MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by beeflet | 2025-05-28 20:11:39+00:00
>but the largest benefits come from having no visible amounts or addresses

MWEB is certainly an improvement over transparent transactions (and other methods such as coinjoin, coinswap, cashfusion, etc.), and I welcome the litecoin upgrade. I agree that decoy-based privacy is weak.

However, I don't believe that the mimblewimble meets the standard of privacy needed for most users. It's not the visible amounts and addresses, but the links between transactions that are the main problem. CTs on their own are just a "nice-to-have".

The end goal should be a zcash or firo style of privacy. I think you can scale that to a global network with an adjustable block size, payment channels, and atomic swaps between multiple cryptocurrencies. The problem is that zcash and firo have weak tokenomics compared to monero. Grin will have a hard time finding an initial niche that isn't currently satisfied by monero, and if it does take off, its changes could be merged into bitcoin (https://www.truthcoin.info/blog/imex/).
by _wire_ | 2025-05-28 20:12:06+00:00
Per Michael Tolkien's writing the dialog to Robert Altman's movie The Player (1992):

(A movie studio executive who believes a screen writer has been harassing him with threatening postcards has just murdered the screenwriter the previous night. The executive arrives late at a mid-morning studio meeting as other executives argue about the lavishness of writers' fees)

Movie studio boss: Griffin, you're here! We were just discussing the significance of writing. Maybe you have something to add?

Executive: I was just thinking what an interesting concept it is to eliminate the writer from the artistic process. If we could just get rid of these actors and directors, maybe we've got something here.

(Assistant hands the executive another postcard)

—

Re AI chat:

High school students who are illiterate now use AI chat to orchestrate the concoction of course papers they can't understand, then instructors use AI chat to grade the work. The grads apply for jobs and get selected by AI chat, then interviewed by managers using AI chat. The lucky hires are woken up by their IOs and transported to an office at an unknown destination by autonomous cars. Their work is to follow scripts emitted by AI chat to apply AI chat to guide refinement of processes, further feeding LLMs. Once returned to the home cubicle after the shift, the specialist consumes the latest cartoons and sexts with an AI companion. The IO sounds the alarm and it's time to sleep.

If the MCP guys can just cut out the middle men, I think we've got something here!

—

The threat of the new machines is not AGI overlords who will exterminate an optional humanity. The threat is an old one that's been proven over millennia of history: the conversion of human beings into slaves.
by programjames | 2025-05-28 20:12:31+00:00
That isn't a fair ranking. Some people are more idealist than you, and a priori want to believe others will play well. If you stick them in a lobby full of smashy noobs, they may not live long enough to update on those beliefs (within the single game). Of course, the same happens in reverse: if you go into a game assuming everyone is a smashy noob, and they're actually good at the game, you're going to end up in the losing position. The rate of mistakes changes the trembling-hand equilibria. The best players will, of course, figure out reputations for the other players as the game progresses, but calling some just 'okay' and others 'better' because they initialize the reputations to different values is not fair.

Think about this: you've probably driven a car to get from Point A to Point B before. If you existed in a society where people were constantly making mistakes, in the sense of crashing their cars several orders of magnitude more often, driving a car to get from Point A to Point B is no longer a good strategy. But it usually is a good, if not the best, move you can make right now, because people aren't making mistakes that frequently.

Here's another example: marriage (long-term relationships). Perhaps not all extra-marital affairs are mistakes, but a significant proportion of them are. If too many people are making these mistakes, leading to messy divorces, it's no longer worth it to even consider dating in the first place.
by kbenson | 2025-05-28 20:12:45+00:00
With regard to proof of work systems that provide revenue:

1) Making LLM (and other) scrapers pay for the resources they use seems perfectly fine to me. Also, as someone that manages some level of scraping (on the order of low tens of millions of requests a month), I'm fine with this. There's a wide range of scraping that the problem is not some resource cost, but the other side not wanting to deal with setting up APIs or putting so many hurdles on access that it's easier to just bypass it.

2) This seems like it might be an opportunity for Cloudflare. Let customers opt-in to requiring a proof of work when visitors already trip the cloudflare vetting page that runs additional checks to see if you're a bad actor, and apply any revenue to a service credit towards their monthly fee (or if on a free plan, as credit to be used for trying out additional for-pay features). There might be a perverse inventive to toggle on more stringent checking from cloudflare, but ultimately since it's all being paid for that's the site owner's choice on how they want to manage their site.
by keernan | 2025-05-28 20:12:47+00:00
Back in 1977 I worked as a young lawyer in a firm of 10 which used a mimeograph machine in the basement to print (smelly) blue printed sheets of paper used for timesheets to record billing information. Case information was stored on index cards in different metal containers: one kept by file number; another kept alphabetically with multiple cards for every party to a case.

In 1978 I bought a Tandy Model I. In 1979 I joined a friend and we started our own firm. Before the end of 1980 our firm was using my Model I to track attorney time and send detailed billing statements to business clients. By 1984 Compaq computers had replaced every electric typewriter in my firm and were running billing software I had written together with detailed Wordperfect scripts I wrote that automated combining database lookups into legal forms.

No other firms had anything like it. Of course, that changed very rapidly. I have always regretted not having the balls to leave my law practice to commercialize my software - but I had to put food on the table. Nevertheless, computing has been the love of my life to this very day where, in retirement, all I do is tinker with my home network playing around with linux.
by mattlondon | 2025-05-28 20:13:37+00:00
Some people quoted sound like they only have one baby.

Something I found was that different kids are, well, different.

For my own kids there is a huge difference in temperament. One is chilled and happy with basically anyone, another is extremely highly-strung. We raised them the same as far as we can tell, but one is very easy to look after and spend time with, the other is a fucking nightmare that no sane person would volunteer to spend time with (...or at least would not volunteer for the second time...).

So being able to "have dinner with our friends every night" I think comes down a lot to the individual kid and not the environment. You may have just got lucky and got a laid-back kid who just goes along with things and is happy hanging out with random adults. They're not all like that.
by TFYS | 2025-05-28 20:14:05+00:00
I think it's the lack a of deeper meaning in the things we do have to do in this system. We're just cogs in a large machine that creates more and more wealth, but after you have enough to live a comfortable life that is no longer enough to make you care. There's no more purpose to it. Yet the pursuit of wealth is the only goal our economic system, and increasingly our culture as well, provides. Any other goal gets trampled under the herd of organizations seeking wealth for the purpose of making more wealth.
by duxup | 2025-05-28 20:14:42+00:00
Are these letters legally binding?

>Several people familiar with the move said the US Department of Commerce had told so-called electronic design automation groups — which include Cadence, Synopsys and Siemens EDA — to stop supplying their technology to China.

>The Bureau of Industry and Security, the arm of the US commerce department that oversees export controls, issued the directive to the companies via letters, according to the people. It was unclear if every US EDA company had received a letter.
by Twirrim | 2025-05-28 20:14:56+00:00
You've made some mistakes with the Game of Life rules. You've missed out the overpopulation rule:

Any live cell with more than three live neighbours dies

Nit: > I guess there’s a harsh third rule which is, “if the cell is dead, it stays dead”.

That phrasing is inaccurate, if a dead cell stayed dead, the first rule wouldn't work. I'm not sure that particular sentence adds much to the flow, honestly.
by ordu | 2025-05-28 20:15:04+00:00
> I know you're joking

Well... I am, and I'm not. I like the idea, and I like it even more than 42. 42 is an incomprehensible answer, while life creating black holes which create life are much more interesting. It spawns new thoughts. Like it seems we are doomed to create black holes. I wonder how it will go. Will our descendants start a war using black holes instead of bullets? Or maybe it will be a software bug, that will manifest itself all at once in gazillions of machines turning them into devices spewing 3 black holes each second? Something like that seems to be the most plausible scenario, judging by the history of humankind.
A toy RTOS inside Super Mario Bros. using emulator save states
by notorious_pgb | 2025-05-28 20:15:43+00:00
This started as a throwaway metaphor in a blog post, but is now fully runnable: a toy RTOS with preemptive multitasking inside of Super Mario Bros. on the NES.

Essentially, this is:

- A rudimentary preemptive RTOS

- Using an unmodified NES emulator (FCEUX) as the CPU

- "Unmodified" depending on how you define terms

- With emulator save states as the thread contexts

- With support for (very basic) mutexes, interrupt masking, and condition variables

- Demonstrated using Super Mario Bros. 1-1 with sections of the map dedicated to various synchronization primitives

There are many simplifications and shortcuts taken (doesn't even have task priorities), and it doesn't map 1:1 to true multithreading (e.g., emulator save states represent the state of the entire machine including RAM, whereas thread contexts represent a much more minimal slice), but I think it's A) pretty interesting and B) a unique visceral explanation of threads.
by JulianPGough | 2025-05-28 20:15:50+00:00
I do understand why you are critical of my decision to attack ΛCDM and the work that led to it. I can see your point of view, and indeed I wrestled with that decision. I do realise that a lot of people will be alienated by the "dissing" of ΛCDM, who would otherwise be attracted to Blowtorch Theory.

But I feel that there are genuine problems with ΛCDM that are making it hard for the field of cosmology to understand what it is seeing in the early universe, and I hope that my careful description of what I believe has gone wrong over the past few decades might have value for the field.

It's simply impossible to ignore the enormous dark matter elephant in the room, especially given that ΛCDM so comprehensively failed to predict what we are now seeing in the early universe. As I mention in my post, the extended version of cosmological natural selection that Blowtorch Theory emerges from DID predict exactly what we are seeing now. Here are those predictions, if you want to check them out:

https://theeggandtherock.substack.com/p/predictions-what-the...

In that context, it makes no sense to avoid mentioning ΛCDM's recent failures: and if I'm going to do that, I feel I should offer my full diagnosis of what went wrong.

But I have every respect for your position, and I understand it will be distasteful and offputting to many.
by somat | 2025-05-28 20:15:52+00:00
I find the windows registry a fascinating mystery, why does something that sounds like such a good idea (hey lets put all the config into one place, a database for configs.) end up being so miserable to be around in practice?

As a good unixaphile My conclusion is that it is because now you have two trees, a main database tree that has excellent ergonomics and tooling(the filesystem). and the registry tree where all the access patterns are special and different and the tooling sort of sucks.

I feel this article could make the same conclusion about the main filesystem if it wanted to. But I do note that because the main filesystem is not the redheaded stepchild tree, any problems with it tend to be fixed.

As a humorous footnote, I really appreciate the plan9 mindset, that single minded devotion to "The One True Tree" that when they wanted a web browser they said "hey the DOM is a tree structure. throw it in the filesystem" those glorious crazy bastards.

https://man.cat-v.org/plan_9/4/webfs
by the_af | 2025-05-28 20:16:45+00:00
> But you could argue it had benefits, because it was so obviously stupid it may have inoculated potential victims against cult think and saved some lives.

I don't think I can buy into this argument. If nothing else, Heaven's Gate did NOT inoculate other people from joining cults.

But it's a patently bad idea anyway, "this can kill people but it's good because it will teach other people not to die".
by FiatLuxDave | 2025-05-28 20:16:54+00:00
I think that a large reason why the discourse sucks is because the public is seeing hardly any discussion using language that is specific about types and features.

Let me explain. With older technologies, the language to talk about it is well developed. I like to use nautical terminology as an example that most people are somewhat familiar with. There are a lot of terms like jib, sheets, mainsail, schooner, keel, galley etc, and a lot of people don't know what those mean. But it is pretty easy to recognize that there is a whole terminology to describe ships and the features thereof which is used by experts and which can be very specific. If one guy says the boat won't make the trip, and it's because the keel goes more than two fathoms deep, and the other guy says that of course it can because the galleon can go bireme past five hundred knots, even landlubbers will be able to figure out who knows their stuff.

But in the current AI discourse, AI is AI is AI. Agentic LLMs? AI. Non-agentic LLMs? Also AI. Diffusion Models? Al. Search engine? AI, kinda. R2D2? AI. Autocomplete? Sure, why not, AI. It's like if sailors used language that barely distinguished between specific nautical technologies. Boat is Boat is Boat.

Now, nautical terms have developed over thousands of years, and AI (whichever type you mean) is a new technology that is not fully developed. But imagine a discourse where Boat is Boat is Boat. The bosses learn that we just got Boat working, and are making plans to conquer the New World. Other people are concerned about the moral implications of conquering the New World. Meanwhile, one of the sailors tasked with this tried using Boat over the weekend fishing with a friend, and he's not sure he can paddle it that far. Another guy tell him not to worry, that there's a new model of Boat and it doesn't even need a paddle. He says at the current rate of advancement, we should have a new Boat capable of going underwater in less than ten years! We thought of coming up with a name for this new type, but it's basically just another kind of Boat.

If we want better talk about AI, we should use better language about AI. We are living in the time where the language used to talk about these things will be developed. We might find there is more agreement when we are talking about the same things.
by jcranmer | 2025-05-28 20:17:00+00:00
> Traditoinally you split the farm when the sons (it need not be sons, but sexism generally comes in somehow as someone needs to leave home for genetic diverstiy reasons and the entire culture needs to follow the pattern in general so lets just talk about sons with the understanding that sometimes it was daughters)

The anthropological term for the kind of arrangement you're talking about is "patrilocality." Matrilocality is where it's the daughters instead of the sons, and it's much more the norm in the indigenous peoples of the Americas (and somewhat more sporadically in Africa). The really fun part is that matrilocality does not imply matrilineality (let alone matriarchy), so you can have a society that is both patrilineal and matrilocal.
by rostigerpudel | 2025-05-28 20:17:03+00:00
To make it clear: The trademark is the combination of the sign (e.g. the word or logo) and the goods and services it is registered for. If you use the same sign for different goods and services then there is no infringement and no watering down/dilution, thus nothing to defend against.

There is a difference when treating well-known trademarks (say Coca-Cola, Sony, Google), however I doubt Waffle House gets over the threshold set for that for being too local (I counted at least 20 states that do not have one) and not sufficiently known by all demographics (if you want to know more read up on the Lanham Act).

Full disclosure: I am a TM lawyer, but not in the US. YMMV and what I write here is no legal advice ;-) since only gathered from US colleagues' explanations regarding cases clients had in the US.

The notorious/well-know concept is part of an international treaty (Art. 6bis of the Paris Convention) and its interpretation is similar in most western countries, so I'd expect the US interpretation to not be that far off.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-05-28 20:17:25+00:00
Assuming you could find an expert like that in time, and that they will then be able to understand and solve the problem fast enough to still be helpful.

If you need the answer within a couple hours, you can probably get it for an expert; if you need to get an actionable answer within minutes, based on some back-of-the-envelope calculations, then a SOTA LLM is a much safer bet than flagging whoever seems the smartest in the room and asking them for help.
by munksbeer | 2025-05-28 20:17:39+00:00
> My experience with Bazel has been extremely bad

Would you mind elaborating and providing some examples of what was bad?

We have a monorepo built using bazel, and at first when new to bazel, I was pretty frustrated. But now I can't think of any issue I've had with it recently.

But we do have a relatively simple setup.
by riffraff | 2025-05-28 20:17:56+00:00
Well, psychohistory is presented as a sort of mathematics for predicting the future, I think it fits the theme.

Likewise, I'm not sure it's on the list, but starship troopers has a kind of mathematics for government (the military dictatorship with citizen-by-merit is provably optimal, not just a random system).

It fictionalized "math" but still fits the generic idea, IMHO.
by fguerraz | 2025-05-28 20:18:36+00:00
There you go:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S037026932...

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/2987/1/...

Pure math fiction [edit: I realise they are not specifically about _particle_ physics, but these are the two I could find back in 2 minutes. Also, my comment was meant to be tongue in cheek ]
by siriusfeynman | 2025-05-28 20:18:37+00:00
Already here with google's ADK (agent development kit)

https://google.github.io/adk-docs/tools/built-in-tools/#goog...

> When you use grounding with Google Search, and you receive Search suggestions in your response, you must display the Search suggestions in production and in your applications. For more information on grounding with Google Search, see Grounding with Google Search documentation for Google AI Studio or Vertex AI. The UI code (HTML) is returned in the Gemini response as renderedContent, and you will need to show the HTML in your app, in accordance with the policy.
by godshatter | 2025-05-28 20:18:58+00:00
I've seen the sun described as being really mostly white and that the yellow color we normally see has more to do with what light makes it through the atmosphere rather than the actual color of the star and that the light is a continuous spectrum and so on. But then the sun is also classified as a G-2, a yellow dwarf. Is the color that we see in the sky just coincidentally match the color the star is classified under?
by seligerasmus | 2025-05-28 20:19:11+00:00
The C&D isn't for the customers, it's for Waffle House. Apprising a party of their infringement and putting them on notice is a crucial procedural step for potential litigation.

>They should have embraced this guy and his website, engage him, and through that channel let him know "hey, you can't use our trademarks, etc. so you'll need to rebrand, but we love what you're doing and want to help."

I don't mean this cynically or rhetorically, but: why? I get that this is a fun and humorous side project for the creator, but I don't see any real upside for Waffle House in supporting it. If Waffle House wanted to lean into the proxy-for-FEMA marketing angle, it'd be much better off doing it in-house, where it'd have complete creative control. More likely, Waffle House marketing strategists crunched the numbers and are understandably hesitant to expand branding based on national disasters and the woeful state of government response infrastructure.

We do this every year when Nintendo sends an icy C&D to some quirky project built on its IP. Techies rend their garments about the deplorable state of IP law, and forecast imminent fallout from all the "bad PR" and "missed opportunities," as if there's a vast, highly sensitive market segment of temporarily aggrieved nerds that has somehow gone unaccounted for in its sprawling global marketing strategy. "I'll never buy a Nintendo product again!" says the 42-year-old Senior Software Engineer with 312 unplayed games in his Steam library, and the money-printing machine continues to hum unabated.
by Ray20 | 2025-05-28 20:19:42+00:00
>i dont see a huge difference here

In the case of a company, you can simply refuse to pay them if you feel that the goods and services you receive are not worth the money they are asking for.

If you try to stop paying to the government, you will be robbed blind and sent to prison for life.

Quite a big of a difference, in my opinion.