skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Great, I'm glad my tax money is going to pay for snowflakes in the government mistreating their provider.

To give another anecdote, I worked for another government (not US) and it was literally the worst client ever.
Besides paying a year late, they had the worst pm ever.

I left that country not long after.
> It is also the only country from all of those I have been in almost 50 years, where great care is taken to never park in an illegal way.

This is only true for the masses. Rich people just leave their cars parked anywhere they want in Mayfair in London because they don't care about a 50 quid fine.
> miracles

Hmm. Magic and miracles are not the same. One is breaking some of the core laws of physics that hold true regardless of your "capabilities".

I also don't really like that justification because it can essentially justify any sort of belief.
This is great, thanks! I hadn't thought about the Pauli exclusion principle problem, which I guess tells you how well I'd understood the problem. And of course I don't know anything about quantum gravity. I was thinking that, for use as a power plant, you want much larger black holes, not only bigger than a proton, but actually bigger than an atom, on the order of a nanometer, for two reasons: first, so that the gamma rays coming out are reasonably low energy (hundreds or thousands of electron volts instead of GeV); second, so that you can continue feeding it with regular baryons instead of keeping your spherically converging laser focused on it. But if you do that, you only get a tiny fraction of a watt out of it, and it's uselessly inefficient; even if you made trillions of these little black holes, the energy payback time of the project is measured in octillions of years if you're feeding useful photons into them.

So the sub-attometer-sized black holes described here seem like they might be a lot more practical than what I was thinking of. But... what does it take to stop TeV gamma rays? (And I guess they might also spew out strange matter and naked truth and the like, but you could probably just toss it back in.)

The billion-tonne gamma-ray laser they're talking about here is absolutely tiny.
It's one thing to fake or massage a summary, it's an entirely different thing to fake the whole data set. This divergence increases based on the amount of data.

Your question is essentially equivalent to: "If you don't believe what the politician said about the event, why would you believe the video recording of it?"
Future investors would avoid the company?
It uses the ordering of std::map for its own comparison operators and hash function.
Quite a few of board members are the investors, if I understand it correctly. As for how their dissatisfaction could manifest, they could vote the CEO out and put someone else in that position who will revert that level openness instantly.
It’s not security through obscurity. The implementation is not necessarily a secret; it’s the model configuration which can only be differentiated if known. Since part of the threat is adversarial embeddings, it’s perfectly fine to assume you can keep a private model confidential that adversaries can’t differentiate.
Linux is just a Kernel NetBSD is a System.
That website: “Please provide a complete profile about you and your personality, and we will make all your dreams come true. Don’t worry, we totally won’t sell or leak this data!”
Quite a lot of hobbyists are going that route instead of purchasing a RealSense camera:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfklQ-O-FPc

Also, I believe Amazon went that way when designing their DeepRacer. Note that it has no IR projector but 2 Cameras and a commodity PC for processing.
> I don't know enough about rust

Rust allows cyclic dependencies between modules within a single crate, but not between crates.
How long? Most side effects should be gone after ~1 month.
Well, it's not quite the same as saying that the invention of agriculture made the current state of affairs inevitable. There's a middle ground between historical determinism, and "anything goes" - some paths become more or less likely depending on how things go, but it's never a railroad.

So, I would agree with OP in that it started with invention of agriculture, in a sense that that gave rise to rigidly hierarchical societies, and centralized states that could extract surplus from their citizens and spend it on warfare and other forms of oppression. But we didn't have to take that route, and it doesn't mean that agriculture per se is bad.
So, for nearly one third of a century :P
this is a very weak argument. The MAGA crowd has been posting images all over social media.

My understanding is that there is a threshold that needs to be met, and then an Apple employee with a very difficult job will need to confirm the image. So even if NCMEC get pressured, I don't see what the result can be.
Can someone explain what is the profile of criminals they expect to catch with this system? People that are tech savy enough to go on the darknet and find CSAM content but simultaneously stupid enough to upload these images to iCloud?

And they think there are enough of these people to create this very complicated system and risk a PR disaster?
I’m not sure how you can conclude the speculation is “right” without engaging with the fact that this hypothetical is addressed directly in the threat model document and hasn’t been pulled off successfully against any of the other services which do similar scanning. Why can’t I buy compromat as a service for your Gmail account?
And even that effort demonstrates the incompetency of most financial institutions - anyone with a security team worth their salt would have mandatory two-factor authentication, which would make the approach unworkable.
As with pretty much everything else computing, the world suffers because Microsoft has been dumping terrible tools on it for decades, and people just take their garbage as the way things have to be.
It's a bit confusing that x >> y means x implies y, when z3 supports bitwise arithmetic as well.
Australia does have other examples of these systems though, like poli (https://www.polipayments.com/) which is commonly used by airlines to accept and prove direct deposit payments
I looked at the link and looked at the output from the algorithm for the 2 images which was a MD5 hash. so from that :)
> governments around the world could pressure Apple to add other forms of surveillance. Be it hashes of non-CSAM, or simply pressure NEMEC or other hash providers

could, yes, but given PhotoDNA has been using similar hashes from NCMEC for a decade and doesn't appear to have had similar surveillance pressure imposed, what makes the Apple scanning different to warrant slippery slope arguments like this?
How to identify the supply and demand side of your marketplace?
> Apple could have quietly implemented CSAM scanning server-side

Aren't iCloud Photos already scanned for CSAM though?
Source? A hash map should in principle be faster than a tree, with far fewer comparisons, and against a computed hash value instead of the whole object, in principle.
Facebook reported 68.1 million csam images last year. If these people were such criminal masterminds, why are Facebook’s numbers so high?
why would they?

judging from comments on this forum alone, it would be a career suicide in this political climate.
> So you'd have to pressure NEMEC and another org under a different government

To be fair, if the other organisation is IWF[1] under the UK government, I don't think there'd be much pressure needed to get them to comply - just offer to bung them and their mates a few million in contracts and you'd be golden.

It's a sensible plan, it just might not be as strong as it seems.

[1] https://www.iwf.org.uk
10 years seems a little too much for US gov's patience
I assumed he was observing that as technology improves, human effort asymptotically approaches zero. If it reached zero, I would be worried!
This looks like an AI version of "design by committee", where a bunch of wanted features are merged into a hyena-like monstrosity.

Reminds me of "Twipsy", the mascot of Expo 2000 in Germany https://www.expo2000.de/index.php/expo-2000/twipsy.html
There is a lower limit to privacy (as a human right) – which after passing, societies would seize to be "free" (liberal democracies?). But that's not a discussion people seem to want to have, when talking about their good intentions of fighting against horrible things.
They only suck in stuff that gets too close relative to their mass. They aren't magical. If you have a planet and turn it into a black hole with the same mass - anybody on orbit around that planet will continue on their orbits like nothing changed.

For a meteor it makes no difference if gravity is coming from a planet or a black hole of the same mass. The only difference is that once you get very close - the gravity changes much quicker (because black hole is much smaller and denser than a planet) so you will be ripped apart.
> Why not?

Why? What would be the point except as a personal challenge?
Packet size is a really good detection for this. DNS packets should only be so big ;)
They could have their own little PRISM.
I am glad that Apple has shown the true colors of trillion dollar corporation thinking.
I see opportunity for people to understand the biggest problem with a future in which humans are only a datapoint in framework designed to benefit few on expense of many.

Can you imagine this "narrative" applied everywhere? From the moment you open your eyes everything around you is extracting data, monitoring and policing you.

We have to redefine our relationship with software and hardware (electronics). The infrastructure (5g) and IOT advancements are here. Data is the fuel of the coming "consumer revolution".
Apple just positioned themselves perfectly as a Data Broker for high level customers - special groups, oppressive governments, you name it.

They will not back up from this. This is more profitable than selling shiny toys and "services".
This gives political elites a reason not to break Apple monopolistic business practices.

I will go even further: This gives Apple a favorable position to become a trusted partner of governments of the World.

Deconstructing this only from a technical point of view is non-efficient. Apple is making an entrance on political stage by embracing the role of World Digital Police.

Everyone is free to apply his own conclusions and analysis.
Mine are proportionally adequate. I have removed macOS from production workflow.
I will never buy another Apple product. And I am willing to throw away "conveniences" and polished UX for preserving my privacy.

This privacy, not Apples corporate redefinition:

The quality or condition of being secluded from the presence or view of others.
The state of being free from public attention or unsanctioned intrusion.
A state of being private, or in retirement from the company or from the knowledge or observation of others; seclusion.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z15JLtAuwVI
Pretty much any kind of rational or truthful reporting on the CCP is going to look like an attack on the CCP.

And their overreactions and undisguised attempts to shut down all criticisms just make it worse, in an ever-deepening spiral where the response to the story IS the story.

Unfortunately, democratic governments haven’t figured out how to combat these soft attacks from the CCP, because it’s very hard to form a national defence against subversive outside influence (good) without trampling on the freedom of expression of our own citizens (bad).

There is also still much to be gained from engaging with Chinese citizens, who represent both a huge market and a huge pool of under-utilised talent.

It is the biggest question of our time: how to maintain our open and free societies, maintain productive engagement with Chinese citizens, and simultaneously defend effectively from attacks by the CCP across all attack vectors both cold (soft power, social media influence, ransomware, IP theft, biological warfare, supply chain attacks, university think tanks, deficit infrastructure investment abroad, etc.) and hot?
I'm confused, Google Voice started in... 2009? How did they manage spam this whole time and suddenly decide they can't handle it anymore in 2021?
What's your current opinion on Rust viz-a-viz Go? I remember that you had a few complaints about Rust.. I wonder if that has changed? :)
> And it's hard for me to imagine the US government doing that without some court battle with serious risk of leaks to journalists.

Anything going through a FISA court (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court) could come with a gag order, preventing anyone involved to talk about it.
This is just crazy how anything and everything is about resources - invade rather than buy from the country peacefully. Geopolitics Bargaining is basically bargaining by force lol
You know, if you asked Christiaan Huygens in 01671 about the possibility of detecting a 4-km-long tunnel getting shorter by a factor of one in a sextillion for a hundredth of a second, he surely would have doubted that it was possible. But it's only been 350 years, and when LIGO detected its first gravitational waves five years ago, that's precisely how it did it.

By contrast, there's ample reason to believe that black-hole power plants are possible. In fact, the spatial precision required is actually the same order of magnitude as that of LIGO, about an attometer. So we might not even have to wait 350 years for it.
The Slow, Stealthy Victory of Serverless 2.0 (and PaaS)
"There's no such thing as miracles, or the supernatural, only cutting-edge technology!"
If you're obsessed with base64 here is a fun thing for you:

A few years ago I randomly remarked that repeated base64 prefix converge to a fixed point. I tweeted [1] the first characters of that string out of amusement, without any additional details.

Then someone saw the tweet, found it funny, and did a write-up about it [2], and then there was an interesting discussion on Reddit [3]. There may have been one on HN too, I don't remember.

Have fun :).

[1] https://twitter.com/p4bl0/status/298900842076045312

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20160313123301/https://fmota.eu/...

[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/compsci/comments/18234a/the_base64_...
I was a Supercalc 2 user under CP/M 2.2 and 3.1. It was my first experience of spreadsheets since an IBM PC was far outside of my price range. My own memory of it was that it was quick, it was economical in terms of disk and memory (as many apps had to be in those days, a lost art), and most important of all the documentation was superb.
Oh, I see. Then we're in agreement, our digital computers are less powerful than analog computers with unlimited precision. What we don't know if such analog computer could exist -- or even if the universe is equivalent to one.

That is, we don't know if nature is actually continuous. Perhaps spacetime becomes discrete in the Planck scale or something like that (I know past attempts have been unsuccessful, but still, it might be). But if nature is continuous, there is probably a fundamental limitation on harnessing those precision bits past a certain limit. Nature's continuous variables might have enough symmetries as to make it Turing-complete. In this case, computation with full real numbers wouldn't ever happen in this universe.

I mean, if it happens, the Church-Turing thesis would be false, and the consequences would be far more strange.
Famously, the US embassy owes about $13M in congestion charges (as of 2017!) they just don't bother to pay.

Although, to their credit, apparently[1] they do pay their parking fines.

[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/us-diplomats...
100% ...

I'd rather at least get the pleasure of driving, rather than basically becoming the supervisor for my car. Quartlery performance reviews, checking on KPI's.

Autopilot and the like are absolutely not on my list of features I'm looking for when buying a new car. Crusie-control? Handy. AP, waste of (my) time.
Some downs people/family also think the same about downs. Also deaf and others...

Personally as an autist I wouldn't want to cure it for myself as it would be a large change in personality that I don't think I could integrate - but if I was to have kids, I'd rather they were "cured" of autism when young.
Coinbase Builds $4B Cash Pile to Weather Tighter Regulation, Crypto Risks
Well done ! Here is my version that uses Scipy lbfgs-b optimizers : https://gist.github.com/unrealwill/d64d653a7626b825ef332aa3b...
Even so, "to keep it alive" seems like a non issue for a single player game a few hours long.
Ok, so he teaches his kids how to hack school thru short term memory tricks and he's upset that they haven't learned anything. I don't think school has failed them, thought school has it's many faults, he has failed his kids. At some point he has to take responsibility to make sure his kids are educated by teaching them how to learn rather than to teach them how to get through tests with a good grade.
As bad as what happened at Tuskegee was, black patients were not injected with syphilis or anything like that. Patients with syphilis were not told that they had it and were monitored over the years to see what would happen.
Great article! Always worth to extend your knowledge beyond the few languages that I use daily.
Unfortunately modules support in major build systems (e.g. cmake) is falling behind, and without it modules are somewhat useless for general c++ projects. I've only heard of build2 having some support for modules.
> This system could potentially

As could PhotoDNA, though, which everyone has been using for a decade to scan cloud photos - but it doesn't seem to have happened.
steampunk had it right
Out of curiosity, in Canada (and the USA, where I assume it will be similar), how do you call the system to authorise a business, for example a utility company, to charge your bank account directly every given period, with a more-or-less flexible amount, and with no need for you to take any action?

The reason I ask is that that is what is called a "Direct Debit" in the UK and the European SEPA area, and it does not involve providing any credentials to the bank account. Rather, you only need to provide your International Bank Account Number (IBAN) and maybe your name. However, the ability for a company to be able to take Direct Debit payments is heavily regulated, you can easily cancel them via your bank, and even reverse charges if they were illegitimate.
Honestly, because they don’t drink it soon enough / slow enough. There’s a pretty cool study on how you can drink seawater and remain hydrated if you do it right.

I meant freshwater cycle time.

Yes there are certainly places that run out of water, I meant more places like Vancouver where the city just doesn’t build a bigger reservoir and instead bemoans an annual water shortage.
Not even a week yet and it is already looking for another reason to invade... it is as if the last 20 years were like a puff of smoke, and just when the Taliban took the country back, there is a sudden urgency to "liberate" Afghanistan again.
The hand gestures that last longer than spoken languages
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28202198
In Northern Ireland there was a debate on that, a down syndrome activist had campaigned against it which was readily taken up by parties that had opposed abortion in the first place. I'm not sure if it passed fully or just the first stage but there was a bill introduced a ban on non-fatal disabilities.
There also seems to be increasing pushback by disabled people against person-first language in general. For example, from a blind person: https://mosen.org/person-first-language-it-does-more-harm-th...
Here is another example of what happens to people's lives when they are trapped in a bureaucracy they cannot control.

https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-58259497
In addition to the attacks, such as converting legit image to be detected as CSAM (false positive) or circumventing detection of the real CSAM image (false negative), which have been widely discussed in HN, I think this can also be used to mount a DOS attack or to censor any images.

It works like this. First, found your target images, which are either widely available like internet memes for DOS attack or images you want to censor. Then, compute their Neuralhash. Next, use the hash collision tool to turn real CSAM images to have the same NeuralHash as the target images. Finally, report these adversarial CSAM images to the government. The result is that the attackers would successfully add the targeted NeuralHash into the CSAM database. And people who store these legit image will then be flagged.
The thing I found unsettling wasn’t that something was disabled (fair design decission), but the mindset that considers some features harmful , but is happy enough to use it in its own „special case projects/packages”. It doesn’t really matter for how many packages its available, since it can be changed on a whim. I can only speak for myself, but I found it unfair and patronizing
This technique has been a standard exfiltration & C2 (command & control) channel for malware for a long time. Typically malware will make a DNS request for a subdomain where the domain name encodes data or a request, and the response contains e.g. commands.
Apparently those defective batches can be fire hazards https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/gigabyte-will-replac... .
I've stopped using twitter myself due to the fact they've locked me out when I didn't give them a phone number. As far as I can tell, that's the only reason they've locked my account.
It's pretty standard for France, come work here! :)
I'm convinced none of these conspiracy theories hold up. This is a typical Apple thing. Thought long and hard about something in a mostly isolated setting and then missing some obvious things.
I've got Dyson Sphere on my backlog; at the moment I finally budget and bought Satisfactory, it looks really well fleshed out at the moment and it'll take me hours and hours of more work to lay out my factory just to get the second package up the space elevator. Love it.
That's kind of implied by the explanation itself though. Ie the explanation is not "Jimmy added this easter egg". It's something technical. Which implies it was not designed.
I totally disagree on the format, FWIW.

When I see a link to a Twitter thread, I know immediately what to expect. I know that the formatting will be consistent. I know that the site will be accessible and at least somewhat readable. I can see the reactions of other people to the content immediately. I can interact with the author in a uniform and easy way, if I want to. I know that the content likely won’t be too long.

This without even mentioning the benefits to the writer of the post. Twitter is free. It’s widely used, so you can get way more impressions that you’d ever get on a blog. It allows you to immediately see and interact with people reading your posts - it’s incredibly painful to do that with a blog that you host. It gives you decent analytics. It’s obviously way easier than hosting a blog.

Of course, blogs have many advantages too. Blog posts and Tweet threads solve two different problems.
Btw here is the thread without loginwall and in blog format:
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1428008043556622336.html
Or am I missing something here?

Wouldn't it be easier for offenders to avoid Apple products? That requires no special computer expertise and involves no risk on their part.
A Comprehensive Comparison Between Kubeflow and MLflow