MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by skippyboxedhero | 2026-01-19 00:14:12+00:00
No, they don't. If you have a line that is beatable, that line has been open for a long time, and you have informed people profiting from that line, it will usually not move. People who have information will disguise their flow, they won't bet with places that will move the line against them when they bet (if you bet this with Pinnacle, for example, they will work out you are beating their line immediately, they have quants who can work out how you are beating their line, and you have permanently destroyed your edge) so you put money down at soft book somehow and they will likely not move line against you...meaning the line doesn't move.

Again, it is fairly common assumption that people make that it must be noise traders who are incentivizing syndicates. This is the case at open but not after, and there is a significant distinction between noise traders and noise traders through retail books. Retail books do not set the lines, they do not post lines early to syndicates, their product is completely different. There is literally no incentive for accurate prediction because the economic gain from noise trading does not accrue to anyone who has information. 95% accrues to firms with the greatest marketing advantage, again...this is entertainment, it is not about accurate prediction, you are misunderstanding at a very fundamental level what is going on here. It is like going to see the Minecraft Movie and thinking this is artistic expression on the level of Tokyo Story.

This would all be different if there were real markets underpinned by economic demand for this risk but there isn't. This is why Betfair failed. This is why these "prices" you see aren't actually real prices.
by rafram | 2026-01-19 00:14:16+00:00
Have you actually accounted for all the services you’re receiving from the government? Road construction and maintenance, schools, availability of clean water, safe aviation, trustworthy financial markets, public universities, funding for research that improves your health and happiness, and so on? I don’t think you can even really put a price on most of those, because they simply could not exist without a centralized system funded by taxes.
by gpm | 2026-01-19 00:15:01+00:00
If the prediction market is for a non-trivial amount, it's likely someone is going to kill you in exchange for the money the prediction market offered them. The prediction market isn't acting as a prophet here, it's acting as a plausibly deniable murder for hire service and you are its victim.

The people "betting against" you dying just paid to have you killed.
by vessenes | 2026-01-19 00:17:02+00:00
Very minor nit -- crew could be a person also - in fact that's how you're supposed to hack on a codebase in gas town directly - add yourself as crew.

Other than that, this is a helpful list especially for someone who hasn't been hacking around on this thing as it's in rapid development mode. I find gas town super interesting, and tantalizingly close to being amazingly useful. That said, I wouldn't mind a slightly less 'flavored' set of names for workers.
by pcthrowaway | 2026-01-19 00:17:14+00:00
In theory it should be possible to allow users to upload ciphertext that they can then share a decryption key with their intended audience. I believe atproto has dissuaded against this with the argument that ciphertext shouldn't be in public view, but this seems to hinge on the idea that the cipher is insecure, or will be in the future. I don't see why using a post-quantum encryption scheme shouldn't provide the appropriate security, which may still not be foolproof, but it certainly would make indexing the data much more difficult
by teaearlgraycold | 2026-01-19 00:17:51+00:00
I looked at the source. It seems most of the code is not included in the GitHub repo, which itself contains a bit of JS glue. The .tgz uploaded to npm has various prebuilt binaries. Can I take a look at the rust code?

I'm not trying to imply LLMs aren't useful. I just want more info from GP so that I can evaluate their claims.
by darhodester | 2026-01-19 00:18:21+00:00
There's a ton of fun tricks you can perform with Gaussian splatting!

You're right that you can intentionally under-construct your scenes. These can create a dream-like effect.

It's also possible to stylize your Gaussian splats to produce NPR effects. Check out David Lisser's amazing work: https://davidlisser.co.uk/Surface-Tension.

Additionally, you can intentionally introduce view-dependent ghosting artifacts. In other words, if you take images from a certain angle that contain an object, and remove that object for other views, it can produce a lenticular/holographic effect.
by tptacek | 2026-01-19 00:18:54+00:00
HN is a common law system; the real guidelines are the guidelines page itself, and the "jurisprudence" of years and years of Dan (and Tom) writing moderator comments. But you also know you're a little off the rails when you've derived a rule that would prohibit, say, criticism of a book --- "Teach Yourself C In 24 Hours is a bad book". Of course that's OK!

But yeah, the big thing here is that the substance of my critique is on a different thread. It's disfavored to retype things you can just link to. I'd be irritated with me too if I just said "CATB is bad!" and left it at that.
by PlatoIsADisease | 2026-01-19 00:19:34+00:00
Read Wittgenstein and maybe finish pragmatism.

There is a reason not even Continentals use ancient thoughts anymore.

But at least read Wittgenstein.

If you want a complete destruction of ancients and pre 1800s thought, Rorty has Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Its incredibly boring and teaches you nothing except that these ancients having incorrect understanding of language, psychology, and metaphysics, caused them to make grave mistakes.
by CPLX | 2026-01-19 00:19:48+00:00
> I'm trying to understand what the criticism is here

> If I knew someone wanted me dead, of course I would want a prediction market on it, and if the odds suddenly shifted dramatically in favor of my death

No, you definitely would not want that. You don't want to live in the world like this. That's the point.

It's fucking horrible and dystopian, people betting on extra-legal invasions of countries, murders, things that could hurt or harm people where they have incentives to do something else that you've just distorted.

Gambling has been illegal, immoral, and proscribed by religions for literally thousands of years, in all sorts of different forms and iterations, for a reason. Because it's incredibly toxic to society.

You can make some arguments that pure games of chance, like casino games, and even maybe sports betting (since sports is a spectacle) aren't that bad. Based on what we've seen recently, I tend to disagree, but at least it's an argument.

But now we're talking about betting on all sorts of political issues, things that are illegal, things where people are acting in an official capacity and shouldn't be given incentives to subvert that. And all these other examples are just bad. There's not really any upside to this at all. It's just bad for society and it shouldn't happen. It's horrible.

If you feel like you're missing a big piece of the puzzle you should take a couple of steps back and think about the consequences of a world where this is common.
by nosuchthing | 2026-01-19 00:20:44+00:00
CC-PP is disproven directly from Elinor Ostrom's research studies in her book "Governing the Commons".

Elinor literally won a Nobel Prize for disproving the tragedy of the commons.

> It was long unanimously held among economists that natural resources that were collectively used by their users would be over-exploited and destroyed in the long-term. Elinor Ostrom disproved this idea by conducting field studies on how people in small, local communities manage shared natural resources, such as pastures, fishing waters, and forests. She showed that when natural resources are jointly used by their users, in time, rules are established for how these are to be cared for and used in a way that is both economically and ecologically sustainable.

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2009/ost...

https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2018/06/ostrom_lecture.pd...

> Ostrom showed that many real-world “commons dilemmas” are not fixed one-shot prisoner’s dilemmas but repeated interactions where people can communicate, build trust, and design rules, impose retaliation to rule breakers, and redefine the rules of the underlying game structure as time goes on.
by zahlman | 2026-01-19 00:20:53+00:00
Unix gave the world a lot of good ideas about architecture, but I think it really hamstrung itself by treating all the data as plain text and resisting the idea of having any kind of structured, formatted data passed within a pipeline. It's nice to be able to serialize to something human-readable and -editable, but constantly re-parsing and re-formatting it becomes a real pain.
by shiroiuma | 2026-01-19 00:20:54+00:00
>Do you mean they could sell or design their own ads?

No, I mean they could host their own ads. The way ad-blockers work is that they see requests from a web page to other domains, particularly known ad-serving domains, so they reject those requests, take those elements out of the page, etc. But they don't alter self-hosted images. So if a web page has a bunch of JPGs which are really ads and not just helpful illustrations, and embeds those into the page, the ad-blocker has no way of knowing these are actually ads, and can't block them.

But these places never do this because they want to outsource the advertising to someone else, and the advertisers want to not just show ads, but also track how many times the ad was served, who it was served to, how long it was viewed, and lots of other information that isn't necessary for advertising (and was never a factor back when ads were simply printed on newspaper or shown on TV). In short, the advertisers insist on spying on people now. This should not be tolerated or excused, ever.
by gpm | 2026-01-19 00:20:58+00:00
The prediction markets aren't yet at sufficient scale to purchase a war, you mean. People start wars for money all the time though. If they become of sufficient scale, people will purchase wars on them.

There's already lots of examples where they are of sufficient scale, like paying the press secretary to shut up after 64 minutes. Or paying someone to falsify ISWs map of the front line in Ukraine.
by CPLX | 2026-01-19 00:21:43+00:00
> And no person in a position to start a war would do it to affect a Polymarket bet.

Are you fucking kidding? Based just on current events, that is absolutely not a statement you can make without at least trying to prove it.

If you do try to prove that you will fail as the idea that people would start wars for profit is as old as wars.

Just evaluate the sentence you've just created. How many people exist who have the capability to start wars or influence the start of wars? It's a lot. What else do you know about these people and their motivations?
by darhodester | 2026-01-19 00:22:28+00:00
Some companies have a proprietary file format for compressed 4D Gaussian splatting. For example: https://www.gracia.ai and https://www.4dv.ai.

Check this project, for example: https://zju3dv.github.io/freetimegs/

Unfortunately, these formats are currently closed behind cloud processing so adoption is a rather low.

Before Gaussian splatting, textured mesh caches would be used for volumetric video (e.g. Alembic geometry).
by danabramov | 2026-01-19 00:22:34+00:00
Do I understand correctly that your main concern is that some random service would serve a page when asked for /your-handle, and so, given a link, someone may assume that you actively use that service? Just trying to understand the exact scenario.

Generally it's good practice for AT apps to treat you as not signed up if you have not explicitly signed up to this app before. So I think a well-behaved site you never used shouldn't show your profile page on request. If this is right, maybe it needs to be more emphasized in docs, templates, etc. Same as they should correctly handle lifecycle events like account getting deactivated.

Realistically it's possible some services don't do this well but it's not clear to me that this is going to be a major problem. Like if it gets really bad, it seems like either this will get fixed or people will adjust expectations about how profile pages work.
by tptacek | 2026-01-19 00:22:40+00:00
If you're talking about Eric S. Raymond here, I'm having trouble not believing that this is just bait. Even in the Linux community, purely on Linux terms he's a problematic and polarizing figure.

I'm annoyed at the arc these discussions invariably take into Raymond's backstory or whatever, because I think CATB fails objectively, on its own merits (or lack thereof) and we don't need to wade into this other stuff. But if we're having the discussion: seems like kind of a wild statement to say he's any reasonable person's role model.
by EastLondonCoder | 2026-01-19 00:23:25+00:00
China is still far more repressive as a system (and Xinjiang is in its own category). The point isn’t equivalence; it’s convergence. Democracies don’t have to become ‘China’ to become unrecognizable fast, what matters is whether coercive tools are being politicized, whether oversight still bites, and whether abuses have consequences.

Personally I don't feel its constructive to discuss who's worst, because there are many axis they could be compared on. But when it comes to internal human rights violations, China has infrastructure in place for industrial control of dissent. The US is not there but is currently on a crash course towards authoritarianism
by jdsully | 2026-01-19 00:23:29+00:00
Ah but see the most important piece of information is not what the manufacturer specifies. Most mechanic friends would tell you manufacturers are over-extending the interval to make their cars look good to purchasers and because they only care about getting to the warranty end not total life of the car. While 3k miles old wisdom is out dated, if you do your own oil changes you can see a massive change in what comes out after 5k miles.

By over specifying the question you will miss out on the more important context.
by pfdietz | 2026-01-19 00:24:31+00:00
> Also, what you said isn’t necessarily true even with plant based resins. What is the carbon cost of producing new resin vs recycling old?

In the post-fossil fuel age, where is the net carbon supposed to be coming from? Unless we're using limestone, it's from the air, so there can't be net emission.

In the not-yet post-fossil fuel age, what matters is displacing fossil fuels as quickly as possible, not the relatively very minor amount of carbon embodied in the renewable energy machinery.
by ThrowawayB7 | 2026-01-19 00:24:42+00:00
This guy is in for a disappointing future since he seems to be unaware that Windows is more than than the consumer editions. Revenue from Windows Enterprise (which has management tools like Active Directory and backwards compatibility with non-game apps needed for large corporate deployments) and Windows Server (needed for Active Directory, Exchange, SQL Server, etc.) is still in the billions and there's nothing on the horizon in the Linux ecosystem to replace those. Given that Microsoft is going to have to continue to develop Windows anyway, there's not much reason for them to throw in the towel on the consumer desktop.
by franciscop | 2026-01-19 00:24:47+00:00
I have a funny story I need to tell some day about how I could get a 4GB JSON loaded purely in the browser at some insane speed, by reading the bytes, identifying the "\n" then making a lookup table. It started low stakes but ended up becoming a multi-million internal project (in man-hours) that virtually everyone on the company used. It's the kind of project that if started "big" from the beginning, I'd bet anything it wouldn't have gotten so far.

Edit: I did try JSON.parse() first, which I expected to fail and it did fail BUT it's important that you try anyway.
by anal_reactor | 2026-01-19 00:24:52+00:00
> then I can go socialize with people I choose to

In the previous comment I was about to say it but then stopped myself: the same thing happened to human relations. Competition isn't local, it's global. In dating you aren't competing against the rest of your village, you're literally competing against the whole planet, because the cute girl you see at the office can get a Tinder match from a guy in Australia and there's nothing you can do about it. Similar thing happened to friends - why would you be friends with your neighbor if instead you can be friends with a guy who lives one hour away one way but he's more fun.

Obviously, it's great to be on the winning side and bad on the losing side. If you're rich and charming then globalization has zero downsides for you. If you're not, well, welcome to capitalism.
by mid-kid | 2026-01-19 00:25:05+00:00
I've seen a few russian pirated game releases for linux do this, they just bundle a copy of wine (downloaded from the same places as e.g. lutris gets it from), and a start script that sets the WINEPREFIX variable to a pre-populated prefix, with the game already installed and all the needed registry configurations already present.
I suppose you could bundle all this in an AppImage, the annoying part however is that the WINEPREFIX is supposed to be read-write, so you'd have to set it to some place specific to your app, to avoid messing with the user's main prefix. These prefixes are huge (hundreds of MB upon creation), so I'm not sure I'd consider this a desireable solution.

If this is your distribution method, consider having the user install wine before running your app.
by kcplate | 2026-01-19 00:25:06+00:00
If you don’t like a law, change it. If your representatives are not representing you, elect new representatives who will.

If you don’t want immigration enforcement, don’t elect someone who ran on that platform.

And, no…I do not believe that our enforcing immigration laws that were passed in a bi-partisan and supported as is by presidents from both parties and enforced by presidents from both parties are in any way, shape, or form equivalent of what China has done specifically to the Uyghurs.
by ninkendo | 2026-01-19 00:25:19+00:00
The problems with social media are not at all the fact that things are “locked up in apps”.

Again, you missed my point. Data sharing is the least interesting thing imaginable, has already been solved countless times, and is not the reason social media sinks or swims.

Social media sinks or swims based on one thing and one thing only: is it enjoyable to use. Are all the people on here assholes or do they have something interesting to say? Can I post something without being overrun by trolls? How good are the moderation standards? How do I know if the people posting aren’t just AI bots? What are the community standards? In short: what kind of interactions can I expect to have on the platform?

The astronaut types look at the abysmal landscape social media has become, and think “you know what the fundamental problem is? That all this is locked up in apps! Let’s make a protocol, that’ll fix it!”

Never mind that the profit seeking platforms have zero interest in opening up their API to competing sites. Never mind that any of the sites that are interested in openness/federating all univerally have no answer to the problem of how you address content moderation, or at least nothing that’s any different from what we’ve seen before.

The problem in social media is not that things are locked up behind an app. There are apps/readers that combine multiple platforms for me (I remember apps that consolidated Facebook and twitter fully eighteen years ago. It’s not hard.)

The problem with social media is that it’s a wasteland full of bots and assholes.

A HN poster said it best 8 years ago about twitter, and I think it applies to all of social media: it’s a planetary scale hate machine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16501147
by shiroiuma | 2026-01-19 00:25:35+00:00
>A friendly average person would have been a net gain.

I'm perfectly happy to have a friendly, average person as my boss, as long as he has good people skills and is pretty good at managing a team. He doesn't need to be technically brilliant at all.

By contrast, working with a boss who's a technically brilliant jerk is an absolutely miserable experience. Companies that make a habit of promoting brilliant jerks into management positions should be avoided.
by ryandrake | 2026-01-19 00:25:44+00:00
The "far left" statistically doesn't even exist in the USA. Less than 1% of the population and less than 0.01% of elected politicians. Effectively zero. No major national or state politicians call for seizing the means of production, a centrally planned economy, widespread price controls, Great Leaps Forward, and so on. The far right has us all convinced that anything to the left of Reagan is "far left".
by djeastm | 2026-01-19 00:25:52+00:00
If it's on the dark web isn't it also possible that it's hacked phone records? Seems like a nice way to bypass getting a warrant. Step 1, make sure hackers know you're in the market for phone company data. Step 2, hackers do their thing and sell it on the dark web. Step 3, police use intermediate tool like Tangles to "obtain probably cause" and "verify reasonable suspicion" based on the hacked records and focus their searches, all without any judge's say-so.
by perfmode | 2026-01-19 00:26:55+00:00
The missing piece is the distinction between a market that observes reality and a market that instigates it.

The criticism is about the systemic risk of converting prediction markets into "Assassination Markets"—mechanisms where the payout is not a reward for foresight, but a bounty for action.

In the case of Maduro, the operation cost around $300 million so a $400,000 payout isn’t providing a financial incentive.

But in the case of assassination, a $400,000 payout is sufficient motivation.
by ragall | 2026-01-19 00:27:54+00:00
I've seen that plenty of times. I suspect that you haven't seen it because you live in a place with high cost of living, which induces a high turnover in personnel, or perhaps you've been working in very dynamic markets such as SaaS.

When I was starting my career in Europe as freelance sysadmin, I worked several times for small companies that were definitely not at the forefront of technology, were specialised in some small niche and pretty small (10-15 engineers), but all its engineers had been there for 10-20 years. They pretty well paid compared to the rest of the country, and within their niche (in one case microcontroller programming for industrial robots) they were world experts. They had no intention of moving to another city or another company, nor getting a promotion or learning a new trade. They were simply extremely good at what they were doing (which in the grand scheme of things was probably pretty obsolete technology), and whenever a new project came they could figure out the requirements and implement the product without much external input. The first time I met a "project manager" was when I started working for a US company.
by otikik | 2026-01-19 00:28:21+00:00
That sounds a lot like "the magical hand of the markets" and "trickle down economics". A hope surrounded by a semblance of logic but not a lot thought put on the important details of how things actually work.

With this I mean: I can think of several ways in which this would go in the other direction (bad for society). And I am not an economics expert.
by TacticalCoder | 2026-01-19 00:28:57+00:00
Linux runs on billions of devices, including billions of phones, Internet routers, 100% of the world's Top 500 supercomputers, etc.

This post makes lots of sense: Windows is and has always been (but it's getting worse now, as TFA notes) a turd whose level of turdiness cannot be understated.

At some point they may just throw the towel in and use an OS that powers tens of billions of devices (which is where Linux is headed).