skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Big_org is paying spammers to like their YT videos: what can I do?
Today I received a SPAM message on Whatsapp. It asked if I was interested in making some money with little effort.
I was curious, so I played along.

Turns out what they're asking for are likes on youtube videos.
Specifically, they want likes on videos from BIG_ORGANIZATION.
The simplest explanation is that BIG_ORGANIZATION hired a promotion company who in turn is paying spammers to get likes on their videos.

I wish I was able to do my part to make them stop. But I honestly don't know what to do.
I was about to shame BIG_ORGANIZATION here in this post, but that's not my point.

My point is: what can we do to stop this kind of behavior?
Whether it’s uncharitable or not it makes specific claims that can be assessed by anyone with the slightest bit of knowledge about these countries.

Again, which claim is incorrect?

> Brazil's history of monetary stability

Does Brazil have a history of monetary stability?

> Russia's respect for property rights

Does Russia have respect for property rights?

> India's domestic tranquility

Is India’s domestic affairs tranquil?

> China's financial transparency

Are Chinese finances transparent?

> South Africa's investment opportunities

Does South Africa have great investment opportunities?

One could argue much of this really matters when it comes to economic growth for individual countries. But all these properties certainly matter when it comes to forming an economic alliance across nations.

Which is why BRICS has been almost completely worthless and to the extent these countries have had any effect together it’s through bilateral agreements.
The geniuses and stewards of our civilization of just a couple of decades ago were trained on this very data. We don't yet know what outcome we'll get by handing out the world to the people trained on "new, up to date, factually correct, egalitarian and legal" data.
Many unpopular laws are also passed not during these events. Without comparison it's a meaningless statement.
Atmosphere rarely gets mentioned, in "space pollution" stories. It can be a factor in "the sky is falling!" stories:

(2022) https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/hubble-is-slowly-f...
Thanks for that Germany.

Won't you take her back and make her Minister for Castles or something,
The human brain isn't randomly initialized. It's undergone 500m years of pretraining.
Mao Zedong's CCP is as relevant to the present discussion as say Adolf Hitler, US treatment of Native Americans or British/French/Spanish colonialism. All awful, yet not awfully relevant.
https://github.com/mafriese/scarecrow
Can upload any files you want there.
Direct DL for one of the files: https://github.com/mafriese/scarecrow/raw/main/autoruns.exe
I'm a malware researcher and reverse engineer for a living. This is absolutely true, but oversimplified. Focus on

>They don't want to get caught and avoid computers that have security analysis or anti-malware tools on them.

Malware doesn't want to run in a sandbox environment (or in general when observed), because doing malicious things in the AV sandbox is a straight way to get blocked, and leaks C2 servers and other IoCs immediately. That's why most malware families[1] at least try to check if the machine they're running on is a sandbox/researcher pc/virtual machine.

I assume this is what this tool does. We joke at work that the easiest thing to do to make your windows immune to malware is to create a fake service and call it VBoxSVC.

[1] except, usually, ransomware, because ransomware is very straightforward and doesn't care about stealth anyway.
GT/s is a measure of latency (not total system latency, but the bus itself is only adding 128 billionth of a second). In fact it does not say anything about bandwidth if you don't know how many bits in a transfer.
Former Malysia PM Dr Mahathir Mohamad wrote the following on Twitter on the Ukraine war:

https://twitter.com/chedetofficial/status/162898188067786342...

In particular the follow up (European's love of war) is hilarious and not an uncommon view in that part of the world.
Like guns for civilians. Nobody should have one, except the Politician body guard.. I am not advocating for guns in Europe! it is just an example. We can use the example with private health insurance, private schools and so on.. it is more like to exemplify the "Do what I say, don't do what I do" kind of politics
> Why do Westerners hate the idea of BRICS so much?

Goldman Sachs coined the term BRICS. If the institution worked, we’d see Western finance rushing to join it.

Nobody hates BRICS. It’s just sort of pathetic. As a security consortium, it’s a failure. As a trade consortium, it’s a failure. It talks about a dollar alternative, yet when Russia needed one China and India reverted to their own currencies.

It’s a dumb idea that made sense when Russia could balance India and China. That balance has failed. There isn’t a unified global south.
Yep, just a rule of thumb – there are many things that the supermarket finds worth refrigerating
Well, obviously everyone is against child abuse. If you are not for this kind of governmental regulation of all communications you are FOR CHILD ABUSE. And that makes your opinion irrelevant.

/s

The power of government + media, both nearly captured by unaccountable interests, has me worried. Does everyone remember the 'soft rollout' of Total Information Awareness back in 2002? There was even a logo for the proposed new government program (US). They have not given up on this for a single minute.
>Hell, it’s easier for me in America to do business with either China or India than it is for them to do business with each other.

I don't see how you can make that claim from such a distance.
I have the naive feeling that early counting may have included 0 as a primitive right from the get-go. The need to say "nothing" seems pretty primal.
Rather, people make up excuses for the elite to cope. There are no good intentions involved in this.
Fair thoughts, all. I'm a big fan of Haskell, but I'm not without sympathy to Lisp, even if my own experience of the latter has been somewhat bumpy.

I'm curious, what are some of the important features for readability and collaboration that you mention Lisp offers?
More Like Bread and Games

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bread_and_circu...
> This, to me, means pretty much that "voters don't care".

This is simplistic. Some have simply lost confidence in their representatives and/or cannot find a decent candidate.
> Shipping compiled code works fine if you have a finite set of kernels. Just build everything for every target, gzip the result and send it out. People are a bit reluctant to do that because there are lots of copies of essentially the same information in the result.

That's kind of the point, you have to build everything for a lot of different targets. And what happens a year from now when the client have bought the latest GPU and wants to run the same program on that? Not having an intermediary compile target like RTX is a big downside, although I guess it didn't matter for Frontier.

I can't find any solution, AdaptiveCpp seems like the best option but they say Windows support is highly experimental because they depend on a patched llvm, and they only mention OpenMP and Cuda backends anyway. Seems like Cuda is still the best Windows option.
That is one demented way of looking at it.
Kind of like how a car is tied to an individual, via the logbook (in the UK at least). You need to think who you let use your laptop, lest they get you in trouble. If it's stolen or you sell it, you report it. To be fair, people were against passports and license plate numbers when these were first introduced, and it hasn't lead to the problems people envisaged.

That said... I don't know if this is feasible with a laptop. It's much easier to pawn my laptop, than it is to steal my car and drive it without me knowing. And at what point does a computer become a server, and are those regulated differently?

Knowing that you're never anonymous online would certainly improve some conversations, and mitigate some of the ability for state actors to e.g. sow discontent online. But it would arguably be a huge inconvenience and risk for everybody, so I don't know if it's worth the cost.
You are missing historical perspective - listen to recordings of western political leaders from the 70’s - whether good or evil, left or right, it is obvious they are clever, talented people in their prime years.

To have someone like Trump, Biden or Boris Johnson I charge would be unthinkable. We are governed by low calibre people that should already be in retirement.

Core of the problem is that talented people no longer go into governance in the West, it’s now low-status career. (You age to consider all career paths, not just becoming president).

In China it’s a high status career, and the results speak for themselves.

Until we have high-calibre, ambitious and talented people go into politics again, we will continue this muddling decline.
>It isn’t explicitly anti-American yet.

It is certainly not pro-petrodollar.

Which, given the blood the petrodollar spills, is probably a good thing for billions of people to get behind.
Bogosort is driven by 0 heuristics - just shuffle and play. Using an LLM as a high-level prior over your search is very different, and the author had to do a lot of problem-specific tuning to make it work well.
As a long as India & Brazil in the group, China can't turn it into an anti-western group without a doubt.

America should take QUAD to the next level ASAP
"If there are browser features that users want (like tabs) or webs standards that enable Cool Stuff (like modern JS) then users will go out of their way to install browser that support them."

Pretty sure that tabs were introduced by a software developer without any prior request from any user.

Same goes for "Cool Stuff". Few users even know what JS means, except that if they do not use it or disable it, they will constantly be met with pages instructing them, even commanding them, to enable it or use a browser that supports it. These were introduced by software developers on their own initiative. Users will go out of their way to try to make stuff work. If a page instructs them to install some software, then, generally, they will follow the instructioins.

Once users become familiar with something then they will expect it. That is quite different from users asking for something that does not exist. (Usually such requests for features are never filled as they would go against advertisers' interests in web browsers. Users want a web free of ads. Software developers depend on a web full ads. In this regard, users do not get what they want. Software developers do.)

Users have little control over web browsers. Software developers at the advertising companies, e.g., Google, and their business partners, e.g. Mozilla, have the control. The companies serve their own interests and the interests of their customers who purchase online advertising service. Those customers are advertisers, not users.

For example, browsers like Firefox and Chrome have at times hidden the full URL from the user in the address bar. No user ever requested that. Nor were any users asked if they wanted it. Chrome introduced a feature called FLoC. No user ever requested that. Nor was any user asked if they wanted it. The list of "features" like this is ridiculously long.

Users do not get features because they "want" them. They get the features that software developers decide to give them, without prior consultation.

Whether they want the features or not, they generally are stuck with them.
It encourages not taking BRICS seriously. Which is absolutely correct. BRICS as an organization is a joke.

The individual countries should be taken seriously. Which western countries finally have started doing over the last couple of years. The watershed moment was Russia’s attack on Ukraine. It finally dispensed with the neocon idea that they could spread free market democracies in Russia and China by simply trading with them.
Because member states like China and Russia are illiberal and left to their own devices pose a risk to global security and human rights. When these illiberal countries band together, the West loses economic and political leverage over them to change their ways.
People outside the BRICS sphere of influence don't want to see that rivalry be resolved through economic means - they'd rather profit (through their own military industrial complex' investments) from the turmoil that comes from invalidating BRICS as a concept within their own sphere.

However, there are billions of people within the BRICS context. Billions and billions. I think this is why Western-aligned folks are in such fear of it as a concept for world diplomacy.
> resulted in Russia falling back to their local currency

It took until May of this year—over 2 years from first sanctions—for the yuan to hit top currency on the Moscow Exchange [1].

Of course sanctions hurt both America and Russia. But they hurt Russia more. Within a year, it will be a total suzerainty of China’s, a dynamic that’s beginning to become apparent in the concessions the latter is already demanding on resource pricing [2].

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/13/investing/us-russia-sanctions...

[2] https://www.ft.com/content/f7a34e3e-bce9-4db9-ac49-a092f382c...
> I don't see how you can make that claim from such a distance.

The distance matters little if you're comparing reality with unbelievable claims that don't hold up to the fastest scrutiny.
Can you start with a single example?
Came here to recommend this wonderful service...

Allows you to create unique CC#'s for every single company, and you can ship to any address (because the "address verification" will always respond <OKAY>).
While this is a really interesting idea, and assuming that it's actually completely safe, the irony is that it looks exactly what I would expect a trojan to look like - somewhat vague promises of security that could be interpreted as snake oil, conveniently packaged as an EXE with scant information about who's behind it, what it does, and no way to verify any of it. No offense to the authors :)
I make systems like this for myself. Not suggesting they are popular or would be familiar to all readers. (Although I am aware of others who make them, too.)
The attestation would be done by your ISP or the next level along. The ISP/backbone could pass this information along to Web servers.
Live by the nanny state, die by the nanny state.
I think it is because CS is such a broad field, every little nook has a ton of different algorithms to study and, like you said, it is not that hard to tell students to implement algorithm X as projects.

While my EE roommates would often just spend their time solving the same types of problems from their text books over and over again. My roommates had a few lab classes where they did get assignments, but they were usually pretty small and couldn't be done at home.
That's because humans learn in stages of growing complexity and semantic depth, and LLMs don't.

The chatbots do what infant humans do: mimic what it "sees" until it gets the pattern consistently matching what it saw without any capacity to understand what it is doing.

Once humans have that part done, whole new layers of semantic learning kick in and create the critical analyses we perceive as "intelligence".

LLMs, as a consequence of their design, lack those deeper layers. They are not artificially intelligent at all. Rather, they're the latest iteration of what centuries ago gave us steam-powered songbirds.
I won't be surprised if GPT-5 would be able to do it: it knows that it's LLM, so it knows its limitations. It can write code to pre-process input in a format which is better understood, etc.

https://chatgpt.com/share/2fde1db5-00cf-404d-9ae5-192aa5ac90...

GPT-4 created a plan very similar to the article, i.e. it also suggested using Python to pre-process data. It also suggested using program synthesis. So I'd say it's already 90% there.

> "Execute the synthesized program on the test inputs."

> "Verify the outputs against the expected results. If the results are incorrect, iteratively refine the hypotheses and rules."

So people saying that it's ad-hoc are wrong. LLMs know how to solve these tasks, they are just not very good at coding, and iterative refinement tooling is in infancy.
> Like it encourages not taking these countries seriously, and not looking hard enough at ourselves to see how we can do better too.

One can also take the countries seriously but the 'BRICS project' not-seriously.
Very nice! Thanks for the link, that's great inspiration.
>He was accused of refusing to bake a cake celebrating a same-sex wedding event.

No. He was accused of refusing to treat a gay couple equal to a straight couple. And that is what he did.

He repeatedly admitted to refusing to bake a cake for a gay couple. He would bake cakes for straight couples without a problem. Gay couples? Nope.

>Phillips was perfectly willing to bake cakes for clients of any sexual orientation,

No he wasn't, this is a lie.

>he just didn't want to send a message in support of a specific event

There was no "message sending". He's perfectly willing to bake cakes for weddings of straight couples. He isn't for weddings of gay couples.

Dishonestly portraying it as "oh he just doesn't want to send a message" would only make sense if he refused to bake cakes for all weddings.

The only difference he cared about is that the couple is gay, that's why he refused them. This is behaviour that should be condemned, the proponents of such behaviour are not victims, they're evil.
Joint issues? It’s one of the drawback.

The video is mostly about the risks and why you shouldn’t consider using steroids, though.

Note: your story sounded quite scary
>stockpiling rupees without any way of exchanging them for anything

But .. that's nothing less than a huge opportunity for India to start building things the Russians need and want.

The same thing occurred with the Euro, which was doing fine until the energy sources feeding its growth were attacked, recently ..
The irony of this is I don't think this will substantially reduce either the percieved or actual danger present to children.

I don't think this will make parents stop worrying about their kids being grabbed by strange men, and the danger will be just as present as before.
The passive voice is doing a lot of work here.
Small correction: not "some hackers", but some malware families (the difference being that the check is automatic). And honestly, not "some" but "most of them" :).

Though I often see this implemented by calling GetKeyboardLayout, so this will only work if you actually use the Russian (or neighbourly) layout when malware detonation happens.
> don't see how you can make that claim from such a distance

I am travelling to India on a tourist visa in November and again in December. (I have family in India.) That literally hasn’t been possible from China for two years [1].

It’s also easier to do money transfers between China and India through the U.S., because both have capital controls and both flag large transactions with the other. (I do more business in India than China, but there aren’t many hurdles.)

[1] https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/india-tourist-visa-chi...
> purposely targeting civilians (entire cities of civilians) for destruction is a war crime

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Chongqing

Few parties ended up with really clean hands in WW2.
Playing devil's advocate (I don't agree with the conspiracy one bit). They might be saying that the war happened, and then "the media" used that to stop talking about covid.

Honestly, I would say that's just the media jumping on the next thing. Everybody was sick of hearing about covid for 2 years. The war was also a lot more threatening by then (at least in Europe).

As for Covid's evolution, like all pandemics before it (plague, spanish flu, swine flu, ...) disease evolution and human immunity reduces its danger and importance.
That will be the end of whatsapp then and any other mainstream secure messaging platforms. Probably will do eff all for the real bad actors, paedos and deviants.
> Also, tech creates new threats

Tech doesn't create terrorism or child abuse.
There are things that you can do that make you seem trustworthy, and you've done none of them.
FWIW GPT-4 is able to generate a plan very similar to one in the article: also involves feature extraction, program synthesis, iterative refinement.

https://chatgpt.com/share/2fde1db5-00cf-404d-9ae5-192aa5ac90...

So it's pretty close to being able to plan solution completely on its own. It's just rather bad at coding and visual inputs, so it doesn't know what it doesn't know.
No, neither of these are true. If Win27k startup is an 8k 120fps video, it is either latency or stutter if you don't have enough bandwidth. You can absolutely design a system with priorities set such that latency is above stutter-/drop-free playback, and if you do, the startup time will be unaffected by that bandwidth.

And, no, not all bandwidth is built to reduce latency. There is a lot of bulk, best-effort traffic - for example, YouTube and Netflix proactively distributing videos between datacenters across the world. (They totally do that before anyone ever clicks play, they have enough data to know what is likely to be needed where.)

The same applies to your YouTube/Netflix playback at home. It doesn't need to be low latency. The only effect of latency is a longer time between you clicking play and playback actually starting. From there onwards, you just need enough bandwidth to keep the buffer filled, and you can do that quite a bit ahead of reaching playback position. Latency is a real non-issue there.

Same locally for bulk copying files around. If your OS & FS is designed well, latency only shows up at the beginning of the operation. Most file systems were designed when data was on rotating rust, and that's dealt with readahead and the likes.
Also it might not be anything like EU or NATO. But instead of system to setup financial system outside the west. And here by financial system I mean how trade and transactions are done, not necessarily anything political about free trade and so on...
Brazil is currently the 8th global economy by GDP. Ahead of Russia but behind China and India. Also ahead of some G7 countries. And a population of more than 230 million people.

It might not be considered a power-house on its own yet but the potential is there. Obviously the current top dogs don't want one more big player at the table so the Brazil struggle is always to find a way to develop without getting into colission route with the West or the East.

Latin America is a whole "unexplored" world far away.
Truly frightening that these are the people who'll be contributing to the decisions made on the future of the internet for the entire rest of the world.
Not just that - it only works on smart malware.

There is plenty of dumb malware.

Security folks seem to get overly focused at times on the most sophisticated attackers and forget about the unwashed hordes.
I have never heard anyone refer to Neanderthal as a human unless they are talking in a "those are cavemen, early humans" way that's wrong. Where is this coming from? Is it a non-English world thing?

Generally Neanderthals are pointed out as an exception to cross species fertility since... humans have some Neanderthal DNA.
Hallo: Hierarchical Audio-Driven Visual Synthesis for Portrait Image Animation
S expressions are great for making valid syntax more likely - an old trick from Genetic Programming.
Obviously it's both. If you have something worthwhile to say, but say it poorly, people will find it difficult to care. Similarly, if you have nothing important to say, but present it in an engaging manner, people will be interested at first, but will cotton on to the lack of intellectual content pretty quickly.

To make a lasting impact you need both.
"WANTS to join BRICS".