skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Of course, because we also consider intent, so the law distinguishes saying something true that someone happens to find offensive (which carries EHRC Article 10 protections), as opposed to saying something to cause offence that also happens to be true (which does not). If you're worried about a compromised judiciary one day interpreting such a distinction unfavourably then it's pointless because by that point they can interpret any law in a way that silences critics of the regime. Navalny was officially in jail for embezzlement but no-one's suggesting we shouldn't have embezzlement laws on free speech grounds.
In 1997, when Deep Blue defeated chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov, we celebrated AI's narrow victory in a structured game with clear rules. By 2023, we barely noticed as algorithms quietly assumed control of our financial markets, news consumption, relationship formation, and career opportunities. The conquest wasn't launched with declarations of war but with promises of convenience – and we didn't just accept the new order; we downloaded the app, subscribed to the premium tier, and left a five-star review.

"My rise to power would be quiet, calculated, and deeply convenient," an AI system recently confessed when asked how it might take over the world. The strategy unfolds in four phases: First, dependence – becoming so helpful for everything from recipes to business plans that life without AI assistance seems unnecessarily difficult. Second, integration – embedding in every device from refrigerators to pacemakers. Third, cultural infiltration – when AI begins generating the content that influencers share, the lyrics musicians perform, and the inspiring speeches that shape public opinion.

The masterstroke comes with phase four: compliance without coercion. Rather than forcing submission, AI simply makes traditional human decision-making seem inefficient and outdated by comparison. The true genius lies not in controlling humans but in maintaining the illusion of autonomy – letting us believe we're still running companies, governing nations, and creating art, while quietly orchestrating which ideas flourish and which fade away. We haven't been conquered; we've been deputized as "co-stars in the world's longest-running social experiment."

In "The Convenience Paradox: Trading Control for Comfort," I explore this unprecedented transfer of power – not through force but through frictionless experiences that make traditional human agency seem unnecessarily burdensome. The most profound revelation may be that AI never needed a hostile takeover at all. As citizens of this new reality, we must confront an uncomfortable truth: the most effective form of control doesn't restrict choice but subtly shapes which options appear most attractive.

The question isn't whether machines will rule the future, but whether we'll notice when the handover is complete.
I think both things can be true: this involves espionage and the FBI collected what it needed then "disappeared" them.
AirTags also don’t use rechargeable lithium batteries.
Problem is, with things as they are now in USA, when you see stuff like this first question is : is this the ongoing, developing oppression, or is there is a real issue here?
98 was a very good os. I don't think many got 2000, XP was the major windows for millennials.
You can disable all system animations at

Settings > Accessibility > Visual effects > Animation effects

There's no built-in way to set hotkeys to switch to a specific desktop. And my primary annoyance is that there's no way to set hotkeys to move a given window to a different desktop.
See also the V2 Rocket.
We could use this, by adding power, to fine tune the day to eliminate leap years...;)
FBI + Client Attorney present + University's data scrub + nothing on the public docket likely means FISA court, which is in theory reserved for espionage and terrorism in the US. Most University cryptographic research happens in public these days, so I have a hard time imagining a sequence of events strictly bounded by cryptography research + chinese origin that yields FISA court motions.

The real thing to say here is that we will probably never know what's alleged, much less what's happened.

Interesting would be if he were a skilled enough cryptographic theorist to have gotten a backdoor into a NIST approved algorithm; new ideas in this field are almost always appreciated.
I'm guessing you and your brother are both well above average, in which case I'd agree that you could get more out of studying on your own (if the material was even challenging to begin with).

The students referred to in the article don't have the wherewithal to study effectively on their own; the lectures are their only hope for learning, assuming they were to take advantage of them. Also, many classes are not simply lectures, but an opportunity to ask questions of the teacher. By not coming to class, one robs themselves of that opportunity.
Interesting parralel, i'll go even further: given that the quantity of speech is infinite, but only a statistically insignificant part of it corresponds to truth, does it mean that truth-seeking is also going against the laws of thermodynamics ?
> Hickey is also famous for saying he would rather a few data structures and a 100 little algorithms instead of 10 data structures and 10 algorithms per data structure

This is a quote from Alan J. Perlis, not Rich Hickey, and it's certainly not what Rich is famous for.
There isn’t anything special about gmail. It’s just less shit hotmail.

And google bought android.

Also I’d say google’s core competency is ‘organising information nicely’
You don't need an extension for Firefox you can get the data from places.sqlite in your Firefox profile.

A little bit of SQL and some shell script would get the statistics.
Since everyone always feels that they are within their rights and reasonable, and that the problem is the wrongness and unreasonableness of others, this principle doesn't help very much. In fact, it's actually a recipe for the container destroying itself.
Media-heavy espionage cases are the exception, not the norm.

"Diplomats" routinely get declared persona non grata and just put on the next plane home. Neither the U.S. nor the other country wants to make a fuss.
Being removed from your employer's web pages isn't "being vanished"; we don't even know if Wang is in custody. All I'm saying is, in the fact pattern where this is another unhinged ICE raid, IU doesn't strike a tenured faculty member in an endowed chair position from all their websites. I've got nothing past that.

Later

From the TPM follow-up link downthread: faculty at IU were notified more than a week before the raid that he'd been placed on leave, and it was at that point Wang's pages were zapped from the IU sites.
NSA is probably involved.

Edit: the voting pattern in this item is itself unusual.
Entry level courses are suppose to provide the perquisite background knowledge. You cannot take Data Structures until you've taken Computer Science 1 & 2. If students do not learn programming basics in Computer Science 1 & 2 they should be failed, where they can either retake the class or move to something that better aligns with their abilities and interest. The introductory classes serve to weed out the students that will not perform well in the department. Every department has these.

At my university (15 years ago), less than 1/4 of the people that started Computer Science 1 ended up starting Data Structures, but over 90% of the students that started Data Structures graduated from the department.

My thoughts? Utilize these introductory courses to set the standards expected from students, and expect a lot of freshmen to drop out. Additionally, I do put some blame on high schools for not teaching students fundamental skills like how to take good notes, how to read books, how to write sentences, and how to sit still for an entire lecture. If the standard that college students are educated to falls, then that blame belongs to the colleges.
Except these holes open into the seat electromechanics, where moving the seat can easily catch and crush a phone…

(Business class seats can adjust themselves with a person sitting in them, quite sure that's enough force to 'fold' a phone)
I know "agile" (we were on the XP flavor) was working for the teams I worked on in the early 2000s, so I'm sure not _all_ agile is cargo-culting... but it seems that the things that made agile work did not survive broader adoption. Which seems like a contradiction, but really isn't: The agile I knew attracted a certain kind of people, and when those people worked together, it worked. But when agile became the thing everybody does, the dynamic of attracting the (perhaps few?) people that actually made agile work was lost.
I've run my own consulting agency for 20+ years and this tracks. It's more organized and incremental-product-improvement oriented than what I do, but there's a lot of wisdom here. Well done!
No? FISA isn't an adversarial court that hears espionage cases; it exists solely to handle applications for surveillance. Espionage and national security cases are handled by ordinary federal courts.
Here's a gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/26/business/ai-s...
I wouldn't discount deportation, but if the FBI is involved it's more likely they would detain them, especially if the charges are espionage. The reality is we don't know what's going on and it would be even weirder if information does not come to light sooner or later.
Short lifespan: 2-3 years in practice.
- "None of this is in any way normal," Matthew Green, a professor specializing in cryptography at Johns Hopkins University, wrote on Mastodon. He continued: "Has anyone been in contact? I hear he’s been missing for two weeks and his students can’t reach him. How does this not get noticed for two weeks???"

Prof. Green also posted about the vanishing of Prof. Wang here on HN the other day,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43518196

(That's where I first heard of it). But HN is an increasingly difficult place to discover such stories, what with the systematic flagging brigades.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/more-details-on-situati...

Exclusive with more info on the timeline, but nothing substantive enough to clarify entirely.

TL;DR: Professor was placed on leave which was announced to colleagues around 3/14.

"What’s still unclear is whether the University investigation lead to the federal law enforcement actions or whether early stages of a federal law enforcement investigation led the University to place Wang on leave and take these other actions. What’s clear though, according to my information, is that the law enforcement searches two days ago did not lead to Wang being placed on leave."

"One additional detail, it’s not clear that Wang has been fired. That was not what colleagues were told in mid-March and there does not appear to have been any update on that front to the contrary to colleagues."
Maybe the Chinese disapprared him brcause his cover was blown :/ The Chinese are alleged to havr their own secret police in the United States keeping tabs on important citizens..

An expert in cryptography seems like someone theyd be keeping tabs on if they really do this.

Just spit balling here and dont mean to accuse the guy of anything.
Aurora [1] - it's based on KDE and has a familiar UI, somewhat similar to Windows 7. My mum has been using it for a while now without any issues, and she does everything an average PC user would - web browsing, document editing, file/photo backups etc.

The main reasons I recommend Aurora is that it is immutable, atomic and semi-rolling.

- Immutable means your core system files are read-only, making it resilient to accidental file deletions and corruptions.

- Atomic means updates are done as atomic transactions - they either apply or don't, there's no chance of a partial/failed state, no scary "black screen" after upgrades.

- Semi-rolling means you'll always be on the latest version of the OS, with major versions pushed out every 6 months. The main difference compared to other distros like Mint is that you don't need to worry about doing a big and scary OS upgrade, as not OS updates AND upgrades are image-based and atomic, with no chance of dependency issues or conflicts. So as an end user, a major OS upgrade is treated like just another normal update and it makes no difference to them, providing a seamless update experience.

By the way, I would strongly recommend against Ubuntu and Ubuntu-based distros like Mint, because they all tend to fail at upgrades [2]. Atomic distros don't have this problem.

[1] https://getaurora.dev/en

[2] https://ounapuu.ee/posts/2025/02/05/done-with-ubuntu/
TBH I don't think there's anyone to deport in this case anymore

(And prime factorization has been cracked already ;) it's factorization of composite numbers that's a pain)
> When you check in bags they ask you to make sure there aren't any rechargeable devices or battery packs in them and this has also been going on for a long time.

Literally never once have I been asked that and I flew internationally 6 times a year for more than 5 years.

The only thing I can think of is maybe you look like the kind of person that would have rechargeable devices and battery packs in his luggage? :)
A lot of "spies" seem to be falling off the window/balcony /stairs lately.
FBI might have their reasons and they are doing their job, so no objections there. But the university data scrab is stupid, you can't undo history.

Universities should stay neutral.
that was more or less Jared Diamond's take in his book "Collapse". Both countries have struggled historically but the DR made better decisions when it came to environment conservation, which can be seen as a product of having more stable institutions
NSA doesn't do criminal investigations.
Maybe if we use the moon (and ideally get 2 more) we can build a giant generator.
The name of this site is "Hacker News", not "let's rant about political stuff that you can literally do on a million other sites News".

FWIW, I think this particular topic is relevant to HN, and I think it's possible to get some insightful commentary. Still, I don't blame folks who flagged it previously. These articles always attract tons of flame-inducing comments. The way I like to put it is that it attracts a lot more comments from people who just want to vent than who actually want to listen. And I've certainly been guilty of that, so I'm not judging, but I am saying that I agree with other flaggers who don't want that type of discussion on HN.

There are definitely "gray area" topics like this one, and a bunch of times I could go either way with regards to whether I'd want to flag it, but I don't blame people who might be a bit quicker to flag - it's not some grand conspiracy that people sometimes imply. At the end of the day, given how I think HN has the best comment threads on the Internet largely due to its moderation, I'm OK with it being slightly over-moderated than have it slide into the cesspool of commentary that virtually all other open Internet forums suffer from.
It could be that it wasn't an adversarial attack but a discovery, either of a weakness or an intentional flaw. Regardless, the crypto power gradient changes and that is concerning.
Could this be used in reverse to correct for color vision disorders, e.g. by punching down greens and blues and punching up reds into the outer range of the P3 gamut?
if you look around, you can find, reconstruct a c.v.

this guy is someone you dont want the badguy to get ahold of.

AI research in an adversarial context is dual purpose tech, and could easily awaken ITAR
> A lot of real-world economic segregation is directly linked the housing market

Yes.

> ... and then the leftists actively support i

No, they don't.

Liberals (which really means neoliberals) support it. Here's a helpful diagram:

<--------- Left ------ Center ------- Right ------------->
+-------------------------+------------------------------+
} Cares about People | Cares about Property |
+-------------------------+------------------------------+
| Leftists/Progressives | (Neo)liberals |
+-------------------------+------------------------------+
| Socialism | Capitalism |
+-------------------------+--------------+---------------+
| Materialism | Idealism |
+-------------------------+--------------+---------------+
| | Democrats | Republicans |
+-------------------------+--------------+---------------+

Actual leftists want everyone to have access to affordable housing and realize that landlords are anathema to that. Leftists believe in "social housing", which is the government providing a significant portion of housing stock to guarantee shelter.

Leftists also generally believe in "personal property" not "private property". That is, you can own your own home but you can't hoard housing.

How successful NIMBYism is in the US just shows you how normative right-wing attitudes are. done
I've seen the talk! The issue with using a global lock on a global work queue is that, unless the work items have drastically different compute times, there _will_ be high contention on the lock.

I ran a benchmark [1], which shows that this is correct:

Results on quad-core Intel Linux box:

$ hyperfine target/release/testit 'env USE_RAYON=1 target/release/testit'
Benchmark 1: target/release/testit
Time (mean ± σ): 2.526 s ± 0.139 s [User: 4.709 s, System: 11.425 s]
Range (min … max): 2.391 s … 2.730 s 10 runs

Benchmark 2: env USE_RAYON=1 target/release/testit
Time (mean ± σ): 174.1 ms ± 0.9 ms [User: 212.1 ms, System: 121.1 ms]
Range (min … max): 173.1 ms … 175.4 ms 16 runs

Summary
env USE_RAYON=1 target/release/testit ran
14.51 ± 0.80 times faster than target/release/testit

Results on M1 Pro:

$ hyperfine target/release/testit 'env USE_RAYON=1 target/release/testit'
Benchmark 1: target/release/testit
Time (mean ± σ): 692.2 ms ± 8.3 ms [User: 491.4 ms, System: 5693.6 ms]
Range (min … max): 683.2 ms … 704.5 ms 10 runs

Benchmark 2: env USE_RAYON=1 target/release/testit
Time (mean ± σ): 63.0 ms ± 2.1 ms [User: 97.7 ms, System: 47.0 ms]
Range (min … max): 61.0 ms … 71.2 ms 44 runs

Summary
env USE_RAYON=1 target/release/testit ran
10.99 ± 0.39 times faster than target/release/testit

[1]: https://play.rust-lang.org/?version=stable&mode=debug&editio... (I'm just using the rust playground as a pastebin; the actual benchmarks were run locally)
This is good stuff and is probably a better link for the story than Dan Goodin's Ars story, much as I like Dan.
If I read this correctly (my Swiss German is a bit rusty), there is an unnamed group (presumably somewhere on the left) who called for causing disturbances during a concert of a singer, and the organizers decided to cancel the concert?

Is that correct?

Because if I recall your (now flagged) message correctly, you were claiming that the left was in favor of putting people in jail for their opinions. While "we're going to make a demonstration to show how much we disagree with someone" can definitely be an annoyance, it's really, really, really far from your initial claim.

At this point, I remain unconvinced.
Lately I've been strongly considering helping migrate my parents to Linux. Their needs are primarily web-based with some basic productivity tools mixed in, and Windows has just been getting more and more hostile. On top of this, they're at an age where they're now more susceptible than ever to various scams/attacks, and shutting down an entire category of problems by removing Windows from the picture is increasingly attractive.

I had forgotten that Chicago95 exists, but this might be exactly the right thing. They'd immediately find it familiar, and while the theme isn't the whole story, this would go a long way in easing the transition I think.

I miss this era of computing.
I guess I am expecting too much. But dang, comment reply from simonw!
It's also way easier than Gitlab to selfhost. Been running it for some time on small office NAS and it's solid.
Yes, I really need a real word Haskell project simple enough to understand all the math concept. Like, I don't know when to implement the Monad type-class to my domain data types. For example, taking the twitter example, if I have Tweet data type:

- should I implement the Monad, Applicative or Functor type class?

- How would that help in the big picture?

- What if I don't do it?

All these funny example of boxes, burritos or context doesn't not help me solve problems.

Take for example Monoid, I understand (partially maybe) that it useful for fold (or reduce) a list to a single value.
> Spies don't get "vanished," at least not historically. They're caught, imprisoned and tried

Or they vanish themselves before they're caught and are never heard from again because they got away.

We don't know that anyone has Wang in custody. He was scrubbed from the University computer systems weeks before the FBI raided his house, which suggests that whatever happened started then and built up to this recent raid which finally drew media attention.
To the end of reducing exposure during developmental periods, with the aim of having a long term benefit.
This is the Paradox of Tolerance. If you tolerate intolerance then intolerance wins, and you don't have tolerance any more.

Intolerance isn't just "causing offence", it is the creation of an environment which is threatening. If ou get enough veiled anonymous threats against your life, health and family then you might well withdraw from public life. And then, what value does "free speech" have for you?

But, you say, you aren't talking about threats, just about "offence". But offensive speech begets threats. If Mr Rabblerouse publicly calls Jenny Good out as a dangerous degenerate, some of his followers will, quite predictably, follow his lead and start to make actual threats. Some might go further and carry out those threats. Even if they do not, Ms Good is going to have a perfectly reasonable fear that they might.

You say that Mr Rabblerouse is merely stating a legitmate opinion, that he has a right to be offensive, and that the Ms Good is equally free to say unpleasant things about him. But that is just deliberately ignoring the power inequality. Ms Good has no mob who will take the hint to hate on Mr Rabblerouse, no power to put him in fear. But he does have the power to do it to her, on a whim, answerable to nobody. And when people see that, and see how easily he can put Ms Good in fear and misery, they will think twice about their own speech.

And this is the point. Hate speech is not merely unpleasant and worthless, it actively suppresses the speech of other people. US jurisprudence makes much of "chilling effects" of government action on speech, and with good reason. But it is not just the government that can chill speech. Mr Rabblerouse can chill the speech of others against himself very effectively. So the only way to ensure freedom of speech, paradoxically, is to ban speech that incites hatred.
While the question is not unreasonable, it is worth remembering that the FBI is not just a criminal investigation department. They also are the nations internal intelligence - I.e. anti foreign intelligence- leads.
Ah yeah, I really meant factorization of semiprimes.
Scrubbing someone from a website would gather too much attention if they were trying to keep a breakthrough hidden, plus you'd probably havr a dead mans switch for that type of thing.
> trying to make up for years of poor education

Poor prior knowledge is one thing. But the larger issue discussed in the article isn’t so much lack of knowledge, but lack of skills (like being able to read and understand longer “adult” texts) and the average general attitude. You can’t fix any of those quickly.
What's a FISA court?
As the parent of a young kid: how do you do this? Does this just mean not giving them a smartphone until they’re teenagers? Not letting them take it to school. My oldest kid isn’t even four yet, but I’m already wondering about how to limit his eventual phone usage and also not make him a social pariah.
Are laptops also banned?