MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sojournerc | 2025-10-21 16:57:06+00:00
Ok, we're 100% aligning. I was taking care of myself, because I was on the way to bad burnout, and wasn't delivering what I had during the "honeymoon" with that company. Despite feeling like a lynchpin in the organization, I was blindsided by a layoff. Now I'm a professional woodworker and don't give a shit about any of that anymore. Cheers!
by fabian2k | 2025-10-21 16:57:19+00:00
The system is a whole bunch of people from different parties being present when votes are collected and counted. And with paper ballots you need to do the fraud in many different polling stations.

It is possible to do small-scale fraud with paper ballots, you can never fully eliminate that option. But it is exceedingly hard to do larger scale fraud without it being extremely obvious to any observer.
by teddyh | 2025-10-21 16:57:22+00:00
No. Public trust demands no software or programmable hardware in the election process.

• Why Electronic Voting is a BAD Idea <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI>

• Why Electronic Voting Is Still A Bad Idea <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs>
by Foden23 | 2025-10-21 16:57:53+00:00
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by iamnothere | 2025-10-21 16:57:57+00:00
I would be more surprised if these employers didn’t target their employees to prevent leaks of trade secrets, union activity, or other internal dissent. Having the power would be too tempting to resist, and besides, there is some degree of legitimate concern; it would be easy enough for rogue employees to sell exploits on the side for millions (there are plenty of buyers).

Another reason not to work at places like this.
by zackmorris | 2025-10-21 16:57:59+00:00
I did a quick search for "smallest C virtual machine" and found this 16 opcode implementation in 125 lines of C:

https://www.andreinc.net/2021/12/01/writing-a-simple-vm-in-l...

Discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29492183

I'm looking for small VMs like this to run sandboxed experiments and test just-in-time (JIT) compilers so that I can explore things like converting abstract syntax trees (AST) between languages and prefix/infix/postfix notation, if anyone has any favorites.

Bonus points for supporting advanced concepts like atomic operations for concurrency.
by vacuity | 2025-10-21 16:58:06+00:00
The trend of multicore and NUMA means that hardware increasingly looks like a traditional network of many separate computers. The natural conclusions of single-core scaled up to, say, 4 cores, shift when there are 8+ cores. Locality becomes crucial; just as you wouldn't split up data-path dependencies across LANs, you shouldn't split them up across NUMA sockets either. Ignoring arguments about locking, message passing, cache management, and whatever, the most pressing argument for multikernels (or at least, far increased per-core state and reduced shared state) is that locality is essential for performance.
by mentalgear | 2025-10-21 16:58:24+00:00
Certainly not the best, just the most practical / commercially sell-able. And once a pattern, like LLM text embedding is established as the way to "AGI", it takes years for other more realistic approaches to gain funding again. Gary Marcus wrote about this extensively how legitimate AGI research is actually being put back years due to the LLM superficial AGI hype.
by Sohcahtoa82 | 2025-10-21 16:58:33+00:00
> Maybe they'll have to tour and meet people in person

That doesn't scale.

During campaign season, they're already running as many rallies as they can. Outside the campaign train, smaller Town Hall events only reach what, a couple hundred people, tops? And at best, they might change the minds of a couple dozen people.

EDIT: It's also worth mentioning that people generally don't seek to have their mind changed. Someone who is planning on voting for one candidate is extremely unlikely to go to a rally for the opposition.
by furyofantares | 2025-10-21 16:58:38+00:00
> It seems true that no company has used frontier models to create a product with business value commensurate with the cost it takes to train and run them.

Anthropic has said that every model they've trained has been profitable. Just not profitable enough to pay to train the next model.

I bet that's true for OpenAI's LLMs too, or would be if they reduced their free tier limits.
by overvale | 2025-10-21 16:58:42+00:00
Other people have said this, but I don’t think it’s going to be any different than living in a world where people can spread rumors orally or print lies with a printing press. We’ve been dealing with those challenges for a long time.

Our ways of thinking and our courts understand that you can’t trust what people say and you can’t trust what you read. We’ve internalized that as a society.

Looking back, there seems to have been a brief period of time when you could actually trust photographs and videos. I think in the long run, this period of time will be seen as a historical anomaly, and video will be no more trusted than the printed or spoken word is today.
by FloorEgg | 2025-10-21 16:58:43+00:00
On some level they know that LLMs alone won't lead to AGI so they have to take a shotgun approach to diversify, and also because integrating some parts of all these paths is more likely to lead to the outcome they want than going all in on one.

Also because they have the funding to do it.

Reminds me a bit of the early Google days, Microsoft, Xerox, etc,

This is just what the teenage stage of the top tech startup/company in an important new category looks like.
by kbos87 | 2025-10-21 16:58:48+00:00
I could see Sora having a significant negative impact on short form video products like TikTok if they don’t quickly and accurately find a way to categorize its use. A steady stream of AI generated video content hurts the value prop of short form video in more than one way… It quickly desensitizes you and takes the surprise out that drives consumption of a lot of content. It also of course leaves you feeling like you can’t trust anything you see.
by shadowgovt | 2025-10-21 16:58:51+00:00
Ironically, that results in worse count accuracy.

Humans are actually quite bad at hand-tallying hundreds of millions of datapoints. Our eyes go glassy but we press on anyway.

Machines are very good at doing that kind of tedious labor accurately.

Whether human beings will put more trust in a system that we know will be wrong, but it's wrong for comfortable meat reasons, over a system that might be compromised but will be more accurate its more of a psychology question than a technical question though.
by _fat_santa | 2025-10-21 16:59:29+00:00
> Another downside is that the seller might install spyware on your machine

At least in my case it came without a hard drive so there was no vector for attack there. Sure they might have installed spyware at the BIOS level though the practical chance of that happening from a seller that does any sort of volume is more unlikely than winning the lottery IMHO.

Sellers (especially volume sellers) just want to ship you your stuff and make a buck off the margin.
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-10-21 16:59:34+00:00
> It sounds like you're conflating legal arguments with moral ones. You're saying animals lack rights so it's morally okay to enslave/make use of them?

I am not conflating moral and legal arguments, though the legal is a determination of the moral (contra something stupid and tyrannical like legal positivism). Genuine law is not arbitrary or established by fiat. There are general moral principles, and the law plays a role in determining their particular, contingent application in a circumscribed and prudential manner within the given circumstances. That is why an unjust law is not a real law and why within one jurisdiction something may be legitimately legal while it is legitimately illegal in another.

So I'm not sure how you arrived at that conclusion.

As for enslaving animals, I would reject that it is possible to enslave non-human animals as a matter of metaphysical fact. Non-human animals can be held in captivity or employed for labor, but this is not slavery. To be enslaved presupposes the properties I explained. However, the absence of rights does not mean a right to do whatever you please with animals. It is immoral to torment or to abuse an animal, even if the animal doesn't have rights in this regard.

> I'd argue it's much baser than that. Animals have feelings and often feel very bad when kept in enslaved conditions. Since humans can understand the pain they inflict on enslaved animals, then it's wrong of us to continue enslaving them when we have alternatives that are just as healthy for us, if not more healthy.

We have to make distinctions here. First, one I already used above, is the distinction between rights and morality. That is, the absence of a right does not entail a total absence of moral constraints or considerations in the relevant respect. I have no problem with criticisms of the contingent and particular conditions of, say, factory farming. I would agree that conditions in which animal welfare is better is preferable, but on moral grounds and by prioritizing human good. But these are matters of prudence, not principle. Whereas it is intrinsically evil to employ people in chattel slavery[0], it is not intrinsically evil to hold animals in captivity or to use them for labor.

> I would also say your assumption that pigs do not comprehend their actions and cannot choose between alternatives is false.

Okay, and I would disagree with you - it is an inference, not an assumption on my part - because pigs lack the kind of language that entails the kind of intentionality that would make rationality possible (which is what understanding presupposes), something free choice presupposes. That is, they "choose" based on sense impressions and appetite (in the broad sense of the term).

[0] Emphasis on chattel. Some forms of servitude are not immoral.
by fragmede | 2025-10-21 16:59:39+00:00
If you're asking for AI hype, promises that haven't come to pass and may not ever, but proponents want you to believe (I mean, I want to believe, the question is if it's a rational belief or not), I can give you some. AI could lead to scientific advancements and make fusion reactors on Earth feasible. (We have one in the sky already, it's just 1 AU away.) With AI enabling fusion, (because controlling the magnetic fields is beyond what humans can do), we get cheap energy. Cheap energy means electrolysis is feasible, making water cheaper. AI robots to farm the fields means land that was previously uneconomical to farm on becomes usable. More arable land means more crops can be grown. Food is already cheap as hell though, farmers don't make a good living in the global economy. Shelter, unfortunately, is a political problem. We have the technology to build more housing right fucking now. China has a glut of housing. Blame the NIMBYs for your housing cost. But AI, in the form of a machine that fills out the paperwork required to build, faster and cheaper will help. Especially in the case of nuclear power plant permits. AI, in the form of helping to generate architectural models of your home that you get 3d printed is also a thing.

But that's all a bunch of hype that may never come to pass. Some people don't want to hear any hype. Hoping is too much to take if you've been let down too hard before. Or for the rich and you're poor. It's there though, if you want to dream. Dream big.
by catapart | 2025-10-21 16:59:46+00:00
Good UX is not about reducing complexity, nor is it about hiding complexity. It's about surfacing the exact utility a user needs in the exact context they are best suited to understand each of its inputs entirely (with the least friction in generating those inputs for the user). It's very hard to do. So much so that describing 'what is wrong' with a UX would be almost as burdensome as just designing a better UX. So I'm not going to tell you what is wrong with it; you KNOW what is wrong with it. It could be better. That you can't specify as to how just means that you aren't currently undertaking the complicated process of redesigning it. It doesn't mean you don't know good UX from bad UX.

Now, all of that aside, I do like Handbrake and I do think it offers a ton of functionality with so little friction that it's one of my very favorite and most-used apps. No login, no project setup, no x, no y, no z. Just a thin wrapper around a badass command line utility, with tons of options for users to override, and sensible defaults. There's a lot to love about Handbrake!

But "my grandma can use it", or "a plumber can use it", or "a person who doesn't understand the technicals and just needs to do one stupid thing that the app can definitely do, can use it" are signs of good UX. You wouldn't say any of those things about Handbrake.
by uecker | 2025-10-21 17:00:04+00:00
You can copy the binary on a different system before installing it, or compute the hash before you run it. This is not hard. And even if you are not copying to another system, the attacker needs to find all copies of the binary and modify them. Also note that the installer binary / script is not the same as the binary that later runs. And any additional effort the attacker has to do to hide its tracks also increases chances for detection, this is also something that can be learned from XZ backdoor.
by kelnos | 2025-10-21 17:00:13+00:00
These kinds of comments always annoy me a bit. It's 2025. 155,238,302 people voted in the most recent US presidential election. It is entirely silly that we expect people to manually count that many ballots in this day and age. And count them without errors! (And yes, we can make those paper ballots machine-readable, but you still need software to count them.)

Yes, I know: before computers and other mechanical systems, people had to count ballots by hand. There were many fewer people voting then, and regardless, that's not really the point: they counted by hand because they had no alternative.

Electronic voting certainly brings new problems into the mix. I don't think those problems are insurmountable. The problem isn't the technology itself. It's the legal and social landscape around voting technology. Open source, with reproducible builds and a method to verify that the code running on a machine was built from a particular version of source, is a start. Verification of that software's functionality, on par with the verification done of critical software (medical devices, things that go into space, slot machines, etc.) would be another good move.

Voters can also receive paper receipts, and I'm sure we can come up with some sort of scheme to take a representative sample of the electronically-recorded votes and validate them against the paper receipts, while maintaining voter privacy.
by truelson | 2025-10-21 17:00:14+00:00
We are having a huge amount of technological change (we haven't even learned how to handle social media as a society yet...). We're experiencing a global loss in trust, and things may fall apart for a bit until our society develops a better immune system to such ills. It is scary.

I think we may revert back to trusting only smaller groups of people, being skeptical of anything outside that group, becoming a bit more tribal. I hope without too many deleterious effects, but a lot could happen.

But humans, as a species, are survivors. And we, with our thinking machines will figure out ultimately how to deal with it all. I just hope the pain of this transition is not catastrophic.
by dloss | 2025-10-21 17:00:19+00:00
Anthropic recently released a sandboxing tool based on bubblewrap (Linux, quite lightweight) and sandbox-exec (macOS). https://github.com/anthropic-experimental/sandbox-runtime

I wonder if nsjails or gVisor may be useful as well. Here's a more comprehensive list of sandboxing solutions: https://github.com/restyler/awesome-sandbox
by jimbo808 | 2025-10-21 17:00:26+00:00
If someone averages only the guesses from this subset, they’re ignoring the conditional selection effect, that the dataset (the set of guesses) is biased by the very act of being willing to guess. So the "average of guesses" doesn't represent the true expert population, and ignores the conditional selection effect.

There's also just the reality that most of these experts have a lot of skin in the game, and there's lots of pressure in this world to a true believer, so I'm not going to buy into it too much.
by BeetleB | 2025-10-21 17:00:32+00:00
My first engineering job was non-SW, and had a lot of manual work. I automated a lot of it.

Yes, it led to more work. What would take half a day could now be done in an hour. So we now had to produce 4x more.

I spent 4 years there automating left and right. Everyone silently hated me. One of the problems with my automation was that it allowed for more and more Q/A. And the more you check for quality issues, the more issues you'll find. Suddenly we needed to achieve 4x more, and that meant finding 4x more problems. The thing about automation is that it doesn't speed up debugging time. This leads to more stress.

One senior guy took me aside and said management would not reward me for my efforts, but will get the benefit of all my work.

He was right.

Eventually, I left because I automate things to make my life easier. If it's not making my life easier (or getting me more money), why should I do it?

Since then, whenever I get a new job, I test the waters. If the outcome is like that first job, I stop working on process improvements, and look for another job.
by lern_too_spel | 2025-10-21 17:00:35+00:00
It's not a pump and dump. It's a one-time sell-off of Trump Coins sold by the various Trump-affiliates organizations to companies in China that wanted to be excluded from tariffs and regulations and individuals who wanted to get Trump's ear at a dinner. It's a bribe. The secondary market value of the coins is exactly 0 because that money isn't going to Trump.
by gdulli | 2025-10-21 17:00:36+00:00
> A company that still believes that its technology was imminently going to run large swathes of the economy, and would be so powerful as to reconfigure our experience of the world as we know it, wouldn’t be seeking to make a quick buck selling ads against deep fake videos of historical figures wrestling.

But also, a company that earnestly believes that it's about to disrupt most labor is going to want to grab as many of those bucks as possible before people no longer have income.
by nothrabannosir | 2025-10-21 17:01:00+00:00
> Finally, people don't really care about the truth.

That same link has two “reader notes” about truth.

The lie is half way around the world etc, but that can also be explained by people’s short term instincts and reaction to outrage. It’s not mutually exclusive with caring about truth.

Maybe I’m being uncharitable — did you mean something like “people don’t care about truth enough to let it stop them from giving into outrage”? Or..?
by rottencupcakes | 2025-10-21 17:01:01+00:00
This isn't perscription drugs, this is information?

To answer your question directly I don't have strong feelings about it. I would prefer if they were freely accessible, other than maybe things like antibiotics that have clear externalities.

I'm okay with insurance companies saying they won't pay for them unless a doctor writes a script, but to gate keep relatively harmless drugs the way we do isn't my favorite policy. There are many times I would love to get a drug but don't want to talk to a doctor about it. This is one of the reasons companies like KHealth exist - they're just rent seeking on a silly system. You can get anything you want, you just have to jump through hoops, but all those hoops just make doctors richer and health care cost more.
by PaulHoule | 2025-10-21 17:01:09+00:00
The Z-80 was one of the best compiler targets of that age, but the 8086 was even better. Everyone was amazed at the very fast Turbo Pascal compiler for the Z-80 that got ported to 8086. I had an 80286 computer and Turbo Pascal was my favorite programming language because the compiler was fast, execution was fast, and the language was extended enough that you could do most systems and applications programming in Pascal -- you could easily link assembly language procedures such as replacements for the stdlib zero and copy routines that took advantage of new instructions and wider paths to 2x those functions.
by csallen | 2025-10-21 17:01:53+00:00
People have been tricked by counterfeits ever since the invention of writing (or even drawing) first made it possible for a person to communicate without being physically present.

At that moment, it simultaneously became possible to create "deep fakes" by simply forging a signature and tricking readers as to who authored the information.

And even before that, just with speaking, it was already possible to spread lies and misinformation, and such things happened frequently, often with disastrous consequences. Just think of all the witch hunts, false religions, and false rumors that have been spread through the history of mankind.

All of this is to say that mankind is quite used to dealing with information that has questionable authorship, authenticity, or accuracy. And mankind is quite used to suffering as a result of these challenges. It's nothing particularly new that it's moving into a new media format (video), especially considering that this is a relatively new format in the history of mankind to begin with.

(FWIW, the best defense against deep fakes has always been to pay attention to the source of information rather than just the content. A video about XYZ coming from XYZ's social media account is more likely to be accurate than if it comes from elsewhere. An article in the NYTimes that you read in the NYTimes is more likely to be authentic than a screenshot of an article you read from some social media account. Etc. It's not a perfect measure -- nothing is -- but I'd say it's the main reason we can have trust despite thousands of years of deep fakes.)

IMO the fact that social media -- and the internet in general -- have decentralized media while also decoupling it from geography is less precedented and more worrisome.