skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I don’t see how this could ever be legitimate. Giving out an unlaunched shitcoin and a t shirt in exchange for the biometric data of people who very clearly don’t understand crypto or biometric data (read: random person in a mall, regardless of country). This is pretty clearly taking advantage of people.

Welcome to the business model of those who want to align their old business models of 'web2' with this re-packed new thing (but not really) and call it 'web3,' which is totally not a scam and not their to sell your data.

Altman is the typical Valley trope tat Silicon Valley lambasted, and showed to be a hypocrite of the worst kind: those that sell an image of and 'making the world a better place' with insert inane startup name (Worldcoin, really?) attached to some pernicious data mining business model.

Honestly, YC may still have tons of capital and some cache in the Valley, but outside of it, especially if you've actually been in the Bitcoin community you will see Altman's work for the same type of ICO scam that it is. And like most of these guys they're transplants to CA, which is no surprise. I really wish they'd stop trying to cling on to our disruptive culture, and perverting it with their headlong greed.

Is he still CEO of OpenAI? At this point I'd consider it equally as scammy as this project.

Honestly, I'm just wondering if they're going to hire Carlos Matos [0] for this shitcoin, too.

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5nyQmaq4k4
Also, those complicated architectures are often quite unreliable anyway - just in ways that don't show in metrics. Slack comes to mind: not only its functionality is poor compared to eg IRC, but it fails in hilarious ways, eg showing duplicated messages, or not showing them at all. Another example is YouTube - the iOS app gets confused when displaying an ad, which results in starting the playback at a wrong time offset. I guess it's because companies like those don't care about actual reliability - what they do care about is availability.
I have yet to hear of a single crypto idea in the last 5 years that was either stupid, malicious, or both.

“How do we print free money for everyone in the world? Oh I know, we’ll just make it virtual money! Also eyeballs!”
I've adopted a practice of having odd backgrounds for video conferences.¹ I generally find these through Google image search, but I often have a hard time finding exactly what I would like. My own use case is a bit idiosyncratic and frivolous, but I can see this being really handy for art direction needs. When I used to publish a magazine, I would often have to commission photographs for the needs of the publication. A custom photograph (in the 90s) would cost from $200–$1000² depending on the needs (and none required models). Stock photo pictures for commercial use were often comparable in cost. Being able to generate what I wanted with a tool like this would have been fantastic. I think that this can replace a lot of commercial illustration.

⸻

1. My current work background is an enormous screen-filling eyeball. For my writing group, I try to have something that reflects the story I'm workshopping if I'm workshopping that week and something surreal otherwise.

2. My most expensive custom illustration was a title for an article about stone carver/letterer David Kindersley which I had inscribed in stone and photographed.
The technology to do that at reasonable cost does not exist and likely won't be developed in the near future.
The bit I don't get:

The time-bounded Kolmogorov complexity is an approximation. But it seems to be being used to prove that cryptography based on one-way functions is/isn't possible.

It's not obvious to this grandstanding ignoramus that the approximation taints the proof; nor that it doesn't. I just prefer proofs that don't include approximations.
Fair enough, it’s hard to convey tongue-cheek position in writing ^_^
Glad to hear it! My initial reaction was quite harsh and I guess I was afraid that would bleed into my comment.
> people claiming when ineligible

Proof of personhood doesn't solve that.

> claiming on others behalf (obvious ID theft/fraud)

Proof of personhood doesn't solve that. A government assigned wallet is merely a different target than a bank account number.
For discussion's sake:

- BFN reached out to A16Z, Worldcoin, Khosla Ventures largely declined to comment, which would mean that at least one person probably had a bit of runway from at least when the requests for comment were submitted. So yeah, you're probably right.

- Going from the github repos for GPT 2 and 3, those may have been hard launches:

Feb 14 2019, predating the first press for GPT-2 by a few days (was probably made public Feb 14 though) - https://github.com/openai/gpt-2/commit/c2dae27c1029770cea409...

May 28 2020, timed alongside the press news for GPT-3 - https://github.com/openai/gpt-3/commit/12766ba31aa6de490226e...

- Would it really have to be a conspiracy? Sounds like only one person would have to target a specific date or date range, and without really giving a reason.

One of the things that puts a hole in my own thinking here is that Sam Altman's name isn't really tied to the Dall-E 2 release. It's just OpenAI, and the press around Sam's name today still exclusively surfaces just this one Worldcoin story (https://news.google.com/search?q=sam+altman+when%3A1d&). So if this was actually intended to bury another story, Sam's name would have to have been included in all the press blasts to be successful. But the Buzzfeed story seems like it kinda died alone on the vine.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/request-for-proposal.as...

"A request for proposal (RFP) is a business document that announces a project, describes it, and solicits bids from qualified contractors to complete it."

Basically, it's a long laundry list of requirements for things you want to buy (e.g. software), with some vague justification attached. It's a thing in big companies and public institutions, which are supposed to have a high degree of oversight on any move they make. In practice, it's just another source of Bullshit Jobs, since the company publishing an RFP has likely already decided what they are going to buy and just have to go through the motions - a bit like those companies publishing job ads because they have to, when they already know who they are going to hire.
Operation Bearded Barbie: Cyber Espionage Campaign Targeting Israeli Officials
Request for proposal. Basically a list of requirements for something, and then someone will reply to it with a quote.
What does setting yourself up for a long-distance run look like?
https://varun.ch, having my fairly common first name (and the correct ccTLD) is pretty cool! It's just a static HTML website hosted with Vercel.
It's not hard to do, but it is unlikely to provide the privacy protection you want against any sophisticated chain analyzer, like Chainalysis.

Those ZK-pool based mechanisms all depend on the amounts being significantly smaller than the total pool in order to attain reasonable levels of anonymity. Unless you intend to take out incredibly small sums over time (at which point, why take 600m), statistical methods will flag you eventually.

I guess maybe if you wait long enough, in theory those pools could get big enough to allow you to more safely retrieve larger sums. But all the while you are trying to hide this from coworkers and not tell a single soul and live below your means. Easier ways to make a ton of money in crypto right now that don't put you in jeopardy of jail time if/when you screw up.
> vexatious litigants

If it's happening only on one or two campuses, perhaps. But these aren't new trends and have popped up all over the US.
If the table is copied somewhere else, you must also remember to update both copies when there is an update or other things can go out of sync.

(Depends on what this table is and how often it can change if at all.)
...or to the 99% of them who earn peanuts.
i am from another EU country and getting funding beyond 50k from the government is really hard. vcs and angels are super conservative and take no risks. the government is not paying your employees if you cannot pay them… and you are personally liable for their social security taxes. i doubt that italy can do what you say here as most EU countries handle things similarly. also, if things get harder than you thought they were going to be and can’t pay the government back you will go bankrupt and potentially lose your assets which you might have invested in substantially yourself. i will never take government loans again.
"Worldcoin says it eventually wants to erase the iris images to protect the privacy of those who sign up for its currency. If perfected, the company says the technology will distill the image of each set of irises into a unique string of letters and numbers, called an iris-hash, to be stored in Worldcoin’s database. As the company’s data consent form states, data gathered by the Orb will be used for “purposes such as training of our neural network for the recognition of human irises.”"
I wish I could help here. I have made exactly one foray into leetcode, wrote out an algorithm for a fairly easy tree traversal thing, tried to submit it and just was told it went into an infinite loop.

I copied my solution elsewhere ran it, and it worked fine.

The only thing I could guess is the input wasn't what I was expecting, but I couldn't verify what input leetcode was actually giving me, so I just walked away.

The whole thing was a waste of time anyways. I still have yet to ever get a leetcode question during an interview and I've been doing this almost a decade now.

Then again, I don't try and get jobs at FAANG companies or FAANG wannabes.
That brings up another thought I've had over the years. From an end user perspective, which is more valuable -- a Free Software program that is very difficult to understand and modify, or a non-Free program that has a well documented extension API?

For example, if the world of web browsers consisted of a non-free browser that was ported to run on almost any platform that had a well documented extension/plugin system, vs. a Free web browser that was a mess of spaghetti code that no one would really want to touch, and didn't support any extensions -- which browser would be more valuable (both in general, and in specific ways)?
I always assumed that GDPR was for taking data away with no consent.

Are you saying that people cant consent to giving away their data for something they deem worth it?

1G of internet is enough to use whatsapp for months. In some economies like Lebanon, that is lifesaving believe it or not.

Guess the question is, is GDPR taking away the ability for users to make decisions about their own data ?
https://www.locserendipity.com

You can serendipitously discover and search for old books and resources, listen to old out of copyright music and radio, and talk to a robotherapist, too: https://www.locserendipity.com/Rogerian.html
What happened is that SGI dropped it and then it got passed around like between one company after another while it consistently lost more and more market share to ARM.

Until MIPS was mostly irrelevant as an arch.

So eventually the company realized that trying to only build on MIPS was not gone work, so they Open-Sourced MIPS itself and they are trying to use their knowledge to be part of the RISC-V ecosystem.

But since they were late to that game as well, I am skeptical.
I ran into this lately when I hadn’t validated a successful file transfer. The script ran to completion against all expectations. Obviously you should check a hash before executing a download anyway, but this was just some automated build code.
https://bellebcooper.com/

I recently rewrote my site in Python as a learning exercise. It was a good first project to start dabbling in web development.
Building a Ferrari is just some wheels and red paint.. I think anyone can build that as well.
This is how it should be. Every generation should be wealthier than their parents. I bet this is the same feeling that people in the 50s had.
re edit 2: a fair number probably loaded the page a while ago and hadn't seen the edit. e.g. I sometimes open a dozen or so tabs at once and then wander through them through the day when I feel like it.
Survival in Space
This.

It's nice to find meaning in your work, but doing so is a luxury not everyone cann afford. More importantly ones work should never be the only source for meaning, nor the most important.

There are competeing schools of thought that value and life satisfcation can be measured by what we produce and what we consume. Both those schools of thought are lies, or at least incomplete.
Stop trying to whitewash this, this is a scam, just because he was the former Kingmaker of the SV startup scene doesn't mean he isn't a scammer and this isn't a scam.
Couldn't Alice just repeat the plaintext many times (number agreed in advance when she shared the OTP), split it into bits, label each bit with a sequence number, shuffle all the labelled bits, then encrypt?

Then Bob can decrypt, split the message into labelled bits, and sort by sequence number. If any any of the repetitions of the message differ then it was tampered with.
One of my personal favorites is C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\etc\hosts.
I think it's really cool! I like how the buttons are like more modern versions of old MacOS buttons!

I wish modern design practices didn't make it so button-y buttons look out of place. We've really lost a lot of accessibility with everything using minimal styling for buttons.
Worldcoin is absolutely collecting more information than iris hashes.

"Worldcoin says it eventually wants to erase the iris images to protect the privacy of those who sign up for its currency. If perfected, the company says the technology will distill the image of each set of irises into a unique string of letters and numbers, called an iris-hash, to be stored in Worldcoin’s database. As the company’s data consent form states, data gathered by the Orb will be used for “purposes such as training of our neural network for the recognition of human irises.”"

Would you like to invest in my new blockchain technology? Send me $100,000 and sign a non-consent and I'll explain it to you.
What isn’t fully thought out?

The categories in the report are weather related, equipment failure, and fuel supply issues. These are considered in the report mutually exclusive. But they aren’t, it is just a useful categorization.

You are simply wrong to think that they don’t consider intermittent resources as part of their planning. Wind stops blowing all the time, this is known. The fact that many natural gas generators iced over, fuel was too expensive, fuel wasn’t available, or they couldn’t maintain their equipment when needed was the principal source of lost capacity.
Last I checked, you had to write out your program on paper, using the special Fortran coding forms. Then you just gave the written out forms to someone who would type out your codes at a keypunch and give you a deck of freshly punched cards, or you could take care of it yourself.
I think most people's threat model is the same. They just want to protect all their data against all threats, to a reasonable level of inconvenience. It's too general to be useful.

So, instead of trying to come up with a threat model, just use best practices. Backups, password manager, blockers in browser, software updating, firewalls, etc.

Now, if you're the 1 person in 100 or 1000 who has a stalker or who is ordering drugs over the internet, trying to create a specific threat model is appropriate.
Deep Dive: SMEE and China's Attempt to Replace ASML Tools (2021)
Switching from KeePass to KeePassXC for work was one of the best decisions I've made in awhile.The modern GUI is cleaner, stuff is easier to find, and the browser integration extension is much better. I have yet to find any downsides.
I want to use this in a situation where I can control the focal distance (microscope). In principle you could even make an autofocus system with a zoom lens and a servo although the engineering is definitely non-trivial.

Is there a standard mount (other than DSLRs) that supports autofocus?
> There's Levin's complete one way function [1; Section 4.3]. Breaking it is proven to be as hard as any other one-way function, in other words if there exist one-way functions then this is one of them.

So you could refer to Levin's complete OWF as "one-way-function-inversion-complete"? And, since one-way functions are, by construction, the hardest to invert, it's function-inversion-complete?

Edit: Wait, I guess the second part wouldn't follow, because OWFs only include functions that are easy in the forward direction, so they don't necessarily cover functions that are hard in both directions.
I loved grub (1)--being able to fix a boot configuration issue during boot time was such a amazing upgrade over lilo. When I first saw grub2 and learned how it worked it struck me as the platonic ideal of the second system syndrome[1]. Everything about it was more complicated, expansive, configurable. The fact that they need `grub-mkconfig` is a sign that it went horribly wrong.

I had not heard of systemd-boot, I will check it out…

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect
The All-New DocSend Dashboard
Once people start crossing the line from promoting an ideal to promoting an identity, that's when they lose me.
One! 28 months and starting to read! (mostly simple monosyllables)
OTPs are vulnerable if you do the one thing that you're not supposed to do with a OTP, namely reuse the bits.

YES. "One time" means "ONE TIME". Use once and destroy.
The one time pad must be random, generated by a true random process. Not pseudorandom.
Not generated by an algorithm. Not generated from a shorter key. Not reused. Not generated by humans hammering on typewriters (see Venona).

One time keys are used for some crucial point to point links. Embassy to foreign ministry, higher military headquarters to high command, or spy to HQ.
Hackers flood internet with what they say are Russian companies' files
Apparently, "Request for proposal", which is a private-sector equivalent of a tender process (speaking from my point of view of doing a lot of consulting projects for the public sector). A tender process usually requires the agency to pick the quantitatively best bid (by some predetermined ranking scale, usually price or some price-quality combination), whereas an RFP has no such requirement and just lets the agency pick whatever seems subjectively/qualitatively the best choice.
I do not hold "free software" as a religious belief, no.

I do, however, believe in property rights. As such, if a developer wishes his/her creation to be freely available, I believe that this wish should be respected under the creator's terms.

As for free software as an idea, I think it has been equal parts awesome and crap.
> look at k8s or whatever the cool kids are using these days.

I'm fine with complex architecture and would actually welcome someone choosing something complex but the issue is that we have perverse incentives at work to introduce stuff just to pad our resume.

Kubernetes was designed for companies deploying thousands of small APIs/applications where management is a burden. I've seen companies that deploy 3 APIs running Kubernetes and having issues...
IFS is amazing.
No. You're wrong.
I believe in free software as a sensible and laudable approach to software, but not as the all-encompasing-single-organizing-principle that GNU seems to. It's a model of development that is of varying importance for different software deployments.

In general, I think the way I would say it is that I agree that, all things being equal, it would be better if all software were FOSS. The problem is not all things are equal and the GNU vision of FOSS is not helpful with that reality. Most often, when I find myself discussing FOSS, it's in a context where the FOSS advocate wants to push their overall goal for all software over the specifics of the situation.

There are a minority of software projects where I think it's very important, but I think the bulk of software projects can be closed source if that works best for the creators and I'm skeptical the harm outweighs the good.

So I believe in it but not the way GNU talks about it? And I think their approach probably does more harm than good.
yes, the usual industrial/embedded motherboard manufacturers build such things, some are NUC sized.
Nope. Green card requires PERM which I think is a bit more extensive than the H1B process.
I'm not defending the company, I'm applying Hanlon's razor to the situation involving the GPL licensing.

I'm not an investor in the company nor do I have any interest to invest. I just think you guys were being biased in assuming malice as well as blowing it out of proportion.

Your bias is due to your hatred of Trump and everything he touches. That's why you were so aggressive in your critiques against even the developers Trump's company employed.

Me not picking up a pitchfork in your witch hunt is not me being biased, it's you being a lunatic...
I'm excited for when that happens. I didn't think of the malicious uses, which now that you brought it up I can think of many, but I still think the pros are worth the cons
How could you say that Slack has poor functionality compared to IRC?
A software developer who is trying to sell products to businesses, software on which those businesses would rely, admits to creating an "ugly mess" of "spaghetti code ... full of shortcuts and hacks" and to embedding security credentials in the SCM.

I wish you no ill will, but goodness, talk about an anti-ad for your products.

Creds should be outside the SCM, and there are varying levels of "best practice" - vaults, environment variables of CI servers, text files with strict permissions outside the SCM, etc.
Money Stuff is Linear-ish
> I believe in free software but I do not like GNU and FSF zealotry

I don't believe you believe in free software.

> Free software (or libre software)[1][2] is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions.

If you believe in that, how can you consider what the FSF stands for 'zealotry'? They are simply standing by their principles, which has undoubtedly pushed forward the state of the art in software over decades.
yeah, and then you get charged nicely by your landlord, health insurance companies, the tax man, and a million other people for basic shit.
Amazon announces rocket deal to launch its satellite internet constellation
This reminds me of the story about the "go.com" program someone sold for £5, which was just an empty file: http://peetm.com/blog/?p=55
It looks suspicious because they reproduced the diagrams using what looks like a fucking typewriter.
that's awesome. I think CBT is really reductive. Quite pessimistic, as well - CBT seems to hold little hope of actually healing many issues, but only aims for symptom management. I think that's because it's not a very good therapy for many (most?) situations so it has to rationalize it by saying true healing is impossible.
>Why does everyone devolve into the same 'X entity is nefarious and they are trying to build a database to sell' or for x machine learning. Thats not what this is about. It's about identity.

Because all collected data is eventually sold.
First you try to sell access to the data. If that doesn't work, then you sell the data itself.

No one wants this crypto/nft/web3 world except rent seekers.
It's really not. It is simply very expensive to build up experimental validation of simulation code rewritten in a new language, and much more expensive than the aesthetic value given by programmers who want new things. There's nothing magic about the old things, there's just an existing ecosystem which works which would involve a whole lot of effort to recreate and most people think they have better things to do.
I think this is a good piece of advice. Consider a) someone else to talk to b) maybe see them less frequently if things are legitimately good.