skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Spotify's Discover Weekly seems to be a healthy mix of close enough guesses and random but not too random suggestions. Song radio is okay. The pop up recommendation for specific new songs/ albums feels so unrelated to my likes that it must be a sponsored recommendation. """Smart""" shuffle exclusively sends me whatever was popular on the radio in the last 5-30 years despite my listening habits being the opposite.

Pandora was much smarter, but seemed to run out of songs instantly.
He was a middle office worker, in security/admin, where he verified then authorized big trades. He used his excel and VB skills to impress a front office manager and get a place in the front office as a market maker (I think he has been assistant analyst in between the two job, but that isn't relevant).

Société Générale used the same id / email adresses for him after he changed jobs, and since the user management was lacking (and wasn't audited), he was allowed to make huge trades as a MM, and authorize his own trade as an ex-security/admin guy.

I might be wrong about his exact job title in the middle office, but I 100% guaranty you the rest.
Is Chaum's eCash concept still workable nowadays?

* https://chaum.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/eCash_2.0_9-7-2...

* https://chaum.com/ecash/

* https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/the-genesis-files:-how-david...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecash
> It's easy to miss that kind of difference even if you wrote the code yourself.

The developer in the story had no idea what the code did, hence they would not have written it themselves, making it impossible for them to “miss” anything.
Nearly all SSNs have leaked by this point. The US needs a cryptography based ID system. That way each identification event is distinct, and each company gets a different (irreversible) derived ID for a person.

On that larger point I'd agree that companies should not have PII data they don't need.
> Based on what?

Consciousness, downgraded due to cultural conditioning.

For example: sometimes climate change is a huge deal, other times it is just fine. Consciousness (2024) seems unable to (try to) be consistent, it's like it lacks an index or logic processor or something. Maybe there's a startup idea here somehow.
> Orchestrated by Dutch resistance members (...) their goal was to inhibit the Nazi’s ability to track and deport Jews and other targets of terror. The operation managed to destroy over 15% of the records. Many of the participants were later captured and executed by the Nazis.

How did they get caught?
Self-hosting from an IPv6-only VPS
Fair point, but all that gets you is SSH listening, they way it has to be now anyways if you want remote access.

This doesn’t feel like an unpickable lock so much as a decorative cover that makes the lock less obvious.
While I wish that fwknop would have displaced the whole idea of port knocking by now, this adds the element of triggering command execution based on the packet, instead of the single fixed action of just opening a port.
Show HN: World's first video processing API & Stanford ask to partner
I think that's only true if you're using direct asymmetric cryptography. In the real world people use hybrid asymmetric cryptography.

Hybrid asymmetric signing is: hash the payload, then use direct asymmetric encryption/signing to encrypt/sign the hash with the private key.

Hybrid asymmetric encryption is: encrypt the payload with symmetric encryption (e.g. AES) with a random key, then encrypt the random key with direct asymmetric encryption using the public key.

As you can see, with hybrid asymmetric cryptography, there's a difference between signing and encryption besides the public vs private key difference.
None of this really surprises me.

Even back to the Vista days, I always knew that once computers (and networking) get better and faster that we will end up with a bloated Operating System, doing things I don't not want it to do. Of course, nobody really gives a p00p because we all agreed to the End User Licence Agreement.

Here we are, now, with Windows 11. Where people are sticking to Windows 10 and, some, are willing to move over to Linux if/when they have to!

This is why I have always been a HUGE supporter of software freedom. Sure, some things may not be the "modern" way of doing things but at least it gives me FAR BETTER control over my computer than the p00p I see in the land of Windows.

I am not perfect and I dont always practice what I preach. I can be just as hypicritical as the next person. I have a laptop running Windows (upgraded to 11 over a year ago) only to be used for my current job. I handed by resgination today.. and I can assure you.. when that job is finally over I am replacing it with Debian!

Other than this one instance of using Windows, my other machines have all been Debian for many, many years!

I hated getting back onto Windows (10) when I purchased that laptop. The amount of p00p is an absolute joke!

I really hope we see a big spike in GNU/Linux in the coming years!
There was an HN thread on how even if one has statistically significant correlations, impossibility of determining causality means interventions on what one believes to be an independent variable may have no, or even the opposite, effect on what one believes to be the dependent variable. Some related link (gwern?) gave as an example the poor track record of many attempted anti-poverty interventions.

With that in mind, our approach is very KISS: rather than attempt to manipulate other things, that may or may not work, or set up entire parallel "programs", we just have the destitute buy their food and shelter on the open market, and reimburse them for the expense.
Introducting PromptMage – simplifies creating and managing LLM workflows
It’s not a separate team for the EU App Store, it’s a separate team for other app stores in the EU.

As in one team for the Apple first party store in all countries and a second team for third party stores, which just happens to be in the EU.
I believe that this is one of the key takeaways for reasoning about LLMs and other seemingly-magical recent developments in AI:

"tasks—like writing essays—that we humans could do, but we didn’t think computers could do, are actually in some sense computationally easier than we thought."

It hurts one's pride to realize that the specialized thing they do isn't quite as special as was previously thought.
The certifications still exist but the craze seems to have died down.
Show HN: A tool that extracts information from impact tags in doc comments
What type of encryption is used?
I believe Audible is already using non human speakers as well and just making up names for the narrators. I can tell since sometimes pronunciations are wrong and sound similar to TTS mistakes.
Update : Shared it on X and now Stanford has asked to partner to build the tech together.
The 5 bit data frame proved useful in the lab at uni where one of our tasks were to build a routable network over serial. :)

Split each byte in 4-bit nibbles and used the remaining data bit for not-quite-in-band-signalling.
You really need to work all this up into an essay and chuck it on Medium or somewhere. Honestly.

I think I'm about to present as the traditional logical-to-the-point-of absurdity HN nerd here, but:

> I think that could be a plausible reading if we split the gay community from the queer community, but I also think that's both unlikely to happen and a terrible idea.

If "Queer community" and "Gay community" are different, it is possible to separate them. Or rather belong to just one, the other, or both.

Is the difference between Q and G not, essentially, one of politics?

(Not my communities, not my country, looking in from the outside, "politics" in a very broad sense, all those caveats. I'm picking up on that one sentence because I don't think there's anything else I can disagree with - I either agree, or I don't know enough to disagree).

BTW, have you ever run across the concept of a purity spiral? I'm not a fan of the source, but I think the concept is a good spanner to add to the mental toolkit. I think it would appeal to you: https://unherd.com/2020/01/cast-out-how-knitting-fell-into-a...
The complaint about his ego is warranted, but he also earned it. Wolfram earned his PhD in particle physics from cal tech at 21 years old. Feynman was on his thesis committee. He spent time at the IAS. When he speaks about something, no matter in which configuration he chooses to do so, I am highly inclined to listen.
They did do it though, and haven't been prosecuted. Having evidence of being manipulated by your boss seems to be a pretty good excuse. If they knew their boss was up to some shit but did it anyway, and stick to their story of being naively manipulated, they're almost certainly in the clear.
Seems, that we already have value classes in the EA builds :-)
Focused gaze peers out,
Framed by thoughtful, steady eyes,
Seeking new insights.

A brushing moment,
Simple tools, focused rituals,
Cleansing, renewing.

Stark white cylinder,
Held aloft, its purpose clear,
Clean and functional.

Analog timepiece,
Held in a steady hand's grasp,
Marking life's rhythm.
I believe the author is comparing their method against just the naive port knocking approach
Obsidian Sync is great, was worried you were describing it for a sec there
It is grounds for unification.

Listen to you discontents squabble. The stakeholders are happy to agreeably own your infrastructure.

⁂ looks like something that can propagate competitively in minds amid the established social norms.
It was also a good 8-part miniseries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Name_of_the_Rose_(miniseri...
Why do we like music? By Marvin Minsky [pdf]
What do you mean? The sun always shines while the great Xi Jinping is in power.

lol
Holding your breath when ascending is the number 1 thing every scuba diver is taught not to do.

Divers may hold breaths a little longer or breath out a little earlier to make subtle changes to their buoyancy when swimming horizontally. But this is definitely now how you are trained to ascend or descend.
So you are saying that Brooks, who was the manager of the System/360 project, for which JCL was created, and who calls JCL "the worst computer language ever", just doesn't understand mainframes and the contemporary environment they existed in and the problems they were solving?

I mean, he literally says "It was developed under my supervision; there is blame enough to go around among all the supervisory levels," so I'd think he knows what was actually going on during its development.
But if you present your badly written requirements to a person who has the culture to ask questions, you at least have that safeguard. After all, it's a collaboration.

And when you work with an offshore team, quite often as contractors, you have the issue that you don't get top quality.

The in-between company will do its very best to hire low to maximize profit.

The good quality developers work either on local grown software, or leave the country for better opportunity.

And you are now working with a group of developers whose livelihood depends on saying 'yes' or not saying 'no.

And because of this you will not know whether there is an issue in the requirements until x time later and the plane goes down.
Tell HN: Interview experience at a 3 Letter Agency
here's what I went through a while ago and my application got discontinued. I've been trying to serve my country for over 4 years (tried to enlist in the military, but ASD is DQ).

1. Submit resume and references + transcript.
2. 2 months before I got CJO.
3. Did a Hirevue recorded interview (after I got my CJO ironically).
4. Filled out SF-86 (100+ pages) month and a half.
5. 6 hours total interview with investigator (I mistyped some info on my sf-86 and there was confusion with gaps between unemployment). 2 months after I submitted my SF-86.
6. Scheduled full scope poly 2 months out.
7. Flew out to do my poly and waited an hour and a half in the cold waiting for the Hotel shuttle to pick me up. My hands turned pink.
8. Got accused of lying during suitability poly, so I had to return the next day (and miss 2 more days of classes). Then got told that I actually passed my suitability poly. Passed CI poly. Was told by the Psychologist that I had to send documentation from every therapist or psychologist/psychiatrist I've ever been to. I have ASD, ADHD, Dyslexia, and Anxiety. I felt my medical conditions contributed to the suitability discontinuation.
9. 4 months later and I got an email stating that due to my "behavior, conduct and/or traits that my application is discontinued". Which is a way to easily get out of a appeal process for a denial for a clearance.
10. me: -_-
The Bayesian stance is that you should not care. The frequentist stance is that a test that has a p-value of 1 is the worst possible.

My stance is that you should know why to care about either. Oh and that the thing you're calculating an expected value off should somehow contribute linearly to your profits/costs, averages do strange things to nonlinear functions.
That's not evidence
But I agree there's no free will and anybody who believes it also believes in magic and god
I have used this, but not the library in the link. From the link’s README, they’re at least analogous. While maybe not the exact same thing, they’re at least the same idea.
Technical reasons why no global API for financial fraudsters and sex offenders?
In 2024, what are the technical reasons why there is no worldwide API for financial fraudsters + sex offenders (even community reported) + spam lists?

An endpoint/ API that
accepts full name, email address, image, video and returns true/false

Context:
I'm building an id and verification workflow for a community of women and vulnerable families who would like predators (online, mostly) out of their social communities.
I haven't been able to find any reliable way to verify this and integrate for an engineer.

Many thanks for your patience.
It looks like this works by making the browser use dn as a local proxy. That should also work with non-chromium based browser right ? I guess it will then be necessary to configure the proxy manually.
The pentagram is fine enough to not be replaced by... this.
The classic blunder. Another one of their problems was that they had to use all those bits. If only they had access to a 2!

Software is always simplifying reality by using abstractions. What else could it possibly do? Completely simulate reality?
Seems really cool! It seems pertinent to remember however that it isn't security as much it is obfuscation.
Show HN: I built an open-source local-first app to track my workouts
I built an app to create, time, and track workouts and sync them across multiple devices.

- Built with Nuxt + Nuxt UI

- Stores data locally in the browser using SQLite

- Local-first with CRDTs using cr-sqlite

- PWA that works fully offline

- Peer-to-peer sync with PeerJS
Latest Visual Studio update has made CoPilot much more prominent. I can't tell if it's actually running or not. I can't figure out how to turn it off completely.

LLM-based AI is technically banned at my work. For somewhat good reason: most of our work involves confidential, controlled, or classified data. Though I've seen a lot of people, especially the juniors, still using ChatGPT every day.

Also noticed the UI has gotten a lot slower. I'm guessing the two things are related.

If my company wasn't locked into "Microsoft everything" this would push me the last inch to ditch VS completely. I already did at home.
chess.com lessons are great for beginners imo, they're well divided into short focused topics, well explained, and you get to practice in between which helps a lot
This looks like a condensed version of https://www.togai.com/blog/what-powers-togai/ For long text submitting a URL is easier to read.
what have you moved on to?
> less than 24MB of ram

As shipped even less; according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System/360#Table_of_System... it'd be the 1970s before anything more than 4MB.

(in what year did computers first have more RAM in MB than they had mass in kg?)
The dive shop on my last vacation made me stop 24 hours before my flight home.
The context I was trying to provide was that I have a particular philosophical viewpoint that could predispose me towards negative association for traditional religious concepts.

Or, put another way, people like me often hate religion, especially monotheistic religion.
Thanks to Vijay for a thought provoking post. I like the juxtaposition of quantum gravity and neuroscience.

I think that it carries two messages, one trivial and one deep.

The trivial one is that physics builds on the human nature to build concepts. Both a jaguar and a quark are ideas that we extract from our perceptions, that we share with others and that help us to model and predict the world - quarks just need a more expensive microscope like the LHC. Sure eagles and prawns may have slightly different versions of concepts since they have different colour perception, but only marginally so.

A practical fellow like a physicist will be clear that when the concepts can make measurable predictions they are worthwhile (we call this meta concept "real"). It is not possible to store the full state of or compute the evolution of anything macroscopic to full precision - such as the positions and momenta of all the particles in a table. So concepts are the only things we can know about reality.

They argue that we may never be able to attain the deep underlying reality - either because it is theoretically unattainable or that we will continue to be resource limited. I contend that this dichotomy is false. It just may never be possible to attain deep underlying reality. The best we can do until we get there is to find some probabilistic rules that work in a pragmatic sense and to refine these tools over time.

[That's pretty much a restatement of the Copenhagen interpretation of 1922].

The deep one is that we are probably looking down the wrong end of the telescope. As far as I can tell (from popular neuroscience) is that our ability to model the perceptual / conceptual processes and how they compose into intelligence remains in the dark ages.

But, given that we each have 70 billion neurones or so, there is a lot of classical physics going on in our heads to make these concepts and we have practically no hard, proven theories about how this works. We are doing layers of pattern recognition and extraction and feedback that allows us to avoid being eaten by Jaguars.

So let's get a proper theory of intelligence. One that let's us work out which aspects of quantum mechanics are philosophically necessary to sustain our subjective experience of space and time. With a substrate with branching / collapsing features. Where time has an arrow with memory in the past and uncertainty in the future. Where cause and effect are loosely coupled. Where there is a notion of free will.

Some endnotes:
- The quantum measurement problem is perhaps a limit of this theory
- Perhaps the notion of computational reducibility is a stab in this direction [Wolfram]
- Probably all you need is emergence for this and not a quantum brain [Penrose]
Hm? IPC improvement appears to be extremely impressive.

If you're put off by gaming comparisons with X3D parts, that isn't really an apples to apples comparison. The current Zen5 parts don't have the huge additional caches that are such a win on some applications, but parts with those are planned for later release.

Similarly, going to 128 cores with the full arch or 192 cores with the cut down one is a big step up from 96/128, but these parts are also not shipping yet.

Separately, the performance/joule improvement looks very good-- for plenty of applications the total cost is dominated by energy usage so zen5 looks like a big win for those. Though again, this is mostly a factor for server parts that aren't shipping yet.

I think it would be fair to say zen5 is impressive while the initial zen5 offerings are less so.
And yet, counterintuitively, it's in precisely these areas (relativity, quantum physics) that our theories are best (most predictive with the strongest mathematical foundations) and the areas where our human intuition ought to supply the most assistance (psychology, sociology) where we seem to be lost at sea.

One explanation that I've come up with to explain this apparent paradox is that while humans may not have any special insight or intuition into microscopic or macroscopic phenomenon, at least we don't have any biases either. Thus, we are able to make progress in these areas by simply pouring in huge amounts of time and brainpower.

On the other hand, for subjects that are more "human," we come pre-equipped with a large number of instinctive insights; or to put it another way, we're burdened with a huge number of innate biases. These are mostly shortcut heuristics that only vaguely approximate the truth, and are deeply and unavoidable biased in ways that we ourselves are blind to. Thus, no matter how much time and brainpower we pour into these subjects, progress remains slow and theories remain poor.

It's a well-known theorem in machine learning that an ensemble of weak (only slightly better than random chance) but unbiased learners will eventually converge to a strong learner, but a collection of biased learners will never become unbiased unless their biases are all uncorrelated. In humans, of course, the biases are shared across all members of the species so do not cancel out in this way.
Show HN: AI Programmable Prompt Engine - new way to manage and reuse your prompt
My take: Pushing back directly against this kind of thing is dangerous and difficult. In a normal environment it will get you driven out, probably to a place that's better. Tenure, on the other hand, can be a trap which will allow them to do things to you much worse than firing you.

In martial arts I was taught "don't be first, don't be last" and that "the nail that sticks out gets the hammer". If you can manage to be within a standard deviation of the mean somebody else will be the victim or be the nucleus of resistance.

Plan B: If you can't beat them, join them. Can you get on this committee? It seems like you have some insight into your own strengths and weaknesses and those and other professors. If you think a professor can be a great professor by helping the strongest students and other professors are great by helping weaker students there should be an evaluation system that recognizes that. In fact, if it is recognized the school can do a better job of matching professors to students and classes that will help students where they are.
Early on my career my employer (a savings and loan) went into receivership because our CEO kept reselling a parcel of land at increasingly inflated prices to himself through holding companies he owned. Each time he was able to force a sale through and a loan to backup the sale by telling employees to just do it. Sadly it was so long ago and something similar has happened so many times since I can't find anything on how much jail time he received. Just a set of stories about bank ceos getting jail time repeated by different news outlets.
Yes, I read it that way too. Which meant that they were under the impression that it is easy to infer tone, so I replied with a serious explanation why it may not be.
Burning Man: Why the US Festival Could Be in Trouble
The staggering death toll of scientific lies