skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
And on top of everything, the bot problem seems worse than ever in the past year. I'm noticing it more even despite spending less time there because the top replies to large accounts are all so worthless now. I have to imagine the problem is even worse for people spending more time there.
"Do I look like someone who would commit wire fraud?"
Yup, and I am curious about the math on collisions with this scheme. Cause 128 bits is a lot of entropy, and I would expect this scheme to have similar collision resistance of "it never happens with good RNG" as regular uuids, but a proof would be nice.
A program can only halt once, but can beep any number of times. So you can make a size X program (or turing machine) that simulates running every program (or turing machine) up to some size Y >> X, and whenever any of those programs halts it beeps. The last time it beeps will be when it simulates the halting of BB(Y) after more than BB(Y) steps, so BBB(X) > BB(Y) >> BB(X).

IIRC basically this same construction means that while knowing BB(N) lets you (very slowly) compute the halting problem for programs up to size N, knowing BBB(N) lets you (even more slowly) compute the halting problem for turing machines supplied with a halting oracle up to that size.
Charging $1/year for the ability to tweet and retweet should reduce spammers significantly.

But don't journalists in oppressive regimes (e.g. Venezuela, China, Russia, Myanmar, Arab Spring) use twitter to share information? They could previously share information with nothing more than an internet connection, but now they'd be required to enter payment info; what does that do for their anonymity?

If the idea is to improve accountability for posted content, this $1 charge might work, but only for those who are allowed to speak, not for the sizeable portion of the world's population who aren't and whose lives will be at risk if their identities are revealed. The sad conclusion is that those journalists may simply stop posting as it's not worth the risk to their lives.
Reminds me of the whole “Artist formerly known as Prince” thing, Twitter was a brand and renaming it to X is just stupid. Oh well.
No. One day a week would be useful though.
> Just admit you need the revenue (...)

Here's a reminder that Forbes reported that Elon Musk's Twitter is spiraling into bankruptcy, and things are so bad that Musk is even unable to pay rent for their offices.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2023/07/03/twitter...
> Well, here is X trying to make a product you pay for.

I think they still show ads if you pay for it, so it's really just adding insult to injury.
Per year not per month, which of course is just grist to your mill.
They tried, but pizza is the wrong shape. In early tests, calzones from new york had some success but the market demand wasn’t there for the new-zone, so it never took off.
Boy, that's a level of "sysadmin read too many BOFH stories and also thinks being 5'11" & bearded is a superpower" bombast I thought died out years ago.
At $1/year, this isn’t a revenue play because after card and/or platform fees - it won’t amount to much at all.

However, account signup will definitely drop considerably, because that’s a pretty big barrier for most users.

So I’m actually inclined to say, this probably is a strategy purely to combat bots.
A bot on its own doesn't cost Twitter much directly, but enough bots costs Twitter users.
it would be interesting if an AI with semantic understanding could read and understand all the material and you could interrogate it about the backup behind a claim.

it would be interesting if the entire lab notebook record was available to such an AI and cryptographically signed and dated. that would potentially prevent people from doctoring images and data, as has been recently alleged on multiple occasions.

it would be interesting if that AI was trained to do causal inference and do-calculus, and every paper published generated an incremental update to an automatically constructed meta-analysis and systematic research review.

keep going and make a large body of real-world e.g. medical data available to the AI, and every interaction could be an addition to the clinical trial data. and then make the AI able to generate new hypotheses and directions for experimentation to test those hypotheses.
I've been to conferences in the past and randomly we get on a table, think, _you know what?, that'd be a great twitter account_ then quickly hop and create an account.

I have access to 3 major conference random accounts that every year go up when the conference is happening and it's always a blast.
That's surprisingly the least of Twitter/X's current problems.
Not a Bot
> you'll reliably get a lot more NIMBY response from "set up a nuclear power plant in the neighbourhood" vs. "set up a gas power plant in the neighbourhood"

I don't associate the term "NIMBY" with either scenarios, just housing. I don't think there's much value to overloading it. It's not like anyone's trying to put a nuclear power plant in the middle of Boston to begin with.
> Twitter was a brand and renaming it to X is just stupid.

The rebranding itself is stupid, but the spin that's added to the rationale behind it makes the "X" brand sound eerily similar to Zombo.com.
“MCI”? (Not familiar)
It's better not to stoop to Elon's level.
I interpreted it more as exasperation.
> Why would future companies not follow that same model?

Because some companies are happy to be profitable without having to squeeze out ever last cent possible of their customers.

When enough people are willing to pay for social media, someone will realize that there is room to build a business that doesn’t abuse its users and they will have enough money to run it.
One of my favorite saying is this: "The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the state" (thousands years old saying and nothing has changed).

And, oh boy, do we have many laws.

It is by design, to oppress the people.
The Typographic Scale
World Rugby to adopt 'gamechanging' G-force tech to flag major head impacts
Email, username, and password?

With this payment?, maybe a webhook for paypal?

> Does their roadmap include biometrics?

Does it?, you're the one saying it's related.
It is still true even today for microcontrollers – many of them come with a miniscule amount of RAM, no MMU and generally unpredictable memory maps.
Servers cost money. Bandwidth costs money. And pre-X Twitter was bleeding money.

In the old days the grey beards called this computing model time sharing.

30 years ago people gladly paid AOL and CompuServe for their chat tools. How is this any different?
For sure. There's no way they'd break even at $1/year per user, let alone turn a profit, unless they're also running ads for those users.
5 1/4" diskettes, and a manual in a spiral binder.
8088? I swear I'm not a robot, but I wouldn't know how to answer that. Perhaps that's the correct answer?
"providing more bandwidth to transmit data than traditional radio"... anybody have numbers?
Attestation of personhood would be another possible solution. Might even be more effective given the cost of each new key ($10+).

https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-cryptographic-attest...
How did you find out about the long standing infection?
That is definitely not why the vast, vast majority of people choose UUIDs, though it is a nice property of them. The reason people choose them is because you can generate them without any synchronization in a distributed system.

To reply to your initial point:

> Whatever compression works on your int64s will work just as well on your UUID int128s.

This is not the case. Compressing non-random 64bit values (such as the ones in the article - they are sequential) is going to be way more effective than compressing UUIDs. UUIDs do not compress, you'll likely end up with a larger output than the input.

What the article does, essentially, is a dictionary encoding pass. The duplicate, expensive UUIDs are mapped to small, sequential integers.

I explained elsewhere that you can turn nearly arbitrary numbers of sequential integers into a few bits each.
I think people forget Stephenson’s cautionary note at the end of The Diamond Age — that the Primer is no substitute for parenting.
Amazon used to be pretty open to discussing SDMs who want to go back to being SDEs — have you talked to your manager about it?
I'm not a programmer, but it seems like they could make it non-trivial to automate the payment process. If I have to click 30 times per account, with a captcha, and wait a minute for the payment to clear, 10,000 accounts suddenly starts to become very expensive in terms of time/effort.
Elon's plan for X to become the "everything" app is not related to this particular news story.
Nah. Twitter never had this much of a bot problem before Elon bought it, which is a big clue as to what's actually gone wrong: He laid off all the moderators and all the staff who were training the automated bot detection algorithms. Extremely formulaic spam which would have been instantly flagged a couple years ago just piles up in my notifications.
I use freetaxusa as well (well their paid version from same company). It is slower than paper, but it saves progress.
Mild cognitive impairment. I googled mci adhd
I've often thought that these would be practical within a set of office buildings, and in fact, the speed would probably rival an email system's. And way funner.

SOME of the time. It clearly wouldn't replace email.

All the tubes would be out in the open, so clearing a blockage would be no problem.
Sounds like this fee is for new accounts only.
Official confirmation:

https://twitter.com/support/status/1714429406192582896

Starting today, we're testing a new program (Not A Bot) in New Zealand and the Philippines. New, unverified accounts will be required to sign up for a $1 annual subscription to be able to post & interact with other posts. Within this test, existing users are not affected.

This new test was developed to bolster our already successful efforts to reduce spam, manipulation of our platform and bot activity, while balancing platform accessibility with the small fee amount. It is not a profit driver.

And so far, subscription options have proven to be the main solution that works at scale.

More details → https://help.twitter.com/en/using-x/not-a-bot
You literally buy Filipinos to do this for you for like 5-cents per account. Maybe 1 cent, account creation never was an issue in today's bot / astroturf meta.

Hell, for like 5 cents/account, you probably can get Filipinos to post enough legitimate traffic about innocuous topics to look like a human before being turned into an astroturf bot.

IIRC, the typical Filipino baker makes $5/day. They literally can make more money making accounts for you all day long at 5-cents per account than legitimate jobs in their town.

That's 100 accounts made in a 8 hour period. More than doable.

-------

Like seriously, ever since 'Mechanical Turk' and other websites made cheap labor from 3rd world countries available, this has been a solved problem.

https://www.mturk.com/
Well like I said above, I think the spatial details of where you’re writing and where the thing you’re writing on is located and the details of the spatial arrangement of your writing itself are all part of it.
While there are undoubtedly new genres since this was last updated, wonder if in general electronic music has entered an amalgamated stage with innovative producers blending genres into very idiosyncratic music that does not fall into a distinct genre.

E.g. Clark, Max Cooper, Rival Consoles, Jon Hopkins, Arca are often described as "techno" or "electronica" but in a very broad sense. These descriptors are just umbrella terms. It's like describing both King Crimson and Blink-182 as "guitar music".
Nature has a more limited tool kit and has limited ability to bring together virus genes that would otherwise not occur in the same nucleus.
One way to frame this that I find fascinating is that increased equality of opportunity directly leads to decreased equality of outcomes. I think we're seeing both. While opportunity is still very unequal, it is arguably more equal than it ever has been -- both for cultural reasons, but also for technological ones, especially the internet. The combined knowledge of humanity is basically freely available to anyone with the skill to use it. Likewise it is much easier, as PG mentioned, for individuals to reach an audience, whether their field is business, art, politics, etc. As a direct result, it is easier than ever for exceptional (and/or lucky) individuals to become exponentially more successful than others, leading to an increase in inequality of outcomes. I've never thought of it in those terms before, and find it really interesting, as both forms of inequality are often lumped together as issues to be solved, whereas it now seems to me they may be in direct conflict.
Thank you. I use flashcards to study for Japanese and I'd like to use flashcards to study for math. Thanks again
I have a hard time believing so... in general. In specific circumstances, maybe?

My team and I toss out more than five hours a week in meetings, together. Claw that back and benefit from context this pluggable advisor won't have.
> I think we're pretty much out of interesting things to say about post-acquisition Twitter (Twixtter?); it seems to have settled into a stable state of lower expenditures counterbalanced by a smaller userbase and significantly reduced ad revenue, coupled to a dependency on lower-quality ads relative to pre-acquisition buyers.

I'm not sure that "stable" is the correct term, as Elon Musk's Twitter is dealing with lawsuits because the company is so screwed they can't even afford to pay for their offices.
> My hope is more on federation

Personally I see federation as N copies of the centralization problem.

I don't think it foundationally solves any of the problems that resulted in centralization of the web, or the incentives that lead to social networking evolving into social media. It just creates N copies of them. They are still ASPs, there are just N instances of them now.

Federation still segregates users into the "administrator class" and the "user class" for web technology. And the administrator class has a substantial power imbalance over the user class.

Users aren't platforming themselves on a federated system. System administrators retain "root access" and users are second class. Users have little to no way of operating independently of the administrator class, unless they are technically savy enough to administer their own node. And administrators still need to pay the bills (though many federated servers operate on altruism).

It's also rather nonsensical to me. Most of the arguments that promote Application Service Providers can be accomplished with peer-to-peer software.

The software can be remotely administrated, updated, and managed. You can deliver a peer-to-peer experience via a browser tab, an app store, or a binary. Those can still update the same way an ASP does today.

The user's data can be backed up and made highly available (though that becomes less important, because a user's social group is doing that too!).

Many of the arguments for someone to administer a server on behalf of a user are still valid in p2p, but the server becomes a p2p node - not a root administrator over the user's account.

Peer-to-Peer doesn't mean users have to build and operate everything. It just means the data they generate is theirs and their social connections are theirs. They can directly dial and communicate with the devices in their social group without needing to go through a centrally managed server.

The federated incentive model can still incentivize administrators to build and maintain systems for peer-to-peer networks without requiring a "first class" and "second class" digital citizen class structure baked into the fabric of the internet protocols.
I saw the first 2 episodes. It wasn't good.
Please read my conclusion where I commented on this exact point.
Many of the good ones don't have much audience
Hospitals usually store large amounts of gas under high pressure, especially common is oxygen. And some of the rockets being produced inside the Gaza Strip have ranges of up to 160km (r160). That’s a lot of potential for an explosion… it’s heart breaking watching the news streaming from the region.
And some New York-style Chinese food. Bay food might be authentic but sometimes you just need some properly deep-fried sweet-and-sour pork.
Also see https://briarproject.org/
"has raised millions of dollars throughout her career"
I got bored of it the same way I got bored of writing in a physical journal
Are any of these music AI's trying to use VSTi instruments and the like? It seems like with the wealth of amazing quality instruments that just accept MIDI data, this would be a really good idea and require almost no compute power comparitively.
I barely remember the actual story in cryptonomicon, but his tangents on who fucked who in Greek mythology, how to eat cereal with a beard, how to assemble a Linux distro with such an obtuse user interface as to defeat Van Eck Phreaking, or Plato's cave are absolute gold.
mouse army did kick some ass though
The scientists of the Manhattan Project moved to Los Alamos, basically the same as Nowhereland WY.

If this field is their career and their passion, they will do it.
>So it's a matter of the city appointing/the voters electing better DAs?

Possibly, but they work on the same team.

>a cop can't be jailed due to qualified immunity

Qualified immunity protects them from getting sued directly in civil court by their victims for violating civil rights, etc. For example, if I ran you over and broke your leg, you could sue me for damages (medical bills, etc). You can't sue police (or judges or prosecutors for that matter). Nothing protects them from getting prosecuted except for lack of political will from DAs.

>the fact that he would be fired long before that for not behaving up to standards.

I wish that were true, but it's not. They investigate themselves and you know how that usually goes. If they do get found doing something unconstitutional, they usually get a half week suspension at most. Also, they are under no legal obligation to protect or help you. They are also not required to even know the law from a legal standpoint. Also the FOP is probably the most powerful, unabated by union busting unions in the country.
I'd way rather pay a dollar.
This understates the case. PG’s essays predated the creation of YC and this “space” (as in this forum called HN) was first coded and moderated by PG.

Obviously many others played crucial roles, but literally none of this would be here without PG’s ideas. The fact that it is and we’re discussing how his ideas may describe effects he’s benefited from only makes them more compelling, IMO.
>At $1/year, this isn’t a revenue play because after card and/or platform fees - it won’t amount to much at all.

It isn't purely about the $1 per year revenue. It is about having a customer credit card on file which reduces friction for every future situation in which the user is charged which increases future revenue.
I think this kind of defeated attitude enables this behavior. You should expect good behavior by default from public officials, normalizing the idea that this kind of corruption is deviant (even if it is more common than that) and expect punishment. Even as a bystander you can help influence opinion, expectations, and standards.

This is a good tactic in many other situations as well.
That's optimistic thinking. I don't believe that will happen even if people realize that it is possible. Because tracking is not detrimental enough to user experience that people move off of existing platforms.
I remember thinking the same thing of a few Gibson novels. What do you recommend that doesn't fall flat at the end? That actually has a point leading to a good ending?
it's possible the ones that are trying to make money are the ones who are more likely to be found
Victoria's electric vehicle tax thrown out by High Court
but ... those horrible function keys!
Existing accounts would be seasoned, and they can filter existing bot accounts over time.
There are for sure other bot management strategies out there (Web Environment Integrity is strictly hypothetical for now, iirc) but the problem is that those strategies cost money, and often quite a bit. Which, I guess "pay $1 to sign up" is _also_ a strategy that costs money, but that cost gets passed to users :P

Honestly though, $1 almost seems too low to be effective in that regard, at least relative to the specific risk/reward of Twitter. For a small forum or something, sure... but if you were interested in running automated Twitter accounts, and you knew for sure that you wouldn't get caught, $100/year to run 100 accounts is absolutely worth it so long as those accounts bring in some kind of money via whatever scam/spam/promotion crap you're running.
Yep! I think all of those repos will either proverbially die a hero or live long enough to see themselves as a villain.

And thats because of the fundamental tradeoff of dynamic typing vs static typing. That part no one can disagree on.

The only disagreeable part I believe I'm saying is where does the dynamic typing scale limit happen. As a polyglot developer, working a lot with junior developers, I can say that dynamic typing hits a scale limit of feature velocity / production support / cost much faster than the general folk are aware of.
Unbelievable
My sister and I have been watching Frasier for over 20 years now. It's our comfort show. She had a Frasier themed birthday party. I'm so excited that this exists
The Internet Could Be So Good
In my experience these models are very bad at describing electronic music beyond extremely clear features like drum and bass vs techno.

The best model is/was the Pandora's Music Genome Project - but likely due to the fact that it is heavily supplemented with human input.
Can’t become the everything app he dreams of unless your credit card details are in there somewhere.
That feels very inaccurate, the C/C++ extension for VSCode has 50 million downloads for example. Just anecdotally, most of the developers I know use VSCode for non-webdev things as well. I think you're underestimating the popularity of VSCode in general.
Maybe just fill a tube container with nvme and have a few USB connected channels on the end, make a little bot to plug it into compute for each step of a processing pipeline. If you move 10T in 30s that’s like 300G/s?
Ask HN: Self-Petitioning for EB2-NIW
I am an ML postdoc with ~200 citations and a few papers at top ML conferences. I would like to apply for the EB2-NIW and I am wondering if it is really necessary to go through a lawyer. I have heard from a few people online who have self-petitioned, but from what I have gathered, most people go through lawyers. The cost is around ~$5K on top of the premium processing fees of $2500, so this is not negligible.

I was wondering if people could share their experiences and give some advice.

Thank you.
And then generally all the smaller S-curves build on each other to make a curve that looks exponential for much longer, but ultimately turns out to be a sigmoid as well. One thing I muse on occasionally is whether the same will ultimately be true for technological progress as a whole.
LLM cracks into your blog: "interesting blog post today about the 8088, thank you! that 8/16 architecture, with some 32 bit ops and, through segmentation, a 20 bit address space really expanded the possibilities for this chip. These PoTeNcY pIlLs will expand your possiblities even more!"