MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jcranmer | 2025-08-12 21:26:19+00:00
In a compiler, you essentially need the ability to trace all the uses of an address, at least in the easy cases. Converting a pointer to an integer (or vice versa) isn't really a deal-breaker; it's essentially the same thing as passing (or receiving) a pointer to an unknown external function: the pointer escapes, whelp, nothing more we can do in that case for the most part.

But converting an integer to a pointer creates a problem if you allow that pointer to point to anything--it breaks all of the optimizations that assumed they could trace all of the uses of an address. So you need something like provenance to say that certain back-conversions are illegal. The most permissive model is a no-address-taken model (you can't forge a pointer to a variable whose address was never taken). But most compilers opt instead for a data-dependency-based model: essentially, even integer-based arithmetic of addresses aren't allowed to violate out-of-bounds at the point of dereference. Or at least, they claim to--the documentation for both gcc and llvm have this claim, but both have miscompilation bugs because they don't actually allow this.

The proposal for pointer provenance in C essentially looks at how compilers generally implement things and suggests a model that's closer to their actual implementation: pointer-to-integer exposes the address such that any integer-to-pointer can point to it. Note this is more permissive than the claimed models of compilers today--you're explicitly able to violate out-of-bounds rules here, so long as both objects have had their addresses exposed. There's some resistance to this because adhering to this model also breaks other optimizations (for example, (void*)(uintptr_t)x is not the same as x).

As a practical matter, pointer provenance isn't that big of a deal. It's not hard to come up with examples that illustrate behaviors that cause miscompilation or are undefined specifically because of pointer provenance. But I'm not aware of any application code that was actually miscompiled because the compiler implemented its provenance model incorrectly. The issue gets trickier as you move into systems code that exists somewhat outside the C object model, but even then, most of the relevant code can ignore their living outside the object model since resulting miscompiles are prevented by inherent optimization barriers anyways (note that to get a miscompile, you generally have to simultaneously forge the object's address, have the object's address be known to the compiler already, and have the compiler think the object's address wasn't exposed by other means).
by toomuchtodo | 2025-08-12 21:26:24+00:00
Fair. I will provide a reference for St Brendan's Isle. It is a locally/family owned business that caters primarily to cruisers (sailors), van life, etc. Their customer base is somewhat inherently sticky compared to transient business customers of other po box services. I cannot guarantee they will be in business forever, but I am prepared to purchase the business and continue to operate at, even at a reasonable loss, in the event the current owners encounter operational challenges. I consider them a utility.

I find their envelope and content scan quotas to be very reasonable, and have never exceeded them; they process all of my personal/family/business mail. They were also friendly when I inquired about writing code to wrap around their website UX to automate certain workflows.

https://www.sbimailservice.com/mail-scan-pro/

(no affiliation besides being a customer, I am just an internet rando)
by travschan | 2025-08-12 21:26:25+00:00
SEEKING WORK | US/Remote

Senior Software Engineering Leader with 20+ years of full-stack development experience in , ERP systems, and cloud architecture. Proven track record in building mission-critical solutions for US, Hong Kong and international markets. Combines deep technical mastery (Python/PHP/Node.js, AWS/GCP, Django/Laravel) with leadership in DevOps, ISO compliance, and cross-functional team management. Specialized in fintech integrations (Stripe/PayPal/Jetco), logistics systems (UPS/FedEx), and Agile transformation.

https://www.travschan.com/software/resume
by keeda | 2025-08-12 21:26:27+00:00
> It's very good at some kinds of reasoning and very bad at others. There's not much it's mediocre at.

Yes, one of the terms for this phenomenon is "jagged frontier" from here:

https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/centaurs-and-cyborgs-on-the...

This is also the main reason people have such diverging experiences and the discussion around AI is so bimodal in nature.
by xp84 | 2025-08-12 21:26:28+00:00
Became a parent mid-30s and I cannot agree more. I didn’t feel old right away, but my first child is somewhat special-needs and it feels like parenting him has aged me 20 years in the past 7. This is a special case, but even with a ‘normal’ kid it’s still true.

The #1 thing I would tell any young person who would listen is that if you want them, finish having children by like 27. I know for most people, that represents a gamble (that you’ll be able to achieve financial stability in the future), but it’s a safer bet than betting that ‘future you’ will be better equipped in all of the non-money ways. Spoiler: older you is worse equipped in most ways. You might have more wisdom to impart, but the children won’t listen to you anyway so that’s moot.
by geysersam | 2025-08-12 21:26:53+00:00
But many of the jobs "lost" were replaced by jobs that produces less value and has worse salary. That's only natural. If there was a higher value job that could be done, it would already have replaced the "lost" job before it was lost.

We can turn and twist and look at it from many different angles but the conclusion is the same: Global economic output increased and economic inequality in rich countries increased.

I don't think it's meaningful to blame any other countries like China and Vietnam for this development. But critique against globalization/our current system of trade should be taken seriously.
by CLPadvocate | 2025-08-12 21:28:10+00:00
Most Arab leaders in the region have no problems with making peace with Israel - it's actually only the terror organisations who refuse - Hamas, PLO, Iran, Huthis ...

And there is actually no confusion about the "Palestinians" in the Arab world - as Egypt annexed Gaza, they made it pretty clear that they will not allow an Arab state there and also that they will never accept Gazans as their equals. Same happened in Jordan after annexing the West Bank. No one really wants them in the region, because Palestinians are THE source of instability and they cost the Arab countries actually way too much. And basically the only reason why they support the Palestinian cause is the chance for political emancipation of the united Arab world from the western dominance.
by 1970-01-01 | 2025-08-12 21:28:32+00:00
I'm surprised the models haven't been enshittified by capitalism. I think in a few years we're going to see lightning-fast LLMs generating better output compared to what we're seeing today. But it won't be 1000x better, it will be 10x better, 10x faster, and completely enshittified with ads and clickbait links. Enjoy ChatGPT while it lasts.
by maxwellg | 2025-08-12 21:28:44+00:00
This is conceptually extremely similar to the Web Push API: https://web.dev/articles/push-notifications-web-push-protoco...

You'd need something at the browser/UA level to unsubscribe or to make the subscription exist for only a single message. Bad content publishers have taught us to never allow Web Push notifications since they always get inundated with marketing and other nonsense - being able to bake protections against that into the spec could be interesting.
by abustamam | 2025-08-12 21:28:45+00:00
Can you explain this part to me?

> assuming you have a decent testing infrastructure in place. Much of the supposed benefit of ORMs is about a form of psuedo-type safety, and making it easier to add more fields. If you have fast running tests that exercise the SQL layer, you might find those benefits aren't very compelling since you have such rapid feedback for your plain SQL anyway.

"decent testing infrastructure" is kinda doing a lot of heavy lifting — I love TDD but none of the startups I've worked at agreed with my love of TDD. There are tests, but I suspect they wouldn't fall under your label of decent testing infrastructure.

But let's say we do have a decent testing infrastructure — how does this solve the type safety benefit that you mentioned?
by duckmysick | 2025-08-12 21:30:10+00:00
> And yet, the rationalist community has hosted perhaps half a dozen small groups with very strange beliefs (including two separate groups that wound up interacting with demons). Some — which I won’t name in this article for privacy reasons — seem to have caused no harm but bad takes.

So there's six questionable (but harmless) groups and then later the article names three of them as more serious. Doesn't seem like "many" to me.

I wonder what percentage of all cults are the rationalist ones.
by nullc | 2025-08-12 21:30:27+00:00
Crime stats do indeed have the obvious problem that when crime is pervasive people stop reporting because reporting just exacerbates the harm of the crime by wasting your time.

One way to deal with this is to look only at murder stats, as there is a lot less reporting optionality there.

Unfortunately, that method is biased by changes the ratio of murders to other crimes. And particularly when the hypothesis is that there is rampant lawlessness and property crime as a result of law enforcement and prosecutors failing to enforce against those less severe crimes, a divergence between murder and other crimes is almost inevitable (unless the failure to arrest and prosecute also extends to murder...).
by thewebguyd | 2025-08-12 21:30:34+00:00
> Why has it taken so long to get the Windows ecosystem fully on ARM? Apple’s transition only took a year or two.

No incentive for third parties. Apple dictates the hardware, and can say "no more x86" and devs either have to jump on board or abandon Apple.

No such thing with Windows. x86 is still the default on windows laptops, and will likely be for the foreseeable future. The X elite still seems to have no successor in the pipeline, and the few laptops that have it don't outsell x86 so why bother.
by frumplestlatz | 2025-08-12 21:31:36+00:00
Empathy biases reasoning toward in-group cohesion, overriding dispassionate reasoning that could threaten group unity.

Empathy is not required for logical coherence. It exists to override what one might otherwise rationally conclude. Bias toward anyone’s relative perspective is unnecessary for logically coherent thought.

[edit]

Modeling someone’s cognition or experience is not empathy. Empathy is the emotional process of identifying with someone, not the cognitive act of modeling them.
by uecker | 2025-08-12 21:31:43+00:00
Ok, thanks. I still do not see where the complexity comes in. I also disagree with most your other points, e.g. that other libraries do not use it seems rather irrelevant. I am certainly not switching to another languages for this reason. Type inference works with auto in C23 (or __auto_type as an extension before), but if you mean the macros themselves, being explicit is a bit reason why I prefer C to other languages. For the sanitizer, this is a choice which makes sense to me. If it does not make sense for you, calling "abort()" explicitly instead of relying on the null sanitizer would be a trivial change. The null sanitizer is also certainly not a big sledgehammer. In fact, in the example in the post there is no sanitizer instrumentation left.
by whatevertrevor | 2025-08-12 21:31:59+00:00
Thank you for clarifying.

That does compute with what I thought the "Rationalist" movement as covered by the article was about. I didn't peg them as pure a priori thinkers as you put it. I suppose my comment still holds, assuming the rationalist in this context refers to the version of "Rationalism" being discussed in the article as opposed to the traditional one.
by gdudeman | 2025-08-12 21:32:08+00:00
Claude is very agreeable and is an eager helper.

It gives you the benefit of the doubt if you're coding.

It also gives you the benefit of the doubt if you're looking for feedback on your developers work. If you give it a hint of distrust "my developer says they completed this, can you check and make sure, give them feedback....?" Claude will look out for you.
by perching_aix | 2025-08-12 21:32:22+00:00
Sure, but this makes me all the more mystified about people wanting these to be outright cold and even mean, and bringing up people's fragility and faulting them for it.

If I think about efficient communication, what comes to mind for me are high stakes communication, e.g. aerospace comms, military comms, anything operational. Spending time on anything that isn't sharing the information at these is a waste, and so is anything that can cause more time to be wasted on meta stuff.

People being miserable and hurtful to others in my experience particularly invites the latter, but also the former. Consider the recent drama involving Linus and some RISC-V changeset. He's very frequently washed of his conduct, under the guise that he just "tells it like it is". Well, he spent 6 paragraphs out of 8 in his review email detailing how the changes make him feel, how he finds the changes to be, and how he thinks changes like it make the world a worse place. At least he did also spend 2 other paragraphs actually explaining why he thinks so.

So to me it reads a lot more like people falling for Goodhart's law regarding this, very much helped by the cultural-political climate of our times, than evaluating this topic itself critically. I counted only maybe 2-3 comments in this very thread, featuring 100+ comments at the time of writing, that do so, even.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-08-12 21:32:22+00:00
"Beyond the fact that almost all web "apps" are actually honest documents, ..."

The www is a document publishing scheme

The documents can contain links ("URLs") pointing to files of any type, text or binary

The documents can contain hyperlinks to each other

Option #1: Publish HTML with visible hyperlink to source code, the www user chooses whether or not to download the code, compile it and run it on their computer

Option #2: Publish HTML with hidden link to executable code, presume that the www user is using a program that contains an interpreter for the code, downloads it to temporary storage and runs it automatically without any www user interaction

Option #2 exposes www users to endless surveillance and monotonous annoyances

It is amusing to watch so-called "technical" people try control this default behaviour in popular browsers, the automatic running of other peoples' Javascripts

Their "solution" is to write their own Javascripts, e.g., "browser extensions"

Whoever maintains the browser software can limit or disable this "solution" at any time for any reason;

Currently companies engaged in online surveillance-based, programmatic, targeted advertising are the browser maintainers

But that nonsense only applies to Option #2

Option #1 is still in heavy usage

Although the number of www users aware of it may be relatively small

For myself as a document consumer, the www still functions well as a document publishing scheme
by minitech | 2025-08-12 21:32:36+00:00
Yes, that option is the real “just do this”.

- escape `<` as `\u003c`

<script id="my-json" type="application/json">{{ escaped_json }}</script> JSON.parse(document.getElementById('my-json').textContent)

No __proto__ issue, and no dynamic code at all, so you can use a strict CSP.
by worldsayshi | 2025-08-12 21:32:43+00:00
> Specialization is what makes the luxury and wealth of the modern world possible

Specialization is not the key here. Although it certainly is one of the major methods that we have used to attain the actual key feature - productivity. Less work per thing produced. Specialization is one enabler for this. It is easier to optimize when the scale is huge. But specialization is not a requirement.

We used to have one device per technical problem. Now we have fewer and more general devices. A smartphone or a pc does what a multitude of devices used to do. The same transformation can happen in industry as well.
by churchill | 2025-08-12 21:32:44+00:00
It's so prevalent that Wikipedia has dedicated pages for specifically American, [0] Indian, [1] and Canadian [2] farmer suicides. In the US, farmer suicide rates are 3.5* the general population. The rate for the general population is between 2-4%, so for farmers it'd be 7%-14%, comparable to the rate for anesthesiologists, at 7%-17%. For physicians, it's just over 1%.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farmers%27_suicides_in_the_Uni... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farmers%27_suicides_in_India [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farmers%27_suicides_in_Canada
by xp84 | 2025-08-12 21:33:33+00:00
While I think such a society would end in a lot of bloodshed, it sounds like it would make for an entertaining sci-fi or anime. I assume the elites would try to condition most or all of these women to be lesbians, to keep them believing that this is about women’s empowerment and not develop ideas of women being unvalued concubines and entertainment for the few Y-chromosome-bearers that survive (who I imagine couldn’t help but develop enormous egos and senses of entitlement).
by spacecadet | 2025-08-12 21:33:43+00:00
Ill pump my repo, DUNGEN.

https://github.com/derekburgess/dungen

It's a configurable pipeline for generative dungeon master role play content with a zork-like UI. I use a model called "Wayfarer" which is designed for challenging role play content and I find that it can be pretty fun to engage with.
by JohnMakin | 2025-08-12 21:33:50+00:00
I don't mean to well ackshually you here, but there are several different theological beliefs around the Rapture, some of which believe Christians will remain during the theoretical "end times." The megachurch/cinema version of this very much believes they won't, but, this is not the only view, either in modern times or historically. Some believe it's already happened, even. It's a very good analogy.
by Tainnor | 2025-08-12 21:33:56+00:00
I didn't call anyone a Nazi because I don't like the inflationary use of that term. But the "Nazi bar problem" is, unfortunately, an established metaphor. It doesn't have to be about literal Nazis, it could be about tankies for all I care. The problem is the same.

I'm going to keep calling people right-wing authoritarian and possibly fascist not for supporting more policing, but for supporting a person who has shown repeatedly that they want to rule as an authoritarian leader and is now implementing another step of that policy.

It literally doesn't matter how bad crime in DC is, because the danger of allowing a person who has denied losing an election for 4 years to single-handedly take over the capital of the most powerful country on earth is so high, in the same way as it didn't matter whether communists actually did or didn't set fire to the Reichstag.

This is what this is about. Not reasonable disagreement about policing, or immigration.

But of course, your only response to opposing authoritarianism is that one has to be some sort of anarchist.

Rest assured that I would react exactly the same if I was talking to a Tankie who was supporting some sort of Stalinist dictatorship.
by hax0ron3 | 2025-08-12 21:34:00+00:00
The premise of the article might just be nonsense.

How many rationalists are there in the world? Of course it depends on what you mean by rationalist, but I'd guess that there are probably several tens of thousands, at very least, people in the world who either consider themselves rationalists or are involved with the rationalist community.

With such numbers, is it surprising that there would be half a dozen or so small cults?

There are certainly some cult-like aspects to certain parts of the rationalist community, and I think that those are interesting to explore, but come on, this article doesn't even bother to establish that its title is justified.

To the extent that rationalism does have some cult-like aspects, I think a lot of it is because it tends to attract smart people who are deficient in the ability to use avenues other than abstract thinking to comprehend reality and who enjoy making loosely justified imaginative leaps of thought while overestimating their own abilities to model reality. The fact that a huge fraction of rationalists are sci-fi fans is not a coincidence.

But again, one should first establish that there is anything actually unusual about the number of cults in the rationalist community. Otherwise this is rather silly.
by pizzadog | 2025-08-12 21:34:11+00:00
I have a lot of experience with rationalists. What I will say is:

1) If you have a criticism about them or their stupid name or how "'all I know is that I know nothing' how smug of them to say they're truly wise," rest assured they have been self flagellating over these criticisms 100x longer than you've been aware of their group. That doesn't mean they succeeded at addressing the criticisms, of course, but I can tell you that they are self aware. Especially about the stupid name.

2) They are actually well read. They are not sheltered and confused. They are out there doing weird shit together all the time. The kind of off-the-wall life experiences you find in this community will leave you wide eyed.

3) They are genuinely concerned with doing good. You might know about some of the weird, scary, or cringe rationalist groups. You probably haven't heard about the ones that are succeeding at doing cool stuff because people don't gossip about charitable successes.

In my experience, where they go astray is when they trick themselves into working beyond their means. The basic underlying idea behind most rationalist projects is something like "think about the way people suffer everyday. How can we think about these problems in a new way? How can we find an answer that actually leaves everyone happy?" A cynic (or a realist, depending on your perspective) might say that there are many problems that fundamentally will leave some group unhappy. The overconfident rationalist will challenge that cynical/realist perspective until they burn themselves out, and in many cases they will attract a whole group of people who burn out alongside them. To consider an extreme case, the Zizians squared this circle by deciding that the majority of human beings didn't have souls and so "leaving everyone happy" was as simple as ignoring the unsouled masses. In less extreme cases this presents itself as hopeless idealism, or a chain of logic that becomes so divorced from normal socialization that it appears to be opaque. "This thought experiment could hypothetically create 9 quintillion cubic units of Pain to exist, so I need to devote my entire existence towards preventing it, because even a 1% chance of that happening is horrible. If you aren't doing the same thing then you are now morally culpable for 9 quintillion cubic units of Pain. You are evil."

Most rationalists are weird but settle into a happy place far from those fringes where they have a diet of "plants and specifically animals without brains that cannot experience pain" and they make $300k annually and donate $200k of it to charitable causes. The super weird ones are annoying to talk to and nobody really likes them.