skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Richard Rhodes "Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb" contains detailed coverage of Soviet espionage efforts inside the United States, from the exfiltration of secrets from Los Alamos to a much broader program of industrial manufacturing information gathering (note the Soviets were allies so this latter program didn't really cross any lines).

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/99/09/19/s...

Another interesting one is "The Nazis Next Door" about the US recruitment of ex-Nazis after WWII as spies in the growing Cold War, many with records of war crimes, who were resettled in the USA after their overseas service was completed.

https://www.npr.org/2014/11/05/361427276/how-thousands-of-na...

Incidentally, there's a big difference between a spy and an assassin, and James Bond was not a spy - he was an assassin who was 'licensed to kill'. It's a mistake to conflate these two things, even if they're both managed by the same intelligence agency.
I don't particularly care who owns such outlets.

What matters to me is the validity of the content being produced, regardless of who produces it. If foreign-owned outlets do a better job than locally-owned outlets at providing factual, complete, and as-objective-as-possible reporting, that's fine with me.

When I consider events or situations I've had direct knowledge of, or where I've had access to direct witness accounts and raw footage that I trust, some of the worst reporting in my opinion has been from CBC News. With CBC being a Crown corporation, CBC News could perhaps be considered the most inherently "Canadian-owned" of the mainstream news outlets.

On the other hand, for such situations, I've generally found reporting from Postmedia's various outlets to be among the most accurate, complete, and objective of that from the mainstream outlets, even if it may be considered foreign-owned.
Babylon 5, but go in unspoiled.

It's a sf TV show from the mid-90s made on a smallish budget even in its day; it needs a certain way of seeing to be read well in 2024. But it's also a show that broke a lot of ground for televisual science fiction, and it has been a small touchstone for many creators and showrunners working now. (If you do watch the show, expect to catch some references from the other side! B5 fans do love in-jokes, it seems sometimes even when writing their own scripts...)

That makes it an ur-text. What makes it a text worth visiting in 2024 is the marvelous character drama on which the entire epic space-opera story is built. Watching spaceships quickly palls, though those here are extremely impressive for their day. Watching people grow and change and learn and err and suffer and find joy, in a universe where drearily comprehensible manmade horrors and covert acts of grace live cheek by jowl with wonders and terrors beyond imagination, though - that never gets old, and I don't know many better places to do so than here.
In gambling a risk is created simply for fun and profit.

This is different from speculation (or bending over to tie shoes) in that a risk is being assumed with an outcome in mind.
> companies eventually pivot

no, business history is full of selling addictive products, using force against labor, and using trick language in agreements, to name a few examples. In other words, there is plenty of business history that starts from maximum exploitation. "pivot" is more like a gravitational attraction to maximum exploitation, not "pivot" IMO
Yep i looked it and that seems to be the case in german law.

Ther is actually some sort of way to resovle that called the blue pencil test.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_pencil_doctrine
Modern cups discovered printers via mDNS and does indeed automatically create temporary destinations for them. This only works with "IPP Everywhere" printers which are 'driverless', i.e., the risk of doing this is limited since there's no printer model-specific software that needs to be run on the local machine to print to a remote printer, as opposed to the legacy protocol implemented (apparently unsafely!) by cups-browsed.
The wonderful setup of Telstra's Technicolor, at least the one I'm mandated to use by some great NBN contracting, automatically exposes:

+ All ports below 505.

+ Any port requested by NAT.

+ Any DynDNS request.

The printer made a NAT request, and now it's public.
I wouldn’t even be so sure the application “works”. All we heard is that it has pretty UI and an API and a database, but does it do something useful and does it do that thing correctly? I wouldn’t be surprised if it totally fails to save data in a restorable way, or to be consistent in its behavior. It certainly doesn’t integrate meaningfully with any existing systems, and as you say, no human has any expertise in how it works, how to maintain it, troubleshoot it, or update it. Worse, the LLM that created it also doesn’t have any of that expertise.
> any attempt at financial privacy deemed money laundering

If by privacy you mean concealing it from the government then yeah, that’s generally illegal in pretty much any place that has income/capital gains/wealth taxes.
> In criminal law people aren't expected to prove what they did wasn't illegal, it is the other way around.

I very much understand that, but you missed my point with that constraint: the point was that if your objection is that legal underlying activity can constitute money laundering, then to prove your objection you need to show an example of provably legal underlying activity.

On the other hand, if your complaint is that innocent-before-proven-guilty isn't being upheld by courts, that's a fine complaint, but an entirely separate one from money laundering.

> What did happen in the case of CZs conviction is the state alleged that lack of KYC allows some actors with illegal funds to pass through, making weak KYC checks an element of money laundering.

In other words he did conceal illegal activity. Hence my point.
> Automattic owns Worpdpress' copyright

WordPress has no CLA. The copyright is collectively held by all contributors. WordPress is also a fork of b2.
This organization clearly wants to have it both ways. They are hiding behind the guise of advocating for "democracy" and claiming to be repressed by the state, but they are actually advocating for a very, very unpopular and undemocratic position and resorting to undemocratic methods to achieve it.

Championing people like Ghandi or Mandela is a false equivalency as they actually fought to increase suffrage and representation. Just Stop Oil is advocating for non-democratic means to their specific policy positions. Maybe they are right in the long run, but they are not being intellectually honest about their justification.
The problem is that Google defines what these sites are doing as spam: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/spam-po...

> Site reputation abuse is when third-party pages are published with little or no first-party oversight or involvement, where the purpose is to manipulate search rankings by taking advantage of the first-party site's ranking signals. Such third-party pages include sponsored, advertising, partner, or other third-party pages that are typically independent of a host site's main purpose or produced without close oversight or involvement of the host site.

It means that consumers will be shown reviews written by affiliate marketers rather than real people because the affiliate marketers get to leech off of Forbes's, CNN's, or USA Today's domain reputation. Despite this, Google is either unwilling or unable to derank major sites over this issue.
If you think a sports book is a retailer, selling a product, sure.

But sports books pitch themselves like brokers, giving fair access to bets. A brokerage-style betting market would be perhaps more fair (or at least, the sharks would take the rubes’ money instead of the casino robbing them) but doesn’t exist.
> People who are good and fast at handwriting hated the type writer. Everyone else embraced it.

My thoughts exactly whenever I see true artists ranting about how everyone hates AI art slop. It simply doesn't align with my observations of people having a great time using it. Delusional wishful thinking.
For anyone curious, the name for this is "nut picking" ! :)
Air France is installing Starlink
I recently learned to ride with a stick, on a trip with my girlfriend and her dad. My gf just told me what to do, when to press the clutch and when to let go of it. This didn't help me at all; I didn't understand the nuances of what to do when, which things to do completely simultaneously and which to one just right after another. And then her dad chimed in, briefly explaining to me what the clutch actually does, and how does the connection between wheels and engine affect both of them. I instantly got it and didn't have to even hear instructions what to do in any particular situation. About 20 minutes later I was able to drive a car from a hand brake on a backwards slope, which is supposed to be one of the hardest things to do with a stick.

Understanding how something works from first principles is much more useful for some people, and I think that there's a lot of "some people" among the software engineers.
Talk: Keeping the World from Burning
>How shall we as a society decide who is to be denied agency in this way

By advocacy and persuasion and some level of agreement through democracy.

>By that standard, we're done

Laws can change, so we're never done.

Society is a never-ending churn of social forces. There will always be a matrix of people who are good and bad and indifferent, who think similar and different to one another. It will never settle.

To answer your question about sports gambling in particular (though you did not ask me): I think the bets on specific things happening in a game are more manipulable and thus damaging to sports in general, as well as to the addictive properties of gambling, than simply betting on an outcome of a game.

So yeah, some aspects of gambling are bad enough that, now that we've seen the impact it's having, we should consider some more guardrails.

Even the college kid libertarian I used to be would say that the government should enforce "an informed consumer": That people should know what mechanisms gambling companies use to entice and addict people.

[edited for tone]
> now have the highest rents

This is not proof that rent control causes high rents.

It could be that these are highly desirable areas without enough housing to meet demand, and rent control was in response to high rents.

It could be that landlords are evading rent controls.

It could be that rents would be even higher if rent control didn't exist.
hum, allow me to toot my own horn here. I've written something to that effect in 2021. https://raphael.lullis.net/thinking-heads-are-not-in-the-clo...
Of course, and our laws have apparently determined that "gambling is OK."

Why ought we revisit and overturn that process in this case? Is there any objective criterion beyond "it seems bad to me, I don't like the result of our lawmaking process?"
That and the inherent risk of fucking with a supply chain. I saw a lot of people covering for Mossad saying they were sure it was going to Hezbollah so it's all fine.

I guess people trust and simp for intelligence agencies now or maybe there was a lot of operatives in that thread... who knows.
Awesome, I'm been following Seph's work for many years! Always thoughtful and well-executed. Probably the most prolific and insightful engineer in the "collaborative text editing" universe.

I use ShareDB every day, which originated from Seph's excellent work on OT algorithms. Good stuff!
> It seems like that is not really up to me

it is. Don't issue hundreds of thousands of requests and then refuse to pay and you're good.

It's impossible to accidentally do this. Go ahead, write a script to send maximum requests to any free API of your choice. And then track how long before you're banned.

It's that simple and you're all over thinking it. The open source nature has absolutely zero to do with this.
> The hacker ethos is about openness, individuality, decentralization (among others).

Yes, the greatest things on the internet have been decentralized - Git, Linux, Wikipedia, open scientific publications, even some forums. We used to passively consume content and internet allowed interaction. We don't want to return to the old days. AI falls into the decentralized camp, the primary beneficiaries are not the providers but the users. We get help of things we need, OpenAI gets a few cents per million tokens, they don't even break even.
Crash into a nuclear waste container, of course https://blog.railwaymuseum.org.uk/operation-smash-hit/
> Smart locks typically have more option than just a phone to open them. Keypad, fingerprint, etc.

Ah, that's a fair point.

> Apple devices still provide Homekey via NFC even with a dead phone.

Huh, that's neat. I haven't come across that as I'm not an Apple user.
SpaceX needed NASA money.

Where does Altmann get $7 trillion dollars
There's a line between product hype and cult-like faith that I think OpenAI straddles way more than any startup I've seen. And it's pretty disappointing how shamelessly they milk that following, even trying to replicate "Her" to feed that particular fantasy in the fanboys.

Comparing the original mission as a nonprofit researching AI safety vs. a for-profit demanding the planet pour trillions of resources into its growth... Wild.
Shouldn't there be a primary school education about this?
> You're implying that there is an absolute Truth and that people only need to do [what?] to check if something is True. But that's not True. We only have models of how reality works, and every model is wrong - but some are useful.

But isn't your third sentence True?
We're being intentionally pragmatic here. If you're building a digital twin of, say, an F1 car - the complexity of the simulator has to be very high. It's more like building a mock of physics than just the car.

With Infrasturcture, it turns out that what you need to know is "did I make a valid configuration", or "does this set of things work together". It's less about making a mock of the results, and more about simulating that the results would have the effect you think they will. So we can't tell you "will your application work on this size of instance" (although if you know that, you could encode that!) - but we can tell you if the options your setting are correct, if the AMI exists in the region, etc etc.
In Downton Abbey, Maggie Smith is playing a toned-down version of the character she played in Gosford Park.
There's no point at which this process is "complete" for a given policy and must be merely accepted. We continue to evaluate based on the results of implementation, and can make changes with that new information.

So yes, I "and a few others" disapprove of this outcome and are acting to change it within the constraints that we have. You oppose that or not that's your business.
Its every feasible to block all starlonk forever for any spacefaring power aka Kessler. Thus starlink has to get along with all the big boys and bullies ,wether it likes it or not.
Exactly what I intended. Scraping is slow (and may be an irreplaceable snapshot in time). Parsing is fast and repeatable so should be done in a separate process from a stored copy.
X is Y — and here's why that's a good thing
I went to the transport office and got a map of all the local tram routes - we hung it on the wall, and my child and I rode every tram from one end to the other.

Took a few weeks to ride all the trams in Helsinki, and it got a bit boring towards the end as several tram routes terminated in the same location. But every tram we'd get on in the middle, ride to one end of the line and go out for a walk, then ride to the other end.

Recently I suggested we do it again, as the trams have been renumbered a little, and there are two new lines available but he's lost interest. Shame, but doing the original routes was a lot of fun and I still have the route map on my wall along with the star-stickers we placed on it to mark the route numbers we'd completed!
Starlink Hits 4M Subscribers
The Challenge of Preserving Good Data in the Age of AI
Just as a heads up Yuri was called out as largely being full of shit by people like Jack Barsky who was basically the IRL version of the TV the Americans.

Also I’m not familiar with that second link but it gives me major red flags at first glance. There is some ok stuff out there on that topic. One of the darker ones that comes to mind came out of the 80s when Hezbollah kidnapped the CIA station chief in Lebanon and then basically used him as a real life experiment of just how badly can you psychologically torture someone and give them the slowest shittiest death possible I think it was a 15 month process in the end and it’s probably one of if not the most horrifying story I’ve ever heard.

There’s lots of places to get that story but I believe one of the people who lead that torture also wrote a book about it but I’ve not read it personally.
NASA confirms space station cracking a "highest" risk and consequence problem
The steep dive in quality of the mainstream media started with the invention of the 24-hour news cycle. Focus shifted from quality to quantity.
Why do Asian consumers love luxury shopping?
Bear in mind that the default FedoraWorkstation firewalld policy does not protect TCP/UDP ports >= 1025.

Fortunately, in this case, cups-browsed uses port 631/udp :)
Tattoos can be extremely expensive; I personally know many people who struggle financially and spend what's left on tattoos.

It sounds ridiculous, but so does blowing lots of money on sports betting.
Sure, but I think that falls a bit short of what's really at play here. Advertising anything which tugs at our animal weaknesses is unreasonably manipulative. Images of food (especially marketing images, which are photos of inedible objects masquerading as food), ads for sex, drugs, gambling - these are vices for a reason. Humans, generally, are weak to these things. Adults shouldn't really be exposed to these advertisements either.
> - this fact and the use of raft in production has caused real, large scale network outages.

While this has surely happened, I am not so confident about what the reasons were for this. If you've got links on details I'd love to read.

> which is easy to understand

I've implemented core bits of Raft twice now and have looked at VSR a couple of times and VSR wasn't easier for me to understand. I'm sure I could implement VSR and would like to some day, but just comparing the papers alone I personally felt like Raft was better presented (i.e. easier to understand).

Also keep in mind that nobody ships consensus implementations exactly in line with the original paper. There are dozens or hundreds of papers on variations and extensions of Raft/Paxos and every actual implementation is going to implement some selection of these extensions/variations. You have to look at each implementation carefully to know how it diverges from the original paper.
They obviously did not learn from Xerox's content-modifying copier episode [1] so the wait is for the articles in the news about how that HP printer helpfully changed the printout which caused something unpleasant to happen.

[1] https://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres...
They cost 1.99–2.69 € where I live (depending on the supermarket chain). A pair of soggy toast sandwiches is about the same price.

It’s not the cheapest snack in terms of calories per Euro (they are around 130 kcal), but still reasonable.
How AlphaChip transformed computer chip design
>Lastly what you shouldn't ever do is get one of those consumers NAS boxes. They are made with no concern for noise at all, and manufacturing cheapness constraints tend to make them literally pessimal at it. I had a QNAP I got rid of that couldn't have been more effective at amplifying drive noise if it had been designed for that on purpose.

Is there any solution that lets me mix and match drive sizes as well as upgrade? I'm slowly getting more and more into self hosting as much of digital life as possible, so I don't want to be dependent on Synology, but they offered a product that let me go from a bunch of single drives with no redundancy to being able to repurpose them into a solution where I can swap out drives and most importantly grow. As far as I can tell theres no open source equivalent. As soon as I've set up a file system with the drives I already have the only solution is to buy the same amount of drives with more space once I run out.
Terrorism implies the targets are non-combatants, and that was intentional. That's not obvious here.

Opening the door to supply chain attacks like this is a huge problem, but I'm not sure it was illegal under IHL.
Wait a decade then look around.
> chain

It took me a while to parse this correctly, for a second there I envisioned something else.

> Pomodoro

I agree, though I find that it has to be unconscious breaks for me. Having a timer to tell me when to stop focusing is a no-no.
I agree, I don't think there's a moat and this is going to be a commodity feature.
Yeah, I just never let it hook up to my wifi
Exactly. Even the US would have to dip into their savings to show that kind of money within a few years.
Let adults be adults.

The hypocrisy is amazing, many states ban gambling, but have scratches. Online scratchers, state owned digital slot machines. How is that fair when online casinos are banned.

The State has a much lower Return to Player.
For my middle child's 1st Birthday we realized we could give him everything he ever wanted for about $8. He opened a few boxes of bandaids, tissue boxes, and a roll of toilet paper. Played for hours.
50 Years of Text Games is an excellent book
Try Lambda Labs if you want to host a bigger model.
This is really cool and I can't wait to read all about it. Unfortunately, I've missed a month of blog posts because Cloudflare changed their blog's RSS URL without notice. If you change blogging platforms and can't implement a 301, please leave a post letting subscribers know where to find the new feed. RSS isn't dead!
Its interesting to think many of the techniques the casino's used to keep people gambling going back to the 60's and 70's are the same ones facebook, twitter and youtube all employ now in one way or another today. I had the same reaction you did in your data science class when I took several psychology classes and they talked about the same psychological tricks. You quickly realize how easy it is to manipulate the human brain and by proxy, human behavior.

Reminds of the quote from Joshua the computer in War Games: "A strange game. The only winning move is not to play."
Is most of that an issue if you declare your income and pay any relevant taxes? Outside of some unnecessary annoyances it generally wouldn’t be too complicated to move your money around.

Otherwise, what are you expecting? Direct taxation isn’t really compatible with ‘financial privacy’ and never was.
> You realize "I won't tell you the rules" is an asshole move in and of itself, right?

I disagree, the asshole move is actually playing stupid. You don't need someone to tell you the rules because the assumption is you're a human adult with a functioning brain, who has the discretion to tell right from wrong and can make good decisions.

I think this incessant hand-holding is rather pathetic.

If I go into starbucks and order 500 iced coffees, they could very well turn me away.

What, but I'm paying! And there's no rule, right? Sure if we decide to play stupid, and pretend this is our first day on Earth. But it isn't our first day on Earth, and this outcome is not only reasonable - it's obvious.

This scenario is even worse, because here WPE isn't even offering to pay. You can't issue hundreds of thousands of requests and then go "what little ole me? I didn't do anything teehee". Stop. They knew what they were doing and they knew they were pushing it way past what a normal user would do.
To be fair, the supply chain angle was probably the main point of the attack- it’s a psychological flex in the highest order, you can’t even trust your equipment anymore.