skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How can I enable a dumber phone to carry sometimes?
I use my smartphone too much. I'm trying to embrace boredom, so I've been leaving it behind when I go out to dinner and such.

However, I'd still like to be contactable via text during those times. (Apps are the problem -- social media, news, etc.)

I still need my smartphone often, like when I travel or when I'm in a work meeting. So I cannot switch to a dumb phone permanently.

But when I'm out for social occasions, I'd like to just take a device that only texts. (I don't even need voice.)

I can get a dumb phone, but can get my phone number to send texts to two devices? Then I could take the dumb phone when I want to detach a bit.

Or are there smartwatches that just receive texts and no other notifications?

I looked at The Light Phone, but it looks like that requires you to actually switch phones.

https://www.thelightphone.com/products

This would be perfect if I could have in addition to my smart phone and just choose which one to take when I leave the house.
> Parliaments and courts.

And how can the parliaments, and the people who elected them, openly discuss what speech to ban, if the speech in question is illegal? Censorship is inherently anti-democratic.
The FDA is filled with antivaxxer sympathizers who throw lots of blocks and hurdles into vaccine testing. Many of the procedures can be shortened with absolutely no loss of safety. A lot of amazing vaccines have been killed under these protocols.
Yes, the blank word "education" means essentially nothing. I think most people on HN (including yourself) understand my intention, however you are absolutely correct that "education" can mean wildly varying things if they have pre-conceived outcomes to which "education" is being directed.

cough Vocational education and training centers cough [0]

My definition is along the lines of independent thought, critical thinking, alternative perspectives, the scientific method, (stretching here: mathematics as a language of observed behaviour). Teaching them to fish rather than giving them a fish. Anything other than blind acceptance, or at least providing a sense of judgement to know when blind acceptance may be justified.

And none of this is easy because 1) once a child is of school age they've already got a firm base of blind acceptances that, basically, work against their own education, and 2) independent thought and critical thinking means a lot of asking "why?" and lots of asking of "why?" takes up precious[1] curriculum teaching time.

[0]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_internment_camps

[1]:Precious to school and education board/department management KPIs that have no provable basis in positive real-world outcomes for either society or the individual
And this is precisely why I do not expect any defense from the right. When discussion of gay people in classrooms and in books is verboten and when tame drag shows draw crowds brandishing weapons and laws banning them entirely, I don't see people on the right leaping to defense.
This is very informal and the blog post is systematic and probably on its way to a peer-reviewed paper.

> How can the author believe that his examples won't be solved in the near future?

OpenAI folks are not that rosy lol (https://futurism.com/the-byte/openai-ceo-people-will-be-disa...)

Established researchers think LLMs won't get to us human-level AI (Yann LeCun https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1621810424910958592), but let us assume they know nothing.

Let us discount all that. Let us assume LLMs will do that. What sized model will solve logic at or near the precision formal logic gives us? A 10 times bigger model? A 100 times bigger model? A 1e9 times bigger model? Can formal logic + deep learning give us a shorter path?

> Regarding AI conferences. Researchers often continue to ride dead horses if they find them interesting. As far as I know, symbolic approaches have never lead to any major success in AI. All the big AI achievements in recent years are based on machine learning, on deep neural networks specifically.

SAT solvers (a small part of symbolic approaches) are used in a lot of places:
https://ai.stackexchange.com/questions/67/what-are-the-real-...

I remember in 2010 that deep learning was a dead horse. Deep learning was practically useless pre 2010 and a joke too (unlike formal logic which has almost all of its current uses outside of AI).

Sorry, this position is very short sighted, and I am young person and was a kid during the 90s but I have read the history of AI. This is like claiming in 1990s and early 2000s all the advances in the past decade were from non deep learning methods and saying we have to stop research in that. Imagine how bad that would have been.

Interestingly, I see experienced researchers (or complete novices and lay folks) taking your position and younger ones in AI being more balanced. I guess the experienced folks have a moat that needs protection and novices fall prey to popular press.

Imagine thinking Newtonian mechanics is all that is needed as it stood for centuries. Thankfully, physicists were not short sighted. Hopefully, AI researchers resist the pressure to be short sighted and fashionable.

Penrose wrote about this very same thing:

"Fashion, Faith, and Fantasy in the New Physics of the Universe"

https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691119793/fa...
Nitpick: Nobody claimed Sisodiya was the LoP.
This has not really changed. There are negative consequences we should accept, such as criticism and disagreement, and negative consequences we should not, such as an online mob getting you fired from your job or the government sending goons to disappear you.
True yes but a lot of cracks are real and still include malware. And it can even be introduced remotely. A malware downloader is a few lines of code hidden among millions.

Also analyzing malware tends to make one more paranoid. This is definitely a thing too.

And the most powerful features of it like hexrays require cloud cooperation so they don't work :(

I really wish it was affordable for individuals because I would pay for it if I could.
Also an astalavista.box.sk user (typo)
It goes both ways. For someone who wants to work in the same place and retire, in say 10 years, could work out great. Unless the company goes bust using unsexy tech could also be a good thing
> It’s not like you can pull people off the street and have them get away with infrastructure this simple

I know that in many cases simple != easy but I can't help feeling sad while reading this.

When I started my career cloud wasn't yet mainstream bu as a beginner I was able to deploy and configure a nginx proxy and loadbalance between 2-3 backend servers without too much effort. It wasn't some kind of rocket science.

I guess the current issue is that cloud has been marketed so much that nobody who's just starting out in the industry even has a second thought about using it by default. What can I say, great job from the cloud providers in capturing their customers as soon as they get in front of the store.
> Education education education. The silver bullet.

Something like 25% of the population has an IQ <90. Education cannot take such people very far. I support almost absolute free speech nonetheless.
> Many European countries have well-designed, robust hate speech bans that have worked well for decades

... to attack democratic debate and suppress those who dare oppose the powers that be with endless SLAPP lawsuits.
Keep in mind that the only reason this works is because it's all running on beefy bare-metal servers.

If you want to run it on Kubernetes I hope you know how to install/maintain K8S on-prem, because there's no way you're going to get this level of performance from any cloud provider (not at a sane price anyway).
The problem with this logic is that censorship is divisive. Whoever is being censored will resent it. They'll build their own networks and partition themselves, which only deepens the divisions.

Whereas if you debate them and they lose in front of everyone, their ideas become discredited and the viewers become inoculated because they've now heard an effective counterargument instead of encountering bad ideas for the first time in a place controlled entirely by their proponents.
Those are good points! But let's consider them in a practical light.

For the mob boss, he is committing an actual crime of extortion. If a shopkeeper goes to police, the mob defense would not be "we were in our rights to threaten", but "we never said this; no idea what the shopkeeper is saying". A prosecutor would have to prove that it was indeed an extortion, but if he proves this to a jury the specific words said would be irrelevant and a first amendment claim would fail.

The same way if an insider is telling a friend about a stock merger during a quiet period, it is an actual crime. The specific words and methods do not matter.

It is tempting to restrict the speech in an attempt to minimize the evil. But giving state this power sooner or later vests it in some political clique that will use it for political suppression; original noble goals be damned. And this is almost impossible to undo.
Same here. Younger developers often don't realize how unproductive they are with their JS based frameworks.

The one thing that I found that makes knocking out a simple web app fast is Streamlit in the Python ecosystem. Setting up Python is a bit of a nightmare but once out of the way, using Stramlit is quite nice. Although no visual designer is a bit of a let down.
> the frequency is pretty low so it doesn't even have to be fully airtight

Am I thinking about this the wrong way? Low frequency will penetrate more easily, high frequency will be blocked. Did you mean high?
Do you always disregard someone's opinions based on the fact that the person is a weirdo? :-)
I would say the most important aspect of this news, as it will almost certainly never be solved one way or another, is for how research is conducted going forward. Clearly, the general population will be averse to this kind of research being conducted, let alone funded, by their own governments. However, said governments and others want to continue this kind of research, so I think the lack of transparency we've seen these past few years will only increase. For example[1]:

> an NIH official said EcoHealth Alliance had not been able to hand over lab notebooks and other records from its Wuhan partner that relate to controversial experiments involving modified bat viruses, despite multiple requests.

[1] https://thebulletin.org/2022/08/nih-to-terminate-ecohealth-a...
We also had p2p file sharing before the internet or any networking existed. Files were shared physically, literally from peer to peer. You would meet with your friends and exchange floppies or CDs, take them home, copy and return back. No IP addresses, no VPNs, nobody could take us down. True decentralization.
The Shaman as a Poet
Shamanism, the ancient practice of spiritual healing and connection with the natural world, has long been shrouded in mystery and wonder. It's a mystical journey that can take you to places you've never been before, connecting you to the spirits that guide us and the energies that surround us.
Well, thanks for the Wikipedia link. It says average complexity is very important for sorting algorithms and cryptographic one-way functions. I found especially this part remarkable:

> Note that it is not desirable for the candidate function to be NP-complete since this would only guarantee that there is likely no efficient algorithm for solving the problem in the worst case; what we actually want is a guarantee that no efficient algorithm can solve the problem over random inputs (i.e. the average case). In fact, both the integer factorization and discrete log problems are in NP ∩ coNP, and are therefore not believed to be NP-complete.

Regarding this question:

> How do you take the uniform distribution over matrices over the (infinite) real numbers?

Well, naively, how about screw the real numbers and just take the uniform distribution over the, say, 64 bit floats, which are conveniently finite? At least if we use those in practice? But I guess this goes in the direction of "Because in the real world, your distribution will rarely be uniform", since the 64 bit floats are a subset of the real numbers, and any uniform distribution over the former is equivalent to a non-uniform distribution over the latter (probability 0 to any reals not in the 64 bit floats).
>If it’s a no in reference to vague reasons, it’s just gate-keeping.

What if it is yes with vague reasons? Why "yes" should be easier than "no" ? It's potentially extra work and extra code to manage. If something is vague in it's usefulness enough that it doesn't get yes with good reasons it should probably go back to drawing board
All theories on consciousness are unproven, but some feel right to the individual.
This gives me some serious nostalgia for those simple and naive days. Around 95' is when I accomplished my one and only successful attempt at cracking. Some company had their software downloads in password protected StuffIt archives, anyone could download the software but you had to buy it to get the password so you could decompress the archive. I really wanted to use that software and I searched everywhere on the net and on BBSs for that program or the password with no luck, so I set out to crack the archive. I made two archives, one with password protection and one without and then opened them in ResEdit, turns out the only difference between them was that the protected file had a second resource other than the data, delete that extra resource and it became a normal unprotected StuffIt archive.

I shared my findings to the community and within days it was all over the web and on every BBS, people where pretending they were the ones who made the hack, it was everywhere. Within weeks StufIt released a free update to fix this and I felt quite powerful at the effect I had caused. Years later I realized that my crack was banal and probably common knowledge to anyone but an ignorant teenager, most were just smart enough to not share it and ruin a good thing. So I inadvertently made the digital world a safer place.

Edit: thinking on it more, I doubt I was even the first person to share this information, I was just the first person stupid enough to share it on an easy to find warez/cracking site that everyone had access too. I also seem to recall that Stuffit explicitly said that this password protection was not a safe or reliable way to protect your data, if you wanted that you had to upgrade to the paid version. I probably had no real effect on anything and the new password protection StuffIt rolled out was probably already in the works when I showed up.
If you read Dijkstra's letter it wasn't about formal proofs. It was about go to statements being very hard to reason about, especially when trying to understand the flow of a program and how you got to a particular point in its execution. The word "proof" doesn't even show up in the letter. It's only a page or so, well worth a read instead of guessing at what he may have been writing about.

http://www.u.arizona.edu/~rubinson/copyright_violations/Go_T...
> To be considered an opposition party, it should be the second largest party in number of seats in either of the houses.

Every party that isn't in government is by definition an opposition party. You're mixing up the criteria for recognition of the LoP of a house with what an opposition party is.
Airline Industry's ancient IT infrastructure
As a veteran traveller I've always wondered why when there's a hiccup, it takes the gate staff so long to find an alternative and what is it that they are busy typing on their keyboard. A typical query like "Is there an earlier flight I can take" is usually answered only after 5 minutes of frantic tapping. What are they typing and why is it so complex when I can pull up Google Flights and find the information in a fraction of that time. This video does a great job of explaining what's going on behind the scenes and how even slick looking booking systems on the front-end are all interacting with ancient command-line based systems on the backend.
I would be disappointed if no one at NSA used "HYPNOTOAD" as a moniker for a related tool.

/jk
I'm also Canadian, the ones I know are not polite, maybe passive aggressive that gets confused with polite by other cultures. I've generally found Americans more polite.
> Getright

That's a name I haven't heard in a long time! It's still available! https://getright.com/
It sounds like you believe those in power are more astute or intelligent than those they exercise power over. I disagree. I don't think there is a positive correlation between a person's ability to impose their preferences on others and the quality of their preferences. If anything, I would guess there may be a negative correlation, considering the kind of person who is likely to become a successful politician. Thoughtfulness and intellectual rigor is not exactly reward in politics.

I would also bet that those who are the most interested in imposing their preferences on others probably are way less likely to listen to or attempt to understand different perspectives, leading to not even understand the views and practices they seek to ban.
The question was not "why was it a pandemic", yhe question is, why was it so transmissible when earlier outbreaks, like SARS, had relatively much poorer transmission? That's the typical profile of new viruses.
"People want a blunt weapon to promote their politics with."
You are right and thats the most fascinating / absurd part of this whole thing. Somehow wet market vs lab leak has political sides and people are emotionally invested in one over the other. Its crazy, lets just have the truth and move on, either way it came out of China and savaged the world. People don't want the lab leak theory to be true for the sole reason that Trump said it and they believe Trump is the devil. I am very much not a fan of Trump and saw his actions leading up to the election as a clear and present danger to our democracy but still have no emotional investment in one theory over another. I just want the truth. This is an example of how insane American politics have gotten over the last 8? years
There's a ton of apps that are not Wayland native at all yet, and plenty that never will be because of the dubious security benefits.

Chrome, for an example. Firefox isn't much better.
Can live for 75 years, and appear to be growing back smaller as a species.

Well.. if you harvest fish and prefer the bigger ones, Thats pretty much selection pressure on a plate right there.
> Pavan Khera broke the law of the land

Which law?
> Hackernews now advocating

THE HACKERNEWS?!
It does not seem to simulate pressure very well.

If you create a closed container with zigzagging tubes, you would expect water to go fast through the tubes but it won't.
In old days, software is not that soft. Floppy disk, CD, DVD are gone now.
That's true in the ideal, and I 100% agree. But not in the actual real world, because, very tritely put, nobody is an island.

Individual choices always have some blast radius. Some small (what movie I'll watch), some large (what chemical to kill my weeds with), some of unknown magnitude (whether to lock up my gun in a safe or not).

That's where the trap comes in. Somebody needs to meddle at some point. Who's going to define what that point is? Who's going to define the course of action that's both virtuous for the community and for the individual. I certainly hope it's not going to be the crazies.
Not working on a Safari browser. It failed to let me use the delete key.
It's interesting that Youtube is also recommending this to me today. I wonder what caused this coincidence. Anyone else seeing this on their Youtube feed?
> it allows the most amount of information to be passed back and forth

It also allows for the most amount of noise, and there are tons of people who don't want to spend their lives filtering through a bunch of noise produced by bad actors and would rather trust someone reputable to do it for them.
Safety is often the first reason given when removing freedoms. It would be a fallacy to compare a poisonous coolaid or more precisely, Flavor-Aid, to speech even when yelling fire.
I honestly, don't see it making much of a difference. There's already more disinformation than a person can consume in a lifetime.
That seems very reasonable for SAT.
in general, the concept of "taking away rights" is ill formed. my rights end where yours begin. in particular, i would take away the right of companies to fire people based on their speech outside of work, and i would take away the right of social media companies to censor people's political views. these can both be phrased as awarding new rights to people, namely a right to employment, and a right to internet expression. both of these come across as much more foundational rights than the alternative.
What was the origin of Bubonic Plague, of AIDS, of Polio? Do we know in sufficient detail? I remember many saying that the exact origin of SARS-CoV-2 may never be known. Say it did escape from a Chinese lab - is that all you need to know? Or would you want to know how it came to be in the lab in the first place?
> Surely you cannot think restricting speech helps you in any way? Do you think it helps turn those that dislike you on your side?

I think it removes the ambiguity. If you find laws that prohibit someone from being a literal Nazi disagreeable and would choose not to live in a state because of it because of 'free speech', that's fine. Just as I'd be fine for not living in Florida or Mississippi for the inverse of that reason.
I'm not saying it's necessarily the case, I'm saying it's possible. You can't just assert that ownership structure has nothing to do with it without evidence for that.
EA. That's the problem right there. With all the employee abuse, I wouldn't trust that company to do any thing important.
Actually, only Klingon was officially rejected. The Tolkien languages never had a fully-featured proposal to Unicode, but space for them is even tentatively allocated in Unicode (https://www.unicode.org/roadmaps/smp/, U+160xx).

Klingon was explicitly rejected for a few reasons. Most prominently, there were serious concerns about Paramount asserting trademark rights over the characters. Especially at the time of its rejection, it wasn't clear that there was any organic use of the script, even among people speaking Klingon (note that in its earliest uses, it wasn't even used consistently as an alphabet for the language it is supposed to represent). Those reasons don't apply to Tengwar--and it's also been noted since then that the Unicode committee might look more favorably on a newer proposal for Klingon.
This looks like the worst environmental disaster in the US in the recent memory and we need to read Chinese news sources to get information about it? I am curious, where are all the environmentalists exactly? Where is the outcry? Here is my hypothesis: the people who say they care about the environment (climate change), do not really care about the environment. Instead, they simply repeat what they have read on the New York Times front page. And the New York Times front page is silent.