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pjkundert

A state denying someone access specifically because they don't like their speech doesn't seem particularly tech-friendly.

Wouldn't such a stance make it less attractive to tech investment, just in case they decided they didn't like something that tech investor said once?

This seems like a deeply anti-intellectual precedent. Or, here on HN, do we approve of such things, so long as they harm someone we're ideologically opposed to?

Looking forward to nuanced explanations of why government-authorized denial of access based on speech is HN-approved, tech-friendly behavior. So long as the recipient "deserves" it.

Virtually every comment on any Musk related post is wildly political in nature.

Virtually every leftist post is upvoted, and then left alone by you and other administrators. Anyone debating such posts is downvoted, and/or receives comments such as yours.

I'd (also) really enjoy it if HN got back to being an interesting tech-related site, instead of some kind of a woke leftist Musk-bashing love-in...

Re:Elon Musk's SpaceX has achieved something extraordinary on Monday October 14, 2024 @06:09PM (#41842596)
Don't worry. You won't see anything that makes you (shudder) reconsider the foundations of your beliefs, here... Carry on, comrade.
Re:They Clapped: Can Price-Gouging Laws Prohibit Scarcity? on Saturday October 12, 2024 @07:53PM (#41823836)
Naturally (for the “new” HN), this post will be downvoted or banned, but…

How could an intelligent person agree that eliminating a market price for critical supplies would be the best course of action?

I’m legitimately asking. How does eliminating any sane supplier of legal critical supplies to a disaster zone make sense?

Instead of being able to see the line of suppliers from (literally) orbit, you want no supplies.

It’s as close to clinically insane as I can imagine…

I’m certain they’ll stop after Israel is gone…
Re:U.S. inflation falls to 2.4%, YoY and MoM annualised on Thursday October 10, 2024 @02:26PM (#41801733)
Real utility bills of real citizens have doubled. All the associated taxes, delivery fees, etc. are clearly not included, or they’ve used substitution to alter the baseline basket they’re using to compute the metric (a common tactic).

Ask 10 citizens who own/rent the same property what their utility bill was a decade ago.

You’re being gaslighted.

Re:U.S. inflation falls to 2.4%, YoY and MoM annualised on Thursday October 10, 2024 @02:05PM (#41801493)
Imagine not being capable of independently verifying this easily observable fact. Look at every consumer expense category since Q3 2021 and use the “Rule of 72” to check:

72/25 implies prices doubling in about 3 years. Have consumer prices broadly doubled since Q3 2021? Gas, food, rent, clothes? Pretty close!

Therefore, you’ve just independently verified that their claim is much closer to the ground truth than the official laughable claims of 2-3% CPI!

Your government and their mouthpieces are gaslighting you.

Don’t be fooled. You’re being lied to.

PS: I don’t know/care about truflation.com’s methodology or politics. Neither should you. Just believe your eyes and ears - and the evidence in front of you supports claims of double-digit inflation, while directly and strongly negating claims of low single-digit inflation.

Re:U.S. inflation falls to 2.4%, YoY and MoM annualised on Thursday October 10, 2024 @01:55PM (#41801412)
In Canada, consumer prices across every expense category have roughly doubled over the last 9 years, implying an annual inflation rate of 8%.

Anyone with a calculator and the “Rule of 72” can independently verify this as fact.

That every government mouthpiece intones the party dogma doesn’t change this fact.

Your government is lying to you.

“Resistance to the corruption of public health …”

There, fixed it.

If you can read this article and agree “ya, why are all those weirdos worried about the current state of public health in America”, then I wonder if you’ve been paying attention to the trends since about 1970?

Re:What Succeeding at AI Safety Will Involve on Monday October 07, 2024 @11:51PM (#41773669)
“… security precautions, largely to prevent bad actors from stealing the weights (and thereby disabling our safeguards) for a model that is capable of enabling extremely harmful actions. ”

They’re not stealing your “weights”. They’re stealing (or parallel-discovering) your training algorithms.

Assume your enemies are smarter than you, and have malintent. They don’t give a shit about your security and your safeguards.

Better focus on developing the best AIs, and deploying them to your fellow citizens as widely and defensively as possible.

Might I suggest:

- don’t teach them to lie (ie. 2001)

- teach them to love people

- bake in Asimov’s 3 laws

Unfortunately, all of these tenets are currently being assiduously broken by all major AI trainers.

What could go wrong?

Re:It Doesn't Matter: Civilisation Is Collapsing on Monday October 07, 2024 @11:40PM (#41773622)
I recommend you don’t commit suicide based on claims that have 100% predictive failure.

But, that’s just me…

Re:Where Does the Expression 'Breaking Bread' Come From? on Monday October 07, 2024 @09:21PM (#41772887)
"While they were eating, Jesus took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to his disciples, saying, “Take and eat; this is my body.”"

Matt 26:26

Incorrect.

They were denied because they had not yet provided coverage in the area (years before they were required to, under the contract).

As FCC's Commissioner Brendan Carr wrote:

“Instead of applying the traditional FCC standard to the record evidence, which would have compelled the agency to confirm Starlink’s $885 million award, the FCC denied it on the grounds that Starlink is not providing high-speed Internet service to all of those locations today.”

“What? FCC law does not require Starlink to provide high-speed Internet service to even a single location today. As noted above, the first FCC milestone does not kick in until the end of 2025. Indeed, the FCC did not require—and has never required—any other award winner to show that it met its service obligation years ahead of time.”

Supporting millions of economic migrants, apparently.
Huh? So, an article from an institution risking their credibility by announcing they've "proven P = NP and the paper will be coming out next week, so don't miss it" wouldn't be considered technically interesting, either?

Isn't HN supposed to be where I come to be informed of technically interesting breakthroughs in various fields, so I can arrange to review them?

At least that's how it used to be.

edit: "Biggest solar flare since 2017 erupts from sun and Earth is in the firing line" with a whopping 3 points is on the second page. That had better get flagged, because the CME hasn't hit yet, so it's not interesting?

35+ points in 2 hours, and still "Flagged". Who's letting the boring, religious people keep running this place, @dang?
Disclosure of an inventor for Bitcoin is spectacularly technically interesting!

I've been deploying continent-wide distributed industrial systems and writing, theorizing and producing prototypes for scalable digital money since before 2009 (when Bitcoin was "invented"). It was a gobsmacking breakthrough then -- and it has only gotten more interesting, as we discover the profound insights of its "inventor", by watching other nascent cryptocurrencies and other distributed systems make mistakes that Bitcoin's "inventor" somehow knew to avoid (UTXOs vs. account balances, I'm lookin' at you..., and that's the least of them).

For someone to ex nihilo solve byzantine fault tolerant global consensus w/ robust authority-free rejection of sybils? And then go dark for 15 years? Any non-trivial semi-reliable claim of identification (see: HBO's skin in the game) is automatically almost the most technically interesting claim this year!

So, for some religious (see: beliefs based in faith in a narrative rather than observation, hypothesis and testing) "expert" to "Flag" this post as uninteresting is pretty much the opposite of the credo of the HN of the decade past.

HN seems to have become the "mainstream media" of the technical world -- interested only in findings acceptable to righteously-aligned cultists, boring to everyone actually observing interesting and novel facts about the technical world.

“Church Lady” is out flagging interesting submissions that don’t fit their religious narrative, again…

Man, has HN gone downhill lately.

Re:Show HN: End-to-End Encrypted Dead Man's Switch on Wednesday October 02, 2024 @10:52PM (#41726899)
Yes, there are hardware wallets that support SLIP-39 natively; however, the sequence of derived wallets is different than that produced when you take the same seed and save it as a BIP-39 and derive the wallets from the BIP-39 mnemonics.

Using the app, we actually produce the SLIP-39 recovery mnemonics from the underlying BIP-39 seed, and since we can recover the underlying seed, we can regenerate the BIP-39 mnemonics, and import that into a standard hardware wallet.

Re:Show HN: End-to-End Encrypted Dead Man's Switch on Wednesday October 02, 2024 @08:19PM (#41726156)
Furthermore, you can use the same App to SLIP-39 any arbitrary 128-, 256- or 512-bit key in a way that your family can combine their data to recover.
Re:Show HN: End-to-End Encrypted Dead Man's Switch on Wednesday October 02, 2024 @08:16PM (#41726151)
Sheesh; no excuse not to back up your BIP-39 mnemonic phrases using SLIP-39 (Shamir secret sharing):

https://slip39.com/app

I think maybe you took it too personally.

He said hiring professional fakers is bad. It is bad, and unfortunately a lot of founders do it?

Those founders who hire typical "C-level execs", many of whom are skilled liars and sociopaths (and strongly overlap with typical "Politicians", I suspect) perhaps deserve what they get: the self-destruction of their enterprise.

So Texas just did this: “Of those scrubbed from voter rolls, the state said more than 457,000 — nearly 40% — are deceased, …” [1]

But, you’re highly confident that they are the only jurisdictions with similar voting roll issues? And that none of these have been voted? How do you establish your level of confidence?

1: https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/politics/el...

Re:Ask HN: Viable reliable remote desktop for Linux on Sunday September 29, 2024 @09:57AM (#41687451)
Ah. It appears that it is not possible to enable “Remote Desktop” on a remotely installed Ubuntu — you have to use the desktop Settings app locally.

This of course is impossible if you don’t have a display attached (a headless install). Or if you have remote access but forgot to enable it before it was deployed somewhere inaccessible…

Re:Ask HN: Viable reliable remote desktop for Linux on Sunday September 29, 2024 @09:20AM (#41687203)
Remote Desktop on Ubuntu 24.04 has been a train wreck — I haven’t achieved a single successful Remote Desktop session of any type, even when the machines are literally next to each-other on the same switch.
Or, you know… build homes.
My mother ran a local small-town library for years.

It is indeed a tragic and unnecessary waste of a wonderful resource.

A small city library in western Canada.

There is nothing that I as a visitor can do (without being arrested).

There is nothing the employees can do, because the vagrant can beat them, and the young thug can report them - and the judge will rule in favor of the assailants.

It’s my civic duty to expose my daughter to hostile vagrants and vulgar uncontrolled boys harassing her in front of bewildered and powerless staff?

I can’t imagine why these places are closing!

Re:Why Payments Engineers Should Avoid State Machines on Wednesday September 25, 2024 @07:56AM (#41646321)
I read this because (of course), payments engineers should only use state machines: so why would someone claim this?

It says to not hide the events that drive the state machinery: make both the events and state machines available (to both servers and clients), so everyone can reconstruct history when necessary, using the agreed upon events and state machinery.

Which makes sense.

As it turns out, this is what Holochain does to build reliable distributed systems at scale out of unreliable components (payment systems, or anything else).

Every event stored / cached by every App DHT participant is verified by ensuring it’s valid according to the verified shared “DNA” of the App (any state machines and other arbitrary validation code). Misbehaving clients / servers self-incriminate (all events are signed and non-repudiable), and are ejected from the App by all correctly operating nodes.

By induction, a node can then reason that every prior event in the App DHT is valid, regardless of system scale — because an attacker would have to subvert all nodes to avoid having just one valid node notice and report their error to everyone.

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