MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by trogdor | 2025-06-07 00:31:39+00:00
> There are just four simple safety rules that prevent all unintentional gun injuries, even if you violate some of the rules some of the time.

Rules don’t prevent accidents. Trying your best to always follow the rules helps to prevent accidents.

I agree with GP: where guns exist and humans interact with them, accidents will occasionally happen.

Humans are imperfect. Some people who know the four rules that you are referring to and who try their best to always follow them will still experience accidents.

I own multiple guns, including a machine gun. No matter what I do, there is risk inherent in my decision to be a gun owner.
by BLKNSLVR | 2025-06-07 00:31:53+00:00
'Normie' takes are what's needed when dealing with sensitive data of this scale.

"Move fast and break things" is fine for startups risking their own life savings or venture capital. It's not ok for governments that are meant to be looking after the health and welfare of their population.

The Clinton / Gore approach seemed to work. Unfortunately it wasn't glamorously headline-making, it was just hard work, so it hasn't been replicated since.

"Understanding this culture" is understanding it needs serious adult supervision to work on things that support society itself.
by dev1ycan | 2025-06-07 00:32:04+00:00
I'll be honest, SpaceX is his as long as he respects the country he is at, and what he was allowed to do, he "joked" about decommisioning the dragon but I don't think a single person in government will allow him to sabotage the ISS like that. Actual room for criminal investigation and possibly expropiation. If he was in Canada or South Africa he wouldn't have access to the technical knowledge or talent that he has in the US, due to law, and said law exists to protect critical industries in America, it goes both ways, you are also not allowed as an individual to sabotage the nation.
by johnnyjeans | 2025-06-07 00:32:27+00:00
Can someone who uses FreeBSD fill me in on the niche that it fills in the Unix space? Why not use OpenBSD or NetBSD, which are far simpler and coherent? If the answer is support for stuff like ZFS, Nvidia drivers, ELF, etc. why not Linux? I'm well aware of the problems with GNU, but do you have problems even with something like Musl Void?

I'm genuinely actually curious. FreeBSD exists in kind of a shadow realm for me where I've never been quite able to pin down the soul that keeps it chugging, but I know it exists somewhere in there.
by alansammarone | 2025-06-07 00:34:10+00:00
I have a somewhat similar point of view to the one voiced by other people, but I like to think about it slightly differently, so I'll chime in - here's my take (although, admittedly, I'm operating with a quite small reasoning budget (5 minutes tops)):

Time and again, for centuries - with the pace picking up dramatically in recent decades - we thought we were special and we were wrong. Sun does not rotate around the earth, which is a pretty typical planet, with the same chemical composition of any other planet. All of a sudden we're not the only ones who could calculate, then solve symbolic equations, then play chess, then compose music, then talk, then reason (up to a point, for some definition of "reason"). You get my point.

And when we were not only matched, but dramatically surpassed in these tasks (and not a day earlier), we concluded that they weren't _really_ what made us special.

At this point, it seems to me reasonable to assume we're _not_ special, and the onus should be on anybody claiming that we are to at least attempt to mention in passing what is the secret sauce that we have (even if we can't quite say what it is without handwaving or using concepts that by definition can not be defined - "qualia is the indescribable feeling of red - its redness (?)).

Oh, and sorry, I could never quite grasp what "sentient" is supposed to mean - would we be able to tell we're not sentient if we weren't?
by curious_cat_163 | 2025-06-07 00:34:15+00:00
> Rather than standard benchmarks (e.g., math problems), we adopt controllable puzzle environments that let us vary complexity systematically

Very clever, I must say. Kudos to folks who made this particular choice.

> we identify three performance regimes: (1) low complexity tasks where standard models surprisingly outperform LRMs, (2) medium-complexity tasks where additional thinking in LRMs demonstrates advantage, and (3) high-complexity tasks where both models experience complete collapse.

This is fascinating! We need more "mapping" of regimes like this!

What I would love to see (not sure if someone on here has seen anything to this effect) is how these complexity regimes might map to economic value of the task.

For that, the eval needs to go beyond puzzles but the complexity of the tasks still need to be controllable.
by mkfs | 2025-06-07 00:34:18+00:00
IIRC, it was a nonce-not-used-only-once vulnerability, wasn't it? Wouldn't that be tricky to detect, even in Rust?

Regardless, it's quite unfortunate to see Colin's nits picked in this manner, dredging up some mistake from almost 15 years ago (which he handled as responsibly as could be expected), given all of the work he's done on FreeBSD and for giving the world scrypt.
by atleastoptimal | 2025-06-07 00:36:09+00:00
I think it's a reasonable assumption to wager that, with respect to the range of what superintelligent AI could do, "undoing the effects of 150 years of anthropogenic climate change" may not be trivial but would fall within that range, especially given what humans alone have been able to do with respect to minimizing the "damage to the environment per $-in-GDP/megawatt extracted" ratio all while maintaining exponential economic growth over the past 50 or so years, during which the majority of time most humans didn't believe climate change was a thing.
by jandrewrogers | 2025-06-07 00:36:15+00:00
In the US, most recent studies of asset portfolios suggest that 60-70% of notional asset value has no liquid market. We already generate fictitious valuations for compliance purposes in many cases (e.g. 409A) that no one confuses with being representative of actual value. Tax policy based on overt fiction is bad policy.

Even in the case of real estate, a large amount of value is locked up in extremely non-liquid markets. You might get a vaguely representative market-clearing transaction once per decade, with high price volatility that makes it nearly impossible to predict what the next market clearing transaction will look like. I’ve owned assets in these types of non-liquid markets; differences in subjective valuations can vary by an order of magnitude and there is no evidence from the market to support any of those values.

If you only include extremely liquid markets for tax purposes in order to make valuations vaguely plausible, assets will be made non-liquid such that they are excluded from consideration. Ultimately this is why taxes on unrealized gains have been a challenging proposition in practice. We have no way to accurately model realizable value for the majority of assets and current simple approaches produce extremely wrong estimates a substantial percentage of the time.
by simoncion | 2025-06-07 00:36:16+00:00
> ...but many don't.

And many do. The US isn't the entire world, you know.

> ...what kind of software do you write that pays your bills?

B2B software that allows anyone to run their workloads with most any cloud provider, and most any on-prem "cloud". The entire point of this software is to abstract out the underlying infrastructure so that businesses can walk away from a particular vendor if that vendor gets too stroppy.

> ...your setup doesn't require any external infrastructure...

It's Gentoo Linux, so it runs largely on donated infra (and infra paid for with donations). But -unlike Windows or OS X users- if I get sick of what the Gentoo steering committee are doing, I can go to another distro (or just fucking roll my own should things get truly dire). That's the point of my comment.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-06-07 00:40:59+00:00
Yes they do want it.

If you've ever negotiated, I bet you've done the same thing of jeopardizing something you want in order to get something else you want. If you never do that, you'll make a lot of deals where you're riding the edge of just barely acceptable and the other person is taking advantage of you. But in this case, with a standalone law, doing it gets pretty rude and we'd be better off if nobody did it.
by atleastoptimal | 2025-06-07 00:41:24+00:00
Another thought-terminating one-liner. This is why I had to add that this was a hypothetical scenario in OP, because it seems whenever anyone tries to discuss transformative AI on this site, there is always the kneejerk bias to just say it's all a VC scam, overhyped, etc.

Which is fun to talk about because it makes you the smart cynic and everyone else the dumb sheep, but it isn't productive when discussing ideas within a hypothetical range (i.e. with no burden of proof, simply a what-if), but even explicitly saying it's a "what-if" scenario can't keep that bias from coming out.

I think it's unwise to spend almost no time considering the real impacts of AI given how much the internet, mobile phones, and social media have changed the world over the past 20 or so years. I mean, don't spend all your time thinking about it, but at least consider it with a seriousness that doesn't resort to those cliches.
by enamya | 2025-06-07 00:43:57+00:00
Double-Hatted Data Scientist & Engineer with experience building end-to-end ML systems—from data pipelines (Python, Spark, AWS, Azure, Hadoop on premises) to production-grade models (Scikit-learn, PyTorch, TensorFlow).

I've led projects in geospatial ML, fraud detection, and LLM/RAG apps. Strong focus on clean code, data quality, and scalable, reusable ML infrastructure.

Open for opportunities where I can contribute to impactful data-related projects.

Location: Morocco Remote: Yes (open to hybrid and on-site too) Willing to relocate: Yes Technologies: Python, SQL, Spark, PyTorch, Scikit-learn, TensorFlow, Airflow, AWS, Azure, RAG, LLMs, MLOps Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BjeFbRYuUrLeEmqO56PuOfBO8jK... Email: aymaneboumaaza@gmail.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aymaneboumaaza/
by vlovich123 | 2025-06-07 00:44:55+00:00
I'm not sure I buy into this. Sure, compared with Russia it's probably a lot less, at least in terms of being something everyday people engage in. But in terms of comparing with countries like Germany or Sweden I don't know.

Here's some food for thought:

* Global financial crises: Banks were paying (bribing) ratings agencies to rate junk bonds AAA.

* Savings & loan crisis: widespread fraud & insider abuse.

* Bernie Madoff: Ran the largest Ponzi scheme ever, with an estimated fraud total of $65B raking in $17.5B in invested cash.

* Enron: straight up accounting fraud sprinkled with intentionally causing brownouts in California to pad their pockets with a side bonus of making Gov Davis unpopular & get him recalled (Enron was closely aligned with the Bush administration).

* Nixon straight up using psy-ops against Democrats & finally trying to burgal the DNC offices.

In terms of stats, the FBI does a few hundred bribery and corruption cases annually. Are they good at catching white collar crime? Well such crimes regularly take more than 5 years to investigate.

And hell, some things that are basically lying and cheating are straight up legal. Usury is legal with minimal to no regulation of payday loans. Pyramid schemes are legal as long as you call it multi-level marketing.

The list goes on and on.
by RiverCrochet | 2025-06-07 00:45:36+00:00
If social media is where the masses hang out, then it won't be where the avant-garde is. You're going to have to look for it and it's probably not something you're going to just run into while scrolling on your phone. We're past the "Google was awesome and actually found what you searched for" trend of the 2000's, and the social media oversharing trend of the 2010's. So increasingly there's stuff happening but you're not going immediately run into it on Facebook, Tiktok, etc. or even a Google search.

> Discovering good artists in the old days was a very difficult endeavor.

> Fast-forward to the 2020s, and the artistic community has been largely disintermediated.

You had art forums before Facebook, but just because you could join, view art and possibly even post it, didn't mean you were in any elitist circle of artists. But it did seem like all kinds of weird stuff was easier to find when Google search was worth a damn, e.g. you could literally type in what you wanted and it would come up, but phone apps and web apps have made things like Discord forums the place where that stuff happens now.
by georgemcbay | 2025-06-07 00:45:42+00:00
Pretty sure his relatively quick walk back on that "joke" was due to the realization that if it was left open as a credible threat it is very likely the government would have just seized control of SpaceX immediately.

There's not really any need to charge him with anything to do that when he is making active threats to weaken national security, though its possible they might have separately gone after him.

And if the government did take that action they would have had incredibly high popular support for doing so among virtually everyone on both sides.
by BLKNSLVR | 2025-06-07 00:46:02+00:00
What are these "lurid tales of corruption"?

There was the proven false claim that 40% of phone calls to SSA were fraudulent. I think it was DOGE fraud checking systems that proved that claim false, quite soon after Musk proclaimed it.

https://www.nextgov.com/digital-government/2025/05/doge-went...

Personally, it feels like the tiny nibbles that DOGE has managed to save from the massive banquet of spending that US government does is proof that there really isn't a lot of waste based on corruption. The spending is systemic and has built up over decades of various policy changes throughout many administrations of both colours.

Off topic, it feels as if this administration has also very effectively disproved any theory about the presence of a deep state controlling things from the background. Interestingly, Trump appears to be trying to show that it's possible, except for the fact that he's putting ridiculously unqualified and incompetent boobs into positions of influence. It'd be laughable except for the fact that this is not a TV show, this is real life.
by atleastoptimal | 2025-06-07 00:47:52+00:00
>You cannot write a Python program to fix global warming or replace corrupt government officials.

How can you say that you're appreciating the scope and seriousness of superintelligent AI as a concept when you are comparing it to a Python program (a pithy shorthand for a small-in-scope, trivial computer program)? Saying "it's just a computer system" feels like a category error when everyone who talks about superintelligent AI's impacts talks about it with respect to its integration into real-world systems, embodied robotics, acceleration of manufacturing, mass manipulation, etc. Is the bias just based in "computers don't affect the world that much so anything under the category of 'computer' can't affect the world that much"?

Your first comment in this chain was that there was no point in considering what to do now because ASI would be able to outsmart humans in any domain, so how come now you're saying that ASI couldn't do anything substantial in the real world? Everything humans have ever done substantial in the real world has been as a result of our intelligence, coordination, and ability to create and use tools, why wouldn't superintelligent systems, bolstered with the same aptitudes, be able to do the same?
by godelski | 2025-06-07 00:48:22+00:00
> This is a self-inflicted problem.

I think it is a problem when markets become profit driven rather than product driven.

By this, I don't mean businesses shouldn't put substantial weight on their profits, but rather that when push comes to shove you have to ask which matters more: profit or product? You will constantly be faced with some choice of sacrificing the quality of the product in favor of higher profits or sacrificing profits in favor of the product.

Certainty we want to maximize both, but this isn't always possible.

I think part of this has come through our runaway problem with shareholders and hyper fixation on the short term. Many shareholders are happy to trade product for profit because they believe they can exit during the market lag. It is statistical arbitrage. They have no interest in the long term value of a company or product, only until the time of exit.

It's worth noting that being too focused on the short term will damage the long term sustainability. Many times you have to put off profits today for profits tomorrow. That's the same problem. But there will be significant pressure against this if people driving don't care about tomorrow.
by em-bee | 2025-06-07 00:48:42+00:00
i knew someone was going to suggest to combine cooking and kids, which is why i added that parenthetical: spending time with my kids (means i do what they want) which could be playing a game with them, or some other activity. but most certainly not forcing them to hang around in the kitchen with me (unless they want cook, but then it will take even longer). besides, if i do anything else while i am cooking then i am most likely going to burn the food. it just doesn't work that way.

and no, i am not cooking fancy stuff. but i am using fresh ingredients which take more prep time and also require me to go shopping more often because you can't keep vegetables fresh for long. meat at least i can freeze.
by Supermancho | 2025-06-07 00:49:20+00:00
> No, they're forcefully entering buildings, adding unapproved infrastructure with no oversight and get rubberstamped access to everything, with people in the way being threatened firing.

That's not what the court was ruling on. Nor is there any evidence that the subject were specifically responsible for these crimes.

>> There are consequences if any individual acts maliciously or abusing the access

> No, there have been no consequences.

That's how consequences work. First the violation, then the consequence. When is based on a number of factors. IN THIS CASE, we're talking about potential acts and consequences. Ofc they have not yet been assigned.

This is not a discussion when the responses are in the form of hypotheticals being assigned to the subjects out of frustration (I'm frustrated by the feckless courts too). None of us are directly involved. Assume good faith. Be kind.
by kiitos | 2025-06-07 00:50:22+00:00
> it must be done in a central error translator. By definition. And this translation must either do a dozen+ Is() and As() calls, or it can be done efficiently, as I've described.

These claims are, bluntly, incorrect. There are no widely-used modules that work this way, and there are no properties of the language or its conventions that would suggest that this is a viable way to design an API. errors.Is and errors.As provide capabilities that type assertions -- as you've described -- factually do not provide. They're not equivalent, they're not normally used, they're not anything other than red flags in bad code that should be eliminated.

I'm not trying to pick a fight with you, I'm honestly just trying to prevent other people, reading this comment thread, from making the kinds of design mistakes that you're describing here as viable and efficient. They truly aren't.
by sokoloff | 2025-06-07 00:51:19+00:00
I wear my seatbelt and insist my family does the same, but am opposed to seat belt laws.

I’m in favor of building codes for commercial and public buildings but not for detached private residences (or not at the current level anyway).

I’m opposed to minimum wage laws.

For oxytocin, I think people derive pleasure and overall significantly benefit from it and naturally encourage people to seek it out, despite it having a positive feedback loop in its mode of action.

Used under a doctor’s care and oversight, for patients where a prescription is indicated, benefits are well in excess of side effects. Maintaining the requirement for a prescription is fine.

Medicines for blood pressure management are likewise overwhelmingly beneficial, and so I want them to also be highly available to anyone for whom they’re indicated, though I think having a doctor in the loop to monitor is appropriate and needing a prescription is therefore fine.
by willywanker | 2025-06-07 00:51:20+00:00
>We technically didn't need more than 640K either.

That old chestnut again - this was true for MSDOS PCs in 1981 when the quote was said. It was still true 10 years later for whatever version of DOS was current then. People keep bringing it up as though Bill Gates said 'no one will need > 640k for all time to come'.
by jandrewrogers | 2025-06-07 00:54:07+00:00
You are basically making my case for me. It is widely recognized that replacement value differs materially from notional value. In such cases you may be required to pay much more than notional value because you have to pay for liquidity costs that only exist when transactions are forced to occur. The act of transacting can intrinsically change the asset value, sometimes by a large factor.

Are you oblivious to the extensive litigation that occurs in cases like eminent domain because there are substantial differences of opinion on even the notional value, never mind the realizable value?

Notional valuations are fiction, everywhere and at all times. Treating them as some kind of objective reality is just enabling a lot of abuse and motivated reasoning.
by quantified | 2025-06-07 00:54:47+00:00
Identity handed to Musk's businesses, along with all of the personal history there, is mind-boggling. But MAGA doesn't care, and all the enabling congresspeople will just say "omg, we didn't know that we should care".

I suppose it's not as bad as believing/promoting the lies that got the US into two wars in Iraq, but it's still bad and sort of feels like it goes into the same bucket.
by eyelidlessness | 2025-06-07 00:55:23+00:00
It had to be incompatible with CommonJS regardless of top level await. There is no imaginable scenario where browsers would ship a module system with synchronous request and resolution semantics. A module graph can be arbitrarily deep, meaning that synchronous modules would block page load for arbitrarily deep network waterfalls. That’s a complete non-starter.

Given that, top-level await is a sensible affordance, which you’d have to go out of your way to block because async modules already have the same semantics.

Recently, Node has compromised by allowing ESM to be loaded synchronously absent TLA, but that’s only feasible because Node is loading those models from the file system, rather than any network-accessible location (and because it already has those semantics for CJS). That compromise makes sense locally, too. But it still doesn’t make sense in a browser.
by southernplaces7 | 2025-06-07 00:55:29+00:00
Thing I never got about ID thieves pulling all this off with stolen basic credentials is just how they get approved so widely.

I mean, imagine, often, when you're the ACTUAL holder of an identity, trying to legitimately obtain credit, buy products and so forth, you get all sorts of absurd algorithmic or anti-fraud roadblocks that can make it tricky or fully block you, but then some dude with only part of your ID paperwork in his hands can just go ahead and take out loans, get credit, use your name for X or Y official thing just like that? Then also, them getting the mailing addresses they need for all these scams to work. How do they pull that off too?

I'm really puzzled by how these contradictions work?