MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by alexey-salmin | 2025-09-14 06:45:11+00:00
> You need to specify UNIX 'date' as your intent as that phrasing wasn't used in the article.

No, I didn't mean unix date, I mean literally date.

I can see two interpretations of the phrasing in the article. Either you have 86M shuffles per day (in this case knowing the date would benefit you) or you have 86M shuffles period (in this case even the date isn't necessary, you already have the totality of information). In both cases we can consider the problem of solving the game with 86M shuffles.

Syncing clocks is needed to enumerate all possible shuffles in real time on a 1999 PC, which is what the paper demonstrates. Doing this in realtime for 86M combinations wouldn't have been possible back then. However building a 1 Gb index file and making a HDD lookup in realtime was absolutely possible on very modest 1999 hardware, you can write such a program in a couple of hours.

Knowing the shuffle with three more rounds of betting to go represents a completely broken poker game, not just some minor biases in outcomes.

I have absolutely no idea what hairsplitting you are talking about, let alone bad faith discussions. 86M combinations is such a little number that you can analyse all of them and solve the game even on 1999 hardware. It's a fact, not a matter of opinion or idealistic standards. If you can just kindly acknowledge this fact, no further discussion will be necessary.
by silon42 | 2025-09-14 06:47:32+00:00
+1 ... Rust has done pretty much the minimal thing that one needs to write C/C++ like programs safely... things must fit together to cover all scenarios (borrow checker / mut / send / sync / bounds checking). Especially for multithreading.

C++ / profiles will not be able to do much less or much different to achieve the same goals.
by visarga | 2025-09-14 06:48:23+00:00
AI is used by students, teachers, researchers, software developers, marketers and other categories and the adoption rates are close to 90%. Even if it does not make us more productive we still like using it daily. But when used right, it does make us slightly more productive and I think it justifies its cost. So yes, in the long run it will be viable, we both like using it and it helps us work better.

But I think the benefits of AI usage will accumulate with the person doing the prompting and their employers. Every AI usage is contextualized, every benefit or loss is also manifested in the local context of usage. Not at the AI provider.

If I take a photo of my skin sore and put it on ChatGPT for advice, it is not OpenAI that is going to get its skin cured. They get a few cents per million tokens. So the AI providers are just utilities, benefits depend on who sets the prompts and and how skillfully they do it. Risks also go to the user, OpenAI assumes no liability.

Users are like investors - they take on the cost, and support the outcomes, good or bad. AI company is like an employee, they don't really share in the profit, only get a fixed salary for work
by synecdoche | 2025-09-14 06:50:37+00:00
Without it, there would be no way to get information from the source. In msm all we get is the msm view. When compared to what was actually said, done or written then you have a chance to make your own opinion. You only then can compare what is in msm and what is not. And the bias is relentless. Which makes it a propaganda machine.

Of course there is garbage in social media as there is in every field. Find the source if there is one recorded. Msm rarely if ever refer to any. And no wonder. It would risk undermining their publication, which they peddle as unbiased.
by vintermann | 2025-09-14 06:50:52+00:00
In one of Marx's most memorable letters:

"Tories in England long imagined that they were enthusiastic about monarchy, the church, and the beauties of the old English Constitution, until the day of danger wrung from them the confession that they are enthusiastic only about ground rent."

That feels like it could have been written today, doesn't it? When push comes to shove, things like Christianity, constitutional order or "fiscal restraint" seem to always take second seat to the yield from owning things, especially real estate.
by pjmlp | 2025-09-14 06:51:49+00:00
> I think the point is that folks will incrementally move their code towards having all profiles enabled, and that's sort of fundamental if the goal is to give folks with C++ codebases an incremental path to safety.

I doubt it, because the reason I favoured C++ over C back in 1993, was the safety culture, as someone coming from Turbo Pascal.

Somehow this has been deteriorating since 2000, as C++ kept getting C refugees that would rather keep using C, but work required C++ now.

Most of the hardening capabilities that are being added now, were already part of the compiler frameworks during the 1990's, e.g. Turbo Vision, OWL, MFC, CSet++, MFC, MacApp, PowerPlant,...
by jajko | 2025-09-14 06:52:22+00:00
Mountains are objectively aesthetically pleasing to humans. They also retain the most wild and specific nature around, especially in western world where in the past mostly agriculture changed environment forever. You can find entire states in Europe where 'wilderness' is basically a well curated park that was a field some time ago. Air is much cleaner, you see far and you feel utterly insignificant up there.

Mountains also allow tons of various sports most of the year as you mention and attract such crowds.

Overall, people go in droves to mountains every year, summer and winter, to recharge. And its a different recharge compared to some beach holiday, much more active and I dare to say a more effective one (active vacations simply recharge better mental tiredness of modern living and working).

I live near Geneva, Switzerland and after moving here basically became mountain sports addict. Hiking, ferratas, climbing, a bit of alpinism in non-winter, and skiing / ski touring in winter. For exotic places there is diving to keep a bit of balance. Did also some paragliding too but had a nasty accident last year that almost killed me so stopped that. Rest I continue, and will do till the last moment I can still do them, they make me properly happy like a toddler. I live in best possible place in the world for people like me, 1h drive from home and I am right below Mont Blanc, towering almost 4km higher than Chamonix valley.

One drawback as you mention - higher mountains are basically high altitude deserts, snow and ice everywhere but humidity easily below 5% ie in Himalaya. Many folks trying ie Everest didnt get higher than base camp simply due to being often sick up there, amateurs and pros alike.
by procaryote | 2025-09-14 06:53:38+00:00
> Part of me thinks that if the case against social media was stronger, it would not be being litigated on substack.

It's litigated all over and has been for a decade.

Australia for example has set an age limit of 16 to have social media. France 15. Schools or countries are trying various phone bans. There's research into it. There are whistleblowers telling about Facebook's own research they've suppressed as it would show some of their harm.

Perhaps you spend too much time on social media?
by jonathanlydall | 2025-09-14 06:54:47+00:00
Why would QUIC be any more or less MITM attackable than say HTTP1.1 or 2?

AFAIK, the only thing that stops an MITM attack (where they respond as if they’re the remote server and then relay to the real remote server) are certificates.

If an authority requires you trust their root certificate so they can spy on you, QUIC will not make any difference.
by visarga | 2025-09-14 06:54:58+00:00
Books also make us less capable at rote memorization. People used to do much more memorization. Search engines taught us to remember the keywords, not the facts. Calculators made us rarely do mental calculations. This is what happens - progress is also regress, you automate on one side and the skill gets atrophied on the other side, or replaced with meta-skills.

How many of us know how to use machine code? And we call ourselves software engineers.
by epcoa | 2025-09-14 06:55:11+00:00
This does not question all knowledge. Bacteremia and cardiac disease have been linked for years (see upvoted comment above), which is why these studies were done in the first place. This study isn't ground breaking, it's extending an already established area of study.

Furthermore, while there are issues of misaligned incentives across the industry, of the top 10 pharma companies: Roche, AstraZeneca, Bayer, Novartis, Sanofi, Novo Nordisk, GSK, are all based in Europe, so your assertion further down makes no sense.
by vintagedave | 2025-09-14 06:56:53+00:00
A year or so ago I read that there was a design decision railroaded through the committee about what kind of safety approach could be looked at. Its wording effectively prevented Safe C++. I was not at this meeting so I’m going on what others say:

https://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/comments/1hppdzc/comment/m4jjo4...

I’m a big fan of Safe C++ and believe its approach — learning from another language, incremental opt-in (just like all good refactorings, work on code and improve it piece by piece) — would have been the path that solved some genuine problems. Profiles seem a hodgepodge. And — to share personal worries about what I read into what comments like the above imply, this is not a statement — I worry deeply about the relationship between who proposes what, and who has pricklier personalities or less connections, with what approach was accepted.

I wish Safe C++ would continue as a hard fork of the language.
by adrian_b | 2025-09-14 06:57:01+00:00
UTC or TAI are the right solution for storing past time values. Any other information is superfluous and it makes things more complicated than they should be.

Future "time" values are typically not time values. Therefore they must be stored using a different more complex data type, which contains all the information that will be necessary in the future to determine the corresponding time value.

Using the same data type to store both past time values and future time values is in most cases a serious programming mistake, which either wastes resources or is likely to cause bugs.
by jpalawaga | 2025-09-14 06:57:22+00:00
almost all of the major ones? voices on the internet have lead people to believe that the journalists at major publications are biased, and that somehow also means they're lying and unethical.

what's interesting is that those opinions are taken at face value without ever happening to do any practical evaluation about traditional media outlets.

the reality is, if you ever read any alt-news publication it becomes evident extremely quickly how deprived of any standards those publications actually are.
by lucas_membrane | 2025-09-14 06:57:35+00:00
You make a fine point. My simplified version of it is that there is no such thing as an isolated system. Things change. A system optimized for one environment is likely to fail when things change. Most of the hugely successful firms of today focus more on controlling their environment than on developing a capacity to adapt to unforeseeable consequences of unforeseen changes in their environment, even the ones that they cause themselves.
by sam_lowry_ | 2025-09-14 06:57:36+00:00
If I had to pick three books that made me who I am, I would add Ask A Foolish Question by Robert Sheckley [0] and Hard to Be a God by Strugatsky brothers [1].

Those two are more about humility and imperialism than learning, though.

[0] https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/33854

[1] https://content.cosmos.art/media/pages/library/hard-to-be-a-...
by notmywalrus | 2025-09-14 06:57:49+00:00
Rust is an example of "compiler magic" in this case.

You're right about Zig, and reading the source [1] I'm still kind of impressed how unified they made comptime / runtime.

[1]: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/blob/32a1aabff78234b428234189...
by soraminazuki | 2025-09-14 06:58:35+00:00
If somebody says "when you jump off a cliff, you fall," that's not "justifying" anything. That's just explaining cause and effect. You're bending over backwards to come up with an excuse for shutting down speech for purely ideological reasons.

Justify policies enabling gun violence, and you make the world a more dangerous place, including for yourself. Sow hate and violence, and you end up creating people who hate you back. Why is that so hard to understand for some people? Why on earth do some people interpret that as a call for violence? None of it makes any sense.
by krrishd | 2025-09-14 06:58:40+00:00
This was also where I initially landed after finding out that the custom stablecoin could not leave my Bridge instance.

I think the role that crypto plays in enabling this is as a neutral, credible storage layer on which this token can be held, that is not my Postgres database as (eg.) Bridge - these tokens still are actual ERC-20s/etc that are present on-chain, as are the wallets that hold them -- but yeah, I'm:

- not sure how instrumental that actually is here

- not sure if that's just incidentally the easiest structure for Bridge, whose primary business revolves around facilitating payments via stablecoin (now, as a part of Stripe)
by zahlman | 2025-09-14 06:59:10+00:00
> And he made clear his belief that the purpose of arming that citizenry is to fight the police if they try to impose tyranny. "The Second Amendment is there, God forbid, so that you can defend yourself against a tyrannical government."

(emphasis mine)

Well, yes. Those are not "words that support killing people". You might as well say that countries that own nuclear weapons thereby demonstrate intent to eradicate life on Earth. The intended deterrence game theory is much the same.

> nobody controls who the citizens define as part of the "tyranny,"

This line of argumentation proves far too much. All definitions are subjective in this manner.

> But I don't agree with Kirk's philosophy on the purpose, origins, or nature of the Second Amendment.

To my understanding (I quickly searched up https://govfacts.org/history/the-history-behind-the-second-a... and by a quick read it seems to align with what I understood of the history) this is not simply "Kirk's philosophy", but something the Founders (and other political thinkers of the time) were explicit about.
by Llamamoe | 2025-09-14 06:59:29+00:00
> the solution might be to enable many areas of curation but in each domain the thing people see is the same for everyone.

Doesn't this already happen to some extent, with content being classified into advertiser-friendly bins and people's feeds being populated primarily by top content from within the bins the algorithm deems they have an interest in?

> Once you feel like it is not necessary to make your case, but just shout the loudest, you lose the ability to win over people who disagree because they don't like you shouting and you haven't made your case.

To some extent, this is how human communication always worked. I think the biggest problem is that the digital version of it is sufficiently different from the natural one, and sufficiently influenceable by popular and/or powerful actors, that it enables very pathological outcomes.
by jstimpfle | 2025-09-14 06:59:50+00:00
> For example, you can't specify a timeout when opening a file, reading from a file, or closing a file, which are all potentially blocking operations.

No they're not. Not really, unless you consider disk access and interacting with the page cache/inode cache inside the kernel to be blocking. But if you do that, you should probably also consider scheduling and really any CPU instruction to be blocking. (If the system is too loaded, anything can be slow).

To be fair, network requests can be considered non-blocking in a similar way, but they're depending on other systems that you generally can't control or inspect. In practice you'll see network timeouts. Note that you (at least normally -- there might be tricky exceptions) won't see EINTR from read() to a filesystem file. But you can see EINTR for network sockets. The difference is that, in Unix terminology, disks are not considered "slow devices".
by sublinear | 2025-09-14 07:00:00+00:00
> Maybe there's an unobvious way to make visual programming actually useful?

I'd think it would be finding the optimal parameters for an algorithm that is probably better expressed in another language.

Even though they are all Turing complete, any programming paradigm is biased towards solving certain kinds of problems.

It seems "visual programming" is biased towards the computationally irreducable[1]. This is a class of problem very sensitive to initial conditions. The chaotic behavior may eventually settle towards a stable state. So, the image of that stable state then encodes the parameters you'd want to use on the algorithm you wrote in another language.

That's not meant to be harsh. This gets directly to the heart of why we may want to write the same ideas in different ways even if those writings seem logically equivalent. One way is just easier to understand than the other depending on what part of the problem you're trying to tackle. These multiple writings are not redundant, but the facets necessary to more thoroughly explain a problem. In fact, upon closer inspection you'd find that what seems like the same algorithm written two different ways is actually not the same because they are executed differently.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_irreducibility
by EGreg | 2025-09-14 07:00:21+00:00
“At no cost”

Actually there is a lot of cost, in terms of bank reputation, loan underwriting, and finding consumers and businesses to lend to. There is an entire loan servicing department etc.

Banks are allowed to keep fractional reserves and lend out money they create out of thin air.

Stablecoins are not. (Hi, Terra Luna!) Stablecoin issuers like DAI even overcollateralized. That money is sitting there doing nothing. Enter… banks.

USDT rebuffed the EU’s push to get them to deposit into European banks. They prefer US treasuries (and the current admin is lucky they’re doing it because the treasuries are taking a dive… and some of them are even looking into forcing partners to buy US treasuries and issue stablecoins).

The GENIUS act requires stablecoin issuers essentially to keep 100% of the money in deposits and to work with US banks, and prop up the US treasuries and dollar.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/ninabambysheva/2025/05/06/why-s...

You see, originally, Tether (issuers of USDT, the original stablecoin) kept a lot of their collateral in Bitcoin, which was essentially creating an asset bubble / ponzi scheme where newly printed USDT propped up BTC and vice versa. But since the US government started running multi-trillion-dollar deficits every year, it has also become a ponzi scheme, just a sovereign-debt-based ponzi scheme.

That’s the real play here, for a country that’s $35 trillion in debt and needs to keep demand for its treasuries going… because printing money as UBI — to trickle up, get taxed and service the debt properly — just aint in its overton window. The link below goes over exactly how a UBI could solve multiple problems at once over a few decades (help cushion the demand shocks for human labor, help make taxes on pollution and fossil fuels popular, and help the government actually pay off its debt)… but since USA probably isn’t going to do this on a federal level, it might make sense to go bottom-up, town by town:

https://community.intercoin.app/t/ubi-is-not-socialism-but-i...
by Mikhail_Edoshin | 2025-09-14 07:01:13+00:00
Long time ago I considered myself atheistic. Then I noticed a strange thing: I liked Chesterton. (Or Graham Greene; also an open Catholic). Why? Why their writings appeared more profound than others'? I couldn't not answer it then, so I just noted that and kept reading. I guess it made me more open. A Buddhist would say it was a good karmic sign.
by makeitdouble | 2025-09-14 07:01:22+00:00
To wager a guess, would that optimization also help push the envelope when one application needs all the power it can get while another monitor is just sitting idle ?

Another angle I'm wondering about is longevity of the card. Not sure if AMD would positively care in the first place, but as a user if the card didn't have to grind much on the idle parts and thus last a year or two longer, it would be pretty valuable.
by xyzzy123 | 2025-09-14 07:02:39+00:00
As I understand it the idea is not necessarily to stop all dissent / awareness, but that it's useful to be able to slow the spread of "rumours" / incendiary information when it is spreading virally. This gives authorities time to come up with a response if required.

While I personally wouldn't want to live in a country which does this, the flip side of unrestricted virality in countries that culturally might not be prepared for it are events like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_WhatsApp_lynchings

Given that the US controls much of what happens on the Internet, another issue for many countries (not China so much) is that without controls they become extremely vulnerable to US influence campaigns and "colour revolutions".

I predict that all countries will end up with something like the GFW eventually because there's basically no other way for governments to achieve "Internet sovereignty" (enforce laws regarding users and publishers on the web). The US might be last to do this because it is in the doubly privileged position of a) being able to exert significant pressure on other countries and b) being able to apply regulation to major US-based Internet companies using their own legal system.