Windows OS get emulated as if it’s on Linux in order to increase the difficulty of detection and prevention. We had to weigh the decision on the number of players who were legitimately playing on Linux/the Steam Deck versus the greater health of the population of players for Apex. While the population of Linux users is small, their impact infected a fair amount of players’ games. This ultimately brought us to our decision today.

https://x.com/PlayApex/status/1852019667315102151
by freejazz | 2025-06-19 21:08:53+00:00
>I think some criticism of EA or rationalism is also a reaction to a creeping unspoken consensus that "things are only going to get worse" in the future.

I think it's that combined with the EA approach to it which is: let's focus on space flight and shrimp welfare. Not sure which side is more in denial about the impending future?

I have no belief any particular individual can do anything about shrimp welfare more than they can about the intractable problems we do face.
by spwa4 | 2025-06-19 21:09:42+00:00
The Netherlands has watchlists of people. Mostly extreme-right and pro-terror names are on that list. In the legislation this is called the "hate preacher" list, and one example of a person on that list is Mohamed Khatib. Another name would be David Icke. Don't look these people up, they are both hateful assholes that, frankly, deserve to be on that list for their political opinion (essentially they preach mass random killings to "help" their respective ideologies). BUT it's not known whose names are on the list, just that there's "hundreds" on there now. Also: now the Netherlands has breached EU legislation (free movement of people in the EU? Not if you're on this list ...)

(Perhaps it's relevant to say that in the Netherlands 1 politician in office has been executed, on the street, about a dozen have been attacked with everything you can think of: machetes, one with a tractor, cars, and one got hit in the face with a fist. Half the parliament complains about weekly death threats. Oh and the current leader of the far-right PVV, effectively the current leader of the government, complains he hasn't had a day with less than 10 death threats in months. He was physically attacked several times since in office)

But go around the earth and it rapidly gets much, much worse:

For example, when Tunisia got caught executing refugees by driving them into the desert and leaving them behind, without water, violating the agreement they signed with the EU ... suddenly they started systematically refusing entry to anyone who might be checking up on this. They refused entry to journalists, EU parliament members, doctors, ... And they got their way: it disappeared from the news.

The same has happened in Turkey, but Turkey has since removed journalists for 100 different reasons since the staged "coup" against Erdogan.

This political suppression is common, for a current example, both Palestine (both the PA and Hamas) refuse entry to most journalists. Hamas was flexible until [1], PA was never flexible. Not sure if it's related, but a Hamas rocket barrage hit the hotel that journalist team was staying AFTER they left Gaza. Iran kicked all journalists out about 4 months after the Iranian revolution and has since imprisoned over 1000 journalists and executed at least 30 of those.

It's becoming more common. Now in the last year Israel has also started refusing entry to (some) journalists (only Al Jazeera actually, and they still have journalists in Israel, but yes some of their employees were refused entry). India has also removed journalists, not from India but from conflict zones.

In the last few days Egypt deported (and arrested) groups of people to prevent a demonstration.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PHk-JqVPx0
by 9rx | 2025-06-19 21:09:49+00:00
> freight rail companies own the tracks

Humans are also freight, of course. It is not like the rail companies really care about what kind of fright is on the trains, so long as it is what the customer considers most important (read: most profitable). Humans are deprioritized exactly because they aren't considered important by the customer, which is to say that the customer, who is also the freight in this case, doesn't really want to be on a train in the first place. The customer would absolutely ensure priority (read: pay more, making it known that they are priority) if they wanted to be there.

I understand the train geeks on the internet find it hard to believe that not everyone loves trains like they do, but the harsh reality is that the average American Joe prefers other means of transportation. Should that change in the future, the rail network will quickly accommodate. It has before!
by dataviz1000 | 2025-06-19 21:10:11+00:00
I set out on a journey to learn quantitative trading based on signals. The first thing I did was study linear algebra, calculus, statistics, probability, and deep learning. Four months in, I’m on chapter 11 of a deep-learning time-series forecasting book, working through the problems when the author mentions that, to date (it has changed since), there hasn’t been a published paper proving deep learning works better than traditional statistical analysis—i.e., everything in scikit-learn. That sucked.

So I moved on to the next step. There’s an industry that generates hundreds of millions of dollars in ad revenue from blogs and videos on how to trade. For several months, I tested each of these strategies using a backtesting library, vectorbt. People had blogs and videos about using XGBoost and LSTM with other deep-learning libraries—every single one failed.

There’s so much BS in the industry, and I got sucked into the rabbit hole. At least I’m honest enough not to take advantage of other people. Maybe I’ll start a YouTube channel where I backtest every strategy to show everyone that they all fail—and explain why.
by const_cast | 2025-06-19 21:10:18+00:00
> This isn't true.

It's very obviously true. Linux culture is installing software from trusted repositories. Windows culture is downloading random .exe or .msi from websites and then immediately running them with full permissions.

That's why Windows has a lot of malware and Linux doesn't. It's trivial really to smuggle malware into closed-source applications that are distributed like the wild west.. If I google a popular Windows program right now, I'm going to get a lot of download websites that supply me a sketchy exe.

Some of the malware differences is because of popularity, sure. But ultimately it's 10x easier for me to add a virus to photoshop and upload that exe to download.com as opposed to smuggling malware in an open-source software in the Debian repository.

> I'm not sure what you mean by this.

It means that when companies want capabilities X Y Z which limit user actions on their own computers, Microsoft will cave. They do it all the time. Microsoft cares about making companies happy and they don't care too much about keeping power users happy.

> It's not.

It is. You're constructing a strawman. You're saying that freedoms 0 and 1 don't allow you to cheat freely. Okay, you're correct - nobody has ever said that.

What we're saying is that building kernel-level APIs to hook in anti-cheat or other anti-user software is antithetical to freedoms 0 and 1. Which it is.
by NathanFlurry | 2025-06-19 21:10:24+00:00
I hope this isn't the case here with Rivet. I genuinely believe that Kubernetes does a good job for what's on the tin (i.e. container orchestration at scale), but there's an evolution that needs to happen.

If you'll entertain my argument for a second:

The job of someone designing systems like this is to decide what are the correct primitives and invest in building a simple + flexible platform around those.

The original cloud primitives were VMs, block devices, LBs, and VPCs.

Kubernetes became popular because it standardized primitives (pods, PVCs, services, RBAC) that containerized applications needed.

Rivet's taking a different approach of investing in different three primitives based on how most organizations deploy their applications today:

- Stateless Functions (a la Fluid Compute)

- Stateful Workers (a la Cloudflare Durable Objects)

- Containers (a la Fly.io)

I fully expect to raise a few hackles claiming these are the "new primitives" for modern applications, but our experience shows it's solving real problems for real applications today.

Edit: Clarified "original cloud primitives"
by pixodaros | 2025-06-19 21:10:29+00:00
In that essay Scott Alexander more or less says "so Richard Lynn made up numbers about how stupid black and brown people are, but we all know he was right if those mean scientists just let us collect the data to prove it." The level of thinking most of us moved past in high school, and he is a MD who sees himself as a Public Intellectual! More evidence that thinking too much about IQ makes people stupid.
by baq | 2025-06-19 21:12:35+00:00
I'm thinking more like pseudointellect over serial to attach a $3 esp32 to. Since it's basically tokens in, tokens out, let's just cut the unnecessary parts out. It's like querying the cloud models, except it's your silicon you personally soldered to the esp so nobody will break your home assistant with a system prompt update or a fine tuning run.
by jjice | 2025-06-19 21:12:39+00:00
I'd consider it the same, personally. It's a social contract that you can absolutely break if you want, just with a bit of work.

Less work in Python than it is Java, but there are ways to get to them in Java, or hell, just modify the source and change it directly. By doing that, you're doing something the developer didn't intend and you shouldn't be surprised if it doesn't work at some point in the future. Same as I'd expect in the Python case.
by charcircuit | 2025-06-19 21:13:22+00:00
>the user is supposed to have full control over their own system

Realistically most Linux users are using a stock kernel and not something custom compiled. You can have both customization and a way to offer a secure environment for apps that need it. Even if you want to allow for custom kernels and drivers, the game could be setup to run in a secure virtual machine.

>The only way for this kind of anticheat to work is by introducing some part of the kernel that users can't touch.

To be clear, attestation is not anticheat. But yes, there would be components that end users would be unable to modify without removing their ability to attest to there being a secure environment for the game. Either these customizations need to be turned into policy for a trusted component to handle, or the customization needs to itself become trusted.

>but Linux isn't about obscuring the system from its owner.

Nothing about attestation requires obfuscation.
by rerdavies | 2025-06-19 21:14:08+00:00
Pretty much all language features save for a shockingly small set are "unnecessary". The proper question is "are they useful?"

The usefulness of public/protected/private is that it provides a way to narrow the surface area through which derived classes can interact with their superclasses. Which is enormously useful from a maintenance perspective.

The place where inheritance is better than composition is where base classes provide partial implementations that are used by derived classes.
by ffsm8 | 2025-06-19 21:14:11+00:00
That's strictly true, but I feel like you're misunderstanding something. Most people aren't actually doing anything truly novel, hence very few people ever actually have to even attempt to predict things in this way.

But it was necessary at the beginning of flight and the flight to the moon would've never been possible either without a few talented people being able to make predictions about scenarios they knew little about.

There are just way too many people around nowadays, which is why most of us never get confronted with such novel topics and consequently we don't know how to reason about it
by Aurornis | 2025-06-19 21:14:14+00:00
It's been a while since I've engaged in rationalist debates, so I forgot about the slightly condescending, lecturing tone that comes out when you disagree with rationalist figureheads. :) You could simply ask "Can you provide examples" instead of the "If you ____ then I suggest ____" form.

My point wasn't to nit-pick individual predictions, it was a general explanation of how the game is played.

Since Scott Alexander comes up a lot, a few randomly selected predictions that didn't come true:

- He predicted at least $250 million in damages from Black Lives Matter protests.

- He predicted Andrew Yang would win the 2021 NYC mayoral race with 80% certainty (he came in 4th place)

- He gave a 70% chance to Vitamin D being generally recognized as a good COVID treatment

This is just random samples from the first blog post that popped in Google: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/grading-my-2021-predictions

It's also noteworthy to read that a lot of his predictions are about his personal life, his own blogging actions, or [redacted] things. These all get mixed in with a small number of geopolitical, economic, and medical predictions with the net result of bringing his overall accuracy up.
by wredcoll | 2025-06-19 21:14:16+00:00
> simpler, cleaner abstraction

My life experience so far is that "simpler and cleaner" tends to be mostly achieved by ignoring the harder bits of actually dealing with the real world.

I used kubernete's (lack of) support for storage as an example elsewhere, it's the same sort of thing where you can look really clever and elegant if you just ignore the 10% of the problem space that's actually hard.
by arp242 | 2025-06-19 21:15:14+00:00
Some mobile devices (especially cheap Androids) often have device model numbers and build version in the User-Agent headers. A few examples from a quick look at my access log:

Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 15; zh-CN; V2301A Build/AP3A.240905.015.A2) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Chrome/123.0.6312.80 Quark/7.13.1.851 Mobile Safari/537.36 Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 13; STYLO RAIN Build/TP1A.220624.014) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/137.0.7151.89 Mobile Safari/537.36 Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 14; moto g04 Build/ULA34.89-193; wv) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Chrome/137.0.7151.89 Mobile Safari/537.36

All of these contain both the device/model name and specific software version.

This is only an issue on Android and some other devices really (e.g. "smart" TVs and whatnot); I'm not aware of any desktop browser that does that. Not all Android devices do either.

This is a major reason why I stopped storing User-Agent headers in the database for my analytics app. I originally assumed there would be a relatively limited set of headers, but at some point I had millions of unique ones. Now it just stores the extracted information (e.g. "Chrome 137 on Android 14"). It's a pretty silly situation and completely unnecessary, but it is what it is.
by delusional | 2025-06-19 21:15:34+00:00
In the common case where the processor dispatching those kernel calls is much faster than the kernel calls themselves, you're not likely to see a meaningful increase in throughput.

What you need to do first is get really optimized kernels (since that makes the dispatching relatively more expensive) and THEN this becomes worth doing. People who are really good a writing optimized GPU kernels are just not that easy to get a hold of right now.
by trustinmenowpls | 2025-06-19 21:15:35+00:00
The narrative that there is a genocide in gaza has lost all credibility. The gazan population has grown since the war started, its completely ludicrous to claim a genocide while the population is literally growing. People have been making claims of genocide since Israel took over in '67, it never made any sense then and it makes even less sense today. People who make such claims should be seen for what they are: charlatans and liars looking to discredit zionists and jews everywhere.
by acdha | 2025-06-19 21:15:56+00:00
> Developers find HCL very confusing. It can be hard to read. Does it support imports now? Errors can be confusing to debug.

This sounds a lot more like “I resented learning something new” than anything about HCL, or possibly confusing learning HCL simultaneously with something complex as a problem with the config language rather than the problem domain being configured.
by danans | 2025-06-19 21:16:09+00:00
Fair point. Last time I took that train (mid 1990s) it didn't run to Pontiac or Troy, and I recall there being very infrequent service. A far as I know, it's not the major mode of passenger transit between Detroit and Chicago. Cars are. That might be because of the serious lack of last-mile transit connectivity in the Detroit area.
by ajkjk | 2025-06-19 21:16:21+00:00
That's not a mistake I'm making. Assuming you're talking about bog-standard effective altruists---by (claiming to) value the suffering of people far away as the same as those nearby, they're discounting the people around them heavily compared to other people. Compare to anyone else who values their friends and family and community far more than those far away. Perhaps they're not discounting them to less-than-parity---just less than they are for most people.

But anyway this whole model follows from a basic set of beliefs about quantifying suffering and about what one's ethical responsibilities are, and it answers those in ways most people would find very bizarre by turning them into a math problem that assigns no special responsibility to the people around you. I think that is much more contentious and gross to most people than EA thinks it is. It can be hard to say exactly why in words, but that doesn't make it less true.
by fasthands9 | 2025-06-19 21:17:27+00:00
Even then you have to be careful.

It would be trivially easy to build an algo that beats the market 90% of years but 10% has huge losses. Just construct a slightly levered portfolio, with some protection against minor losses, but totally exposed to big losses.

If you sold that, it would appear like its working for awhile and you'd probably have lots of trusted customers by the time it fails.

(I'm a bit cynical, I worked in finance briefly, and I realized the fund we were selling to investors was essentially this)
by mettamage | 2025-06-19 21:18:01+00:00
I always liken this to that we’re all asteroids floating in space. There’s no free will and everything is determined. We just see the whole thing unfold from one conscious perspective.

Emotionally I don’t subscribe to this view. Rationally I do.

My critique for rational people is that they don’t seem to fully take experience into account. It’s assumptions + rationality + experience/data + whatever strong inclinations one has that seems to be the full picture for me.
by jjmarr | 2025-06-19 21:18:03+00:00
You should safely shoot yourself in the foot with `friend`, which is a core language feature for accessing private members/functions/etc.

https://www.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/friend.html

Redefining public as private can violate the ODR rule and triggers undefined behaviour because private members are ordered in memory in an undefined way, while public members are ordered in a standard way.
by skavi | 2025-06-19 21:18:38+00:00
Does anyone have an intuition on why this offers significant gains over CUDA Graphs?. The CPU launch cost of a graph is tiny which implies most of the work has been offloaded to the GPU's own scheduler. I'd expect that some I/O marshalling at kernel boundaries could be avoided with megakernels. Maybe some loop fusion? Are there any more interesting optimizations they enable?