MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mdasen | 2025-10-31 22:53:03+00:00
I'd recommend watching this video: https://www.infoq.com/presentations/rust-2019/; and reading this: https://tokio.rs/blog/2020-04-preemption

I'm not the right person to write a tl;dr, but here goes.

For actors, you're basically talking about green threads. Rust had a hard constraint that calls to C not have overhead and so green threads were out. C is going to expect an actual stack so you have to basically spin up a real stack from your green-thread stack, call the C function, then translate it back. I think Erlang also does some magic where it will move things to a separate thread pool so that the C FFI can block without blocking the rest of your Erlang actors.

Generally, async/await has lower overhead because it gets compiled down to a state machine and event loop. Languages like Go and Erlang are great, but Rust is a systems programming language looking for zero cost abstractions rather than just "it's fast."

To some extent, you can trade overhead for ease. Garbage collectors are easy, but they come with overhead compared to Rust's borrow checker method or malloc/free.

To an extent it's about tradeoffs and what you're trying to make. Erlang and Go were trying to build something different where different tradeoffs made sense.

EDIT: I'd also note that before Go introduced preemption, it too would have "pitfalls". If a goroutine didn't trigger a stack reallocation (like function calls that would make it grow the stack) or do something that would yield (like blocking IO), it could starve other goroutines. Now Go does preemption checks so that the scheduler can interrupt hot loops. I think Erlang works somewhat similarly to Rust in scheduling in that its actors have a certain budget, every function call decrements their budget, and when they run of of budget they have to yield back to the scheduler.
by ChadNauseam | 2025-10-31 22:53:17+00:00
> (because we literally know how LLMs work) nothing related to consciousness or sentience or thought.

1. Do we literally know how LLMs work? We know how cars work and that's why an automotive engineer can tell you what every piece of a car does, what will happen if you modify it, and what it will do in untested scenarios. But if you ask an ML engineer what a weight (or neuron, or layer) in an LLM does, or what would happen if you fiddled with the values, or what it will do in an untested scenario, they won't be able to tell you.

2. We don't know how consciousness, sentience, or thought works. So it's not clear how we would confidently say any particular discovery is unrelated to them.
by roenxi | 2025-10-31 22:53:19+00:00
Well that is the question, isn't it. What qualities are passed on to their children? It is actually fairly common to see ideological continuity between parent and child (eg, most members of a religion had parents from that religion). So there is a case to be made that if you have a subgroup of society with unusually clear governing principles it makes sense to put them in change and have their children continue to be in charge because it has a chance of preserving the principles. In the optomistic case they can propagate for generations. That does actually appear to be what happens historically in successful countries where a hereditary or semi-hereditary ruling elite form with strong capabilities and shepherd everyone to success for a few generations before their abilities mean revert.

That being said it is comparatively a terrible way of doing things vs a more mathematically and psychologically sound system. Electing people really is the way to go, all these "stable" political systems are stable at being worse than just letting people vote for everything. As the saying goes, dead is stable. Stable isn't great if unstable means the capacity to rapidly improve.
by drdeca | 2025-10-31 22:54:03+00:00
They address that. The thing is that when they don’t fiddle with things, it (almost always) answers along the lines of “No, I don’t notice anything weird”, while when they do fiddle with things, it (substantially more often than when they don’t fiddle with it) answers along the lines of “Yes, I notice something weird. Specifically, I notice [description]”.

The key thing being that the yes/no comes before what it says it notices. If it weren’t for that, then yeah, the explanation you gave would cover it.
by meowface | 2025-10-31 22:54:52+00:00
This is very, very true. The best debunkers avoid being hostile and make the other side feel like they're being heard and that their feelings and fears are being validated. And they do it in a way that feels honest and not condescending and patronizing (like talking to a child). They make frequent (sincere) concessions and hedges and find as much common ground as they can.

Although he's more populist-left and I'm more establishment-liberal (and so I might find him a bit overly conciliatory with certain conspiracy theorists), Andrew Callaghan of Channel 5/All Gas No Brakes demonstrates a good example of this in the first few minutes of this video: https://youtu.be/QU6S3Cbpk-k?t=38
by Bender | 2025-10-31 22:55:08+00:00
What solutions could be implemented to prevent this cycle and ensure factual reliability and avoid biase?

I don't know about solutions but when enough companies put hard dependencies on 3rd party AI and that AI either starts crashing enough, getting slow enough, getting tainted by poisonous data enough or charging for priority access and even that starts getting slow then people will have to re-think those decisions and contemplate moving the functions in-house which is not a trivial decision.
by aurizon | 2025-10-31 22:55:55+00:00
This relic of the days of Kings/Queens/princes/dukes/Lords/Ladies has to be extinguished, root, branch and leaf. There are residues in many European countries as well, slowly fading to irrelevance. The current King should dissolve this system and abdicate and let the remnants shrivel. The UK 'House of Lords' = also gone. Create an elected second house with spread terms, like the USA has, with 6 years and 1/3rd every 2 years. USA has fixed lengths, first house 4 years for all, the senate 6 in 3 staggered pairs. Or something rational. In the UK/Canada/others, there is party discipline and party members vote as told be leader(except for free votes). This blocks buying votes, as happens in the USA and some, where an elected member is free to vote. This appears to 'let the people see', but it creates a fungible vote where a briber can see if the elected member voted as paid, yes illegal, but the word 'bagman' crops up a lot in politics. Paid lobbies need to be outlawed, however they are named\hidden
by elmerfud | 2025-10-31 22:56:04+00:00
What Trump says is not wrong, and because some local municipality has passed ignorant laws is not a reason to keep the penny around or to delay it's removal. Move fast break things I believe is the motto. But for being hacker news there seems to be a lot of stodgy people here when it comes to anything good that Trump wants to do. I suggest you go see what CPG Gray says about it to understand the real problem, which is the problem across lots of government.

Congress has the sole constitutional power to make money and set its value. What Congress did with this power was to abdicate it to the executive branch to determine the amounts thereof of the monies in circulation. So while you might want to scream "orange man is bad" which I do agree there has been several bad decisions, this one is because the absolute failure of Congress to do the job that it was empowered to do by the Constitution.

So put the blame we're blame exists. You get to re-elect a massive portion of those congressmen every two years. So you don't have to wait for the "bad orange man" to leave office. Most of what people cry about that Trump is doing is actually because all they seem to focus on is the president and never about the Congress which has abdicated its power in many places to the executive branch. Because Congress seems to have its sole focus on getting reelected and not actually managing the portions of government that they were empowered to do by the Constitution.
by zbentley | 2025-10-31 22:56:39+00:00
Why would attitudes change? The impact is diffused across a wide enough populace (precisely because ecosystems with weak community norms around dependency security are extremely popular) that the rate of “shaping up in response to a painful lesson” may remain lower than the rate of newcomers joining the community or the rate of new insecure dependencies proliferating to serve new needs brought about by new use cases brought about by growing popularity of a platform.

That’s not to say it’s hopeless. Rather, it’s more likely that widespread improvement will need to be centrally orchestrated rather than organic in response to hacks.
by ben_w | 2025-10-31 22:57:07+00:00
> https://youtu.be/h0z7rVP2glk

To quote the video description:

“Silenced” is a documentary that was originally made by Tommy Robinson."

You want to treat a video created and edited by the person who lost a libel case in this specific matter, as a valid source of truth about the matters of fact in this specific matter? Where the film itself constitutes a contempt of court for repeating a libel he had been found guilty of, resulting in him being sentenced to 18 months in prison?

That is the "evidence" you bring?

I wouldn't even trust that any video meeting this description accurately represents the views of someone who is literally filmed speaking in it.

To quote another source:

But the founder of the English Defence League has been told he will face legal action after reposting a screenshot of a message from a mother claiming the youngster had bullied her daughter. The mother later posted a message on Robinson’s page denying it was Jamal who had attacked her daughter.

- https://web.archive.org/web/20181202204147/https://www.indep...

> Good. Why aren’t you?

The assorted list of crimes I just gave you, some of which threatened to set some rapists free without conviction.

Also some others I didn't mention, like libelling a journalist's partner by calling them a paedophile, something he later admitted was false. The journalist got this treatment from him after she had asked for his comment for a story she was writing about allegations that he had misused financial donations from his supporters. You know, silencing journalism, just like he accused the judicial system of doing, except he admitted using dishonesty to try to get silence, and was also seen to be dishonest with the libellous statements.

Anyway, here's what he and his former associates have to say on the matter of misused donations: https://web.archive.org/web/20210317214553/https://www.indep...

Lots of examples of him being less than honest — mortgage fraud, using someone else's passport, listing "Ireland" on his Irish passport — so why do you trust his take on anything?
by ajross | 2025-10-31 22:57:14+00:00
> that is like skim reading or basic introductions

No? How do you learn stuff you don't know? Are you really telling me you enroll in a graduate course or buy a textbook for everyone one?

Like, can you give an example of a "deep dive" research project of yours that does not begin with an encyclopedia-style treatment? And then, maybe, check the Wikipedia page to see if it's actually worse than whatever you picked?

Again, true domain experts are going to read domain journals and consult their peers in the domain for access to deep information.[1] But until you get there, you need somewhere you can go that you know is a good starting point. And arguments that that place is somehow not https://wikipedia.org/ seem... well, strained beyond credibility.

[1] Though even then domains are really broad these days and people tend to use Wikipedia even for their day jobs. Lord knows I do.
by DennisP | 2025-10-31 22:58:25+00:00
This is just about seeing whether the model can accurately report on its internal reasoning process. If so, that could help make models more reliable.

They say it doesn't have that much to do with the kind of consciousness you're talking about:

> One distinction that is commonly made in the philosophical literature is the idea of “phenomenal consciousness,” referring to raw subjective experience, and “access consciousness,” the set of information that is available to the brain for use in reasoning, verbal report, and deliberate decision-making. Phenomenal consciousness is the form of consciousness most commonly considered relevant to moral status, and its relationship to access consciousness is a disputed philosophical question. Our experiments do not directly speak to the question of phenomenal consciousness. They could be interpreted to suggest a rudimentary form of access consciousness in language models. However, even this is unclear.
by strgcmc | 2025-10-31 22:58:48+00:00
I got curious and validated your source [1], to pull the exact quote:

"The proportion of Connecticut gambling revenue from the 1.8% of people with gambling problems ranges from 12.4% for lottery products to 51.0% for sports betting, and is 21.5% for all legalized gambling."

Without going into details, I do have some ability to check if these numbers actually "make sense" against real operator data. Will try to sense-check if the data I have access to, roughly aligns with this or not.

- the "1.8% of people" being problem gamblers does seem roughly correct, per my own experience

- but those same 1.8% being responsible for 51% of sportsbook revenue, does not align with my intuition (which could be wrong! hence why I want to check further...)

- it is absolutely true that sportsbooks have whales/VIPs/whatever-you-call-them, and the general business model is indeed one of those shapes where <10% of the customers account for >50% of the revenue (using very round imprecise numbers), but I still don't think you can attribute 51% to purely the "problem gamblers" (unless you're using a non-standard definition of problem-gambler maybe?)
by cyberax | 2025-10-31 23:00:26+00:00
This "attack" is not even theoretical. Android apps can just download arbitrary binary code, mprotect(PROT_MAYEXEC) some area in RAM, link the code there, and run it.

Google will simply revoke the keys for the "loader" APK. But that's fine for malware, its authors will just use the next stolen credit card to register a new account.

That's also why this has nothing to do with security.
by LastTrain | 2025-10-31 23:00:53+00:00
That's how Wikipedia works. People can edit it. People who are members of organizations can edit it. The edits are transparent, and the history is preserved. It is open to anyone. It is like you're saying the whole world is biased and stacked against your point of view. The example you provide doesn't suggest any kind of centralized control or gatekeeping at all. Just some interested parties trying vying to contribute to articles that are of interest to them. What if I told you a single person, soon to be a trillionaire, would like to replace it with one he controls himself. Why wouldn't that bother you more? Honestly perplexed.
by stocksinsmocks | 2025-10-31 23:01:45+00:00
I would entertain the possibility that there are at least some who cannot or will not avoid that kind of destructive behavior. The only thing you can do for them is deny access. I know that nobody asked for a lecture on 12 step, but number one is an admission that you do not have control.

Do you enable the majority who can manage risk, knowing some will be destroyed by it or deny it to everyone to protect the minority who can’t?
by meowface | 2025-10-31 23:01:47+00:00
>And again, trying to change people's minds by telling them what they believe is wrong is a fools errand (99.99% of the time). But it still needs to happen as that misinformation should not go unchallenged.

It's a trite point and I ended up repeating it before seeing your post but this really is very true even if it may not seem like it. On one hand the practice is basically futile. But someone absolutely needs to do it. People need to do it. The ecosystem can't only ever contain the false narratives, because that leads to an even worse situation. "Here's why Holocaust denialism is incorrect and why the 271k number is wrong" is essentially pointless, per Sartre, but it's better for neo-Nazis to be exposed to that rather than "one should never even humor Holocaust denialists".
by drekipus | 2025-10-31 23:01:58+00:00
The first thing I thought about as reading this: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"

We have a big "cost of living" concern in Australia, and it's very ripe to gaming the system through things like energy bill handouts.

I can only talk from the Australian perspective, but I think there's certain elements set up like a Ponzi scheme, and we'll need to correct it and stick to fundamentals, and that is going to break quite a few eggs.
by wlindley | 2025-10-31 23:01:58+00:00
The original IBM PC could be purchased either with 160KB/180KB single-sided floppy drives, or the 320KB/360KB double-sided. Some early IBM PC users still needed the "flippy" trick!

See IBM advert, https://archive.org/details/eu_BYTE-1983-10_OCR/page/n111/mo...
by hydrogen7800 | 2025-10-31 23:02:04+00:00
I always thought this was unnecessarily made to sound counterintuitive, and I think there is a way to explain it simply without trying to make it sound like rocket science.

Instead of "speed up to slow down", it's "speed up to go higher". I think anyone can get on board with that. You'll come back to the same point you were when you accelerated, but later than before since you went into a higher orbit.

I like the included animations, since it also makes it clear that accelerating or decelerating from a circular orbit makes it elliptical. Your don't just jump to a higher or lower circular orbit.
by zahlman | 2025-10-31 23:02:10+00:00
As an end user: I chose my web browser. I know how things tend to look in it. I know that this is not the same as how they look by default in other browsers. I do not care. I actively want it the widgets to look familiar, because that means I can readily parse the UI, and don't have to think about your design.

I actively do not want you to even try to "make it look the same everywhere", because the way you want it to look will in general be a way that degrades functionality for me. When you try, you send the message that you know better than me about how I want the GUI on my computer to work; and that makes me less inclined to use your site, and thus your product.
by CiscoCodex | 2025-10-31 23:02:12+00:00
Ugh, I might just be adding to the frustration here. But honestly I don’t understand why we’re not talking about how bad partisan politics is. It baffles my mind that we agreed a total population percentage of about 0.00015609% will choose our countries fate. I get that higher numbers don’t necessarily translate to efficiency, but California Republicans aren’t the same as Massachusetts Republicans and the same goes to Democrats.
by janalsncm | 2025-10-31 23:02:13+00:00
The answer is there’s already a doctor shortage, and the US simply does not have the capacity to effectively 2x the doctor-patient ratio.

Doctors are also unlikely to want a 50% pay cut in exchange for shorter hours. They aren’t directly exposed to the risk caused by fatigue since they will have malpractice insurance. Therefore the safer method of care would be simply too expensive, and doctors wouldn’t see an upside.

Part of the shortage is a result of artificially constrained supply as there aren’t enough med school seats to keep up with demand.
by alphazard | 2025-10-31 23:02:23+00:00
Polymarket is not even close to the same thing. Sports betting allows a blessed few corporations to run rigged markets and intentionally prevent price discovery by keeping the smart money out.

Polymarket uses open orderbooks where you match against someone else who wants the other side of the trade just like the stock market. Prices are set by the market, as they should be.
by abejfehr | 2025-10-31 23:02:29+00:00
I might be silly but I don’t get the point being made there.

I believe due process is important in every case, and I want to believe that having a mixed system eventually results in due process being skipped more and more, but the example from the end of the article goes against that: England and France diverged, so it’s possible for a mixed system to go either way?
by lostlogin | 2025-10-31 23:02:34+00:00
Are you talking about a specific example or a hypothetical?

I’m referring to the House of Lords. They are affiliated with political parties.

In terms of them not being swayed by ‘movements of the moment’, you are quite right. They are stuck in the past. 6% aren’t white. 26% are female.

https://www.democraticaudit.com/2018/10/02/audit2018-how-und...
by Retric | 2025-10-31 23:02:37+00:00
> They're serving files to every IP address (no matter what machine is attached to it) that is capable of opening a socket and sending GET.

Legally in the US a “public” web server can have any set of usage restrictions it feels like even without a login screen. Private property doesn’t automatically give permission to do anything even if there happens to be a driveway from the public road into the middle of it.

The law cars about authorized access not the specific technical implementation of access. Which has caused serious legal trouble for many people when they make seemingly reasonable assumptions that say access to someURL/A12.jpg also gives them permission to someURL/A13.jpg etc.
by asdff | 2025-10-31 23:02:43+00:00
I feel like it only became rampant in recent years. As a 90s kid no one cared about the card packs. We all assumed they'd be junk cards and a waste of $7 or whatever. No, the move for card people back then was to wait for the card show and just buy the cards you actually want from a card dealer.

The thing is now people are marketing the pack opening. You have social media accounts of them pulling cards from packs and getting all hyped up about it. Again no one thought that was fun in the 90s, everyone hated that aspect of cards in the 90s but thats because the unboxing as an experience wasn't marketed by anyone at all. People just wanted cards they thought were personally cool in some way.

And likewise expansion of markets in the internet era means people start to have shared values of what is a valuable card based on market price vs just being interested in some certain cards out of your own interest.
by avidiax | 2025-10-31 23:02:51+00:00
It's also about revenue.

Uber could run the complete global rider/driver flow from a single server.

It doesn't, in part because all of those individual trips earn $1 or more each, so it's perfectly acceptable to the business to be more more inefficient and use hundreds of servers for this task.

Similarly, a small website taking 150ms to render the page only matters if the lost productivity costs less than the engineering time to fix it, and even then, only makes sense if that engineering time isn't more productively used to add features or reliability.