News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

angel_j

Re:Stop the Earn IT Bill Before It Breaks Encryption on Tuesday October 06, 2020 @08:08AM (#24696827)
Sit down dude. You think you are standing up for rights, but are making a case for weaker security by trusting, i.e. that MS and Apple won't backdoor you in an instant if they must. You are literally, actually, a shill, especially with this pompous presentation.

None of your list is better than nothing, if the authoritarians want your data. Except, maybe, Tor, and only if people contribute to running exit nodes.

If it isn't end-to-end, and only you know and control your keys, you are already doomed. In other words, you cannot trust any service with your keys. That includes https and signal.

Shows just how valuable neo-yuppies are to local economies and politics. Go home, you actually make it worse for everybody else. Plus, your vote matters in any other state.
Travel is so valuable to perspective, too. I know some people on the woke spectrum who would be a lot less miserable if they traveled even to other U.S. states, but the up-front cost is a barrier. Share your miles, make the world a better place!

The U.S. should invest in sending youth abroad (not excluding domestically). The U.S. should also invest in sending entrepreneurs abroad. Thanks for coming to my two-cent talk.

I wonder many miners have already been using this optimization for the advantage.
Re:AI Democratization in the Era of GPT-3 on Saturday September 26, 2020 @02:27PM (#24600981)
Forget AI democritization, GPT-3 is AI demoguerization.

GPT-3 is singular; it is one model, one dataset, one training. Yet it will be the only one that will exist for quite some time (or by far the most available), and now it will underwrite productization and malfeasance, a la mode pay to play.

For example, I recently read a paper supposedly written by a Chinese dissident virologist, which report was disseminated by a group with questionable membership. Most of the jargon in the report going over my head, I had to wonder if the otherwise convincing verbiage wasn't the work of GPT-3.

Re:5D chess game where pieces time travel on Thursday September 24, 2020 @06:08PM (#24584246)
I am using motion quite generally, to include the motion of particles, heat, etc. I don't know if the emergent property stuff is proven or discussed much, but I think the field is coming around to it, if for no other reason than they are running out of ideas.

Physics has been working in the top-down direction. That is not how you find emergent properties, it is an attempt to explain things from the properties they seem to possess.

For instance, the relatively gigantic boson is somehow "sub-atomic", to particle physicists. Whereas I think it that particles emerge from the breakdown of the bosonic field, and when we smash together the particles which reveal the boson, we are briefly seeing what happens when we have put them back together. See my comment here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21039542

A very good primer on this is "Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy" by Manuel DeLanda.

Re:Why neural networks struggle with the Game of Life on Thursday September 24, 2020 @05:53PM (#24584114)
IMHO, GoL is too simple (as Einstein might have said). The machinery GoL can produce is "curious", but overly complicated. IOW, GoL is not complex enough to produce results that can be reasoned about usefully/meaningfully.

They used CNNs in this experiment to learn how far a NN could predict GoL into the future. It can't be done, for GoL is not finite.

Garbage in, garbage out. If you admit dummies, they are not going to become a genius. The bigger issue for all of us is, now we are not supporting the students who could really move the needle. So the needle doesn't move.
Re:5D chess game where pieces time travel on Saturday September 19, 2020 @01:53PM (#24529234)
You read the papers correctly, bc those are abstract dimensions, neither time nor space nor precise facial features. Adding another element to an array is changing it's arity, as arguments to a function (which nobody confuses as a function's dimensions).

The chessboard case is an example of mixing disparate, concrete properties, and calling them all dimensions. But that is exactly the error in saying that time is the 4th dimension: mixing the concrete concept of dimension with the abstract one. Blame physicists, for they seem to really think time is our forth dimension, ergo fundamental, whereas time is an emergent property not of spatial dimensions alone, but motion in that space.

Here is an example of purely abstract dimensions. When the researchers at OpenAI want to add the position of words in a sentence, they literally add time, in form of co/sines, to the data. They don't "add" as-in append/concat another dimension to the data, the add as-in sum the existing data with the co/sines, changing the data. They literally merge time into the dimensions of the input. Before and after are temporal, for clocks and words in a string (ie their relative position gives meaningful relativity to the concepts the words represent, or we are lost), but really ALL time is a position WITHIN the dimensions, and the changing of time is the change of position. Ergo time is not additional dimension to the space.

We would not experience time if there was no motion, and objects moving faster experience faster time relative to a slow moving object, as Einstein proved.

Re:Facebook Accused of Watching Instagram Users Through Cameras on Friday September 18, 2020 @01:29PM (#24519537)
nah you pick a photo and select "share" then select insta
Re:5D chess game where pieces time travel on Friday September 18, 2020 @12:41PM (#24518935)
Those lines are an aspect of the dimensions of the board, not an addition to them. The measure of time does not make it a dimension (we can measure time in the universe too).
Re:Facebook Accused of Watching Instagram Users Through Cameras on Friday September 18, 2020 @12:39PM (#24518906)
It doesn't need access to your photo library either. Imagine giving access to your whole roll!
Re:What happened to Firefox Send? on Friday September 18, 2020 @12:26PM (#24518771)
Mozilla sucks at software. They are prescriptive, and always changing. They practice the worst of open source (give today, take tomorrow, user no choice, auto-updates), and they cannot keep up with enterprise in their own domain.
Re:5D chess game where pieces time travel on Thursday September 17, 2020 @06:36PM (#24510809)
Y'all are not going to grok this, but time is not a dimension.
Re:How Did Software Get So Reliable Without Proof? (1996) [pdf] on Thursday September 17, 2020 @06:33PM (#24510785)
Obviously because it just works.
It does make me wonder if a binocular affect similar to a binaural affect would induce would do it. The ocular pathways are significant...
Hi-tech aliens could send no-tech agents.
Re:Ask HN: What do you think about “The Social Dilemma”? on Monday September 14, 2020 @09:02AM (#24469593)
I will never understand how parents can be okay with ads that target children. It's like giving their children's minds to a stranger with candy.
Re:Google says its carbon footprint is now zero on Monday September 14, 2020 @08:54AM (#24469498)
This is a wealth privilege, setting an example others cannot follow unless the whole economy is changed. It does nothing to address the externalization of pollution as a norm of the free market, for which all are complicit. It's just like sending plastic to a poor country and giving them a little cash to make it their problem.
Re:Oracle Wins Bid for TikTok in U.S. on Sunday September 13, 2020 @08:34PM (#24465314)
Oracle must have made the most concessions of control to ByteDance. Oracle gets a popular brand, data, and a strong entry into social networks.
Re:Reverse-engineering the first FPGA chip, the XC2064 on Sunday September 13, 2020 @02:04PM (#24462686)
Would it be safe to say that modern FPGA, although larger, are not more complex, in terms of the bit stream that programs them?

In other words, that a modern chip's bit stream is not more complex, only longer?

Re:Ask HN: What is a better approach to interviewing? on Saturday September 12, 2020 @04:41PM (#24455467)
Hiring managers in tech need to realize they are working with high level learners. An expert in JavaScript can easily learn React, TypeScript, etc. Somebody who knows the ins and outs of Linux can easily learn Docker and Kubernetes.

Hire them, give them a week to catch up, and their off; or wait months to find a perfect match? Any developer with a few years experience knows how to pick up the next piece of technology, the same way everybody else does: read docs, search blogs and forums, ask StackOverflow, etc.

Re:Pringles tube tries to wake from 'recycling nightmare' on Friday September 11, 2020 @11:22AM (#24443774)
And all for 10 cents worth of potato dust cast into the shape of a chip and covered in sodium.
The only solution to is to live in harmony with more animals. People think wild animals can't be domesticated, but they are wrong. Living in the wild makes any animal wild, including humans, but raised from birth, generations of animals can learn to cohabit with humans. We could even train the more intelligence animals to assist us. Imagine local monkeys trained to collect trash and recyclables, rewarded with food to bring bottles and cans to a local depository.
Journalism is not as important as journalist want us to think. Reporting is important. Clear, unbaised reporting gives us what we need to be informed. Nobody asks for story driven reporting, that is a fabrication.

A journalist is a reporter who wants to be Real Writer. Which is to say that they want to do more than give us the facts, they want us to know it via the filter of their experience and analysis. It is a self important profession, all the moereso because universities degree it. Who gets a degree in mere reporting?

Re:What Satoshi Did Not Know (2015) [pdf] on Saturday September 05, 2020 @12:12AM (#24381355)
Bitcoin technology was never decentralized, merely distibuted, despite ideals about how the software could be used.

What is decentralized is the currency at the user level. It has taken the power of control away from a central authority.

There is a glaring legal disconnect with popular web services, where they are not responsible for the content you post, yet the content does not really belong to you, for if it did belong to you, the service would have no right to give it up to police, that information being your property. This double standard allows tech giants to profit precisely at the expense of our fundamental rights. For further proof, ask yourself why they can arbitrarilly censor users despite claiming no responsibility for that content, because "they can do what they want with their platform". It is one or the other: they act like tbey own and are responsible for content, but without the legal ramifications of that reaponsibility.
H1B is screwing generations of US tech workers, and dampening STEM initiatives which is really going to hurt the economy later when we need skilled labor and innovation at another scale.

We need to hire and train US. Anyone can learn the skills, why are we rewarding education in other countries? Why are we drowning a hot job market and neutering the innovation industry?

Ah, the language of science in our times, a universe described as "violent" and "traumatic".
There must be a net benefit to using this software, right? Otherwise somebody in charge would make the decision to use something else, right? It’s not like they are forced to use MS excel, right?

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