Hacker News Reader

CGMthrowawayon Florida's HOAs and condo associations are making the housing crisis worse

>To an extent they might make sense where there are shared facilities that need to be funded, like a swimming pool or something. Most of what they seem to do is just bullshit though.

You can say the exact same about the government. To be clear, are you in favor of more liberty for homeowners, or are you in favor of the government stepping in to regulate HOAs?

CGMthrowawayon Florida's HOAs and condo associations are making the housing crisis worse

People love to hate on HOAs but not all are bad, and in general they are a good example of self-governance, when the alternative is having people who DON'T live in your neighborhood regulate your neighborhood. Which would you prefer?

CGMthrowawayon Claude reveals ECDSA curve origins

Why did they specifically skip other apparently suitable curve candidates? The B-163 seed and the base point origins of several other curves are still not explained

CGMthrowawayon Neural networks are clean

What did it say? One comment is totally flagged away now

CGMthrowawayon One in ten people are older than 65. Three in four live under a leader who is

Yeah you can add 18 to my 48 number if you are going to look at it that way. Not sure that it changes anything

CGMthrowawayon One in ten people are older than 65. Three in four live under a leader who is

>The founding fathers were in their 30s.

The average age of the Constitutional Convention was 42 years old. Life expectancy of an adult[1] at that time was only about 48 years old, and the the median age of all American adults 18+ was about 30 (today it is 48).

[1]Avg life expectancy of someone from birth during this time was 37 years old.

CGMthrowawayon One in ten people are older than 65. Three in four live under a leader who is

I read that book. William Golding, right?

CGMthrowawayon One in ten people are older than 65. Three in four live under a leader who is

Ten in ten children have parents who are older than them

CGMthrowawayon NYC's "Click to Cancel" rule is now in effect

  Doubled the police force and cut crime in half, including murders down 66%, shootings down 72%
  Zero-tolerance policy against public disorder, panhandling and public nuisance crimes (unheard of today!)
  Cleaned up times square transforming from a seedy red light district into a major tourist destination
  Converted a $2.3 billion city budget deficit into a $2.9 billion surplus
  Reduced or eliminated 23 different city taxes, saving taxpayers over $9 billion
  Overhauled the welfare system, helping people get jobs and successfully moved over 600K people off assistance
  Led NYC and USA through the immediate aftermath of 9/11
  Earned the title America's Mayor, Time magazine Person of the Year and an honorary knighthood

CGMthrowawayon Anthropic Bans Cruelty to Claude, Still Won't Say What It Protects

Neither is talking to a chatbot

CGMthrowawayon Food processing influences metabolism and brain activity

The average dinner plate today is 11.5 inches. Fifty years ago, it was 9.5in. A hundred years ago, it was 9 inches. In the 1700-1800s, it was 8 to 8.5 inches. For centuries before that, the common "trencher" was 4-6 inches square. And say ~2000 years ago, food was served for the entire dinner party on a single 12-16inch communal platter.

Dinner plates have gotten huge, historically speaking.

CGMthrowawayon Anthropic Bans Cruelty to Claude, Still Won't Say What It Protects

>are you saying people who run over pedestrians on GTA just for the fun of it or punch other people or beings in Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat are all psychos

Pretty sure he said not all, but there is a chance some are. Which seems sensible.

CGMthrowawayon Anthropic Bans Cruelty to Claude, Still Won't Say What It Protects

> Shooting NPCs in video games isn't anything like doing the real thing. If it was then yeah i would very likely think it would have some effect. Talking to Claude is a lot like the 'real' thing

What if the NPC's dialogue is powered by Claude? Checkmate lol

CGMthrowawayon NYC's "Click to Cancel" rule is now in effect

I'm old enough to remember that everyone said the same thing about Giuliani when he was mayor. Now everyone hates him

CGMthrowawayon Trump administration is suspending Microsoft from a green card program

If anyone needs an example of this happening, here is one from yesterday. Netflix is advertising a fully remote $750K software engineering job in the Seattle Times classifieds but the same job isn't listed on their career website: https://x.com/JobsNowPR/status/2107816460634784094

CGMthrowawayon Why were Victorian elites so effective?

Many private K-12 schools in the US are also doing this. It's the type of education my parents wanted for me, and for college they thought likewise about the importance of liberal arts, in the classical sense of that term (intellectual pursuits as distinct from practical trades).

This type of education is not for everyone, though.

CGMthrowawayon Demystifying Tufte's data-ink ratio

Narrowing the bars is not reducing non-data ink ratio imo and against the spirit. The bars are the data. And they therefore should be maximally visible, the same way that you BOLD text (make it thicker) that you want to emphasize rather than thin it to "reduce non-message ink ratio."

For the width of the bar there is practically speaking a middle ground that uses thick bars but not too thick/close together such that it harms legibility.

CGMthrowawayon Cold War spy satellite named after Farrah Fawcett just exploded in space

USA 32 broke apart on September 13.

It seems obvious to me that this is related to an announcement the very next day - September 14 - wherein Secretary of the Air Force Troy Meink publicly confirmed for the first time that the US has active "on-orbit space control weapons" circling the globe.

Either the US destroyed its own decommissioned satellite as a public weapons demonstration, or the sudden "breakup" forced the Pentagon's hand to make the announcement.

CGMthrowawayon It's Time to Investigate the AI Labs

There are levels to it as well. Take alcohol and driving, for example:

Level A: Who can drink it (possession and consumption law)

Level B: What you can do while drunk (DUI law)

Level C: What you can do while drinking (open container law)

All orthogonal to things like reckless driving, endangerment and creating injurious accidents, which are already criminalized without needing additional laws against alcohol use to enforce them.

CGMthrowawayon Sex, AI, and the Apocalypse

Hopefully enough smart people out there can distinguish between many "AI safety" people and actual AI engineers/scientists at these labs working at the coalface.

AI ethics reminds me of "design thinking" grifters or scrummasters or other such BS jobs of times past.

If you listen in an informed way to these people talk, they are not really as technical as they sound. They are personality hires, woo-woo spellcasters. They are just creating content for a narrative. The grasp of philosophy is not even at par with what you might think it ought to be.

CGMthrowawayon Eating Fruit Skins

Lots of fruit skins are very edible (kiwis etc.), but they are covered with pesticides. All conventional fruits are.

If you look at the "Dirty Dozen" vs. "Clean Fifteen" lists of fruits/veggies that come out every year, you'll notice that the cleanest fruits are almost always ones that grow with a thick skin or covering, or are covered by soil: banana, pineapple, avocado, corn, (shelled) peas, watermelon, carrot, potato, etc.

And the dirtiest ones have a thin or no skin: greens, stone fruit, blackberries, strawberries, apples, pears etc.

The clean fruits aren't really any cleaner, the study just tests the "edible" part minus the outer skin. If you eat the skin of conventional Clean Fifteen, you might as well be eating a Dirty Dozen.

CGMthrowawayon Eating Fruit Skins

Cf. red wine

CGMthrowawayon Navier-Stokes Announcement

https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-...

CGMthrowawayon Why Bullshit Jobs Are (Finally) Dying [video]

The TLDR is not that interesting, but here you go...

1) BS jobs, in the sense outlined by Graeber (the BS jobs essay guy), proliferated due to easy money/low interest rates

2) money is not so easy anymore

3) AI is taking our jobs

4) BS jobs may actually not be going away, just shifting, e.g. from "culture coordinator" to "AI ethics reviewer"

CGMthrowawayon What do Visa and Mastercard do? An intro to card networks

>It boggles my mind that the government has privatized currency to these people.

That's the banks (lenders), not the payment networks.

>Crazy-person-but-actually-really practical-idea: Nationalize one if these networks. Maybe Discover.

The central planners want to. It's called FedNow.

CGMthrowawayon Searching for the best silicone USB cable

And the plasticizers (DEHP primarily) are really nasty, easily slough off onto your skin where they are absorbed. Don't ever put plastic cable in your mouth, or that of a child

CGMthrowawayon I've factored the RSA keys of a Certificate Authority from the 90s

Did you have any personal interaction with NSA or their proxies?

CGMthrowawayon Why getting your hands dirty is good for you

We have this already: "touch grass" for the normies and "grounding" (standing barefoot on the earth) for the more hacker inclined

CGMthrowawayon LG smart TVs caught logging audio with screen off and snooping on local devices

Why wait until after the return policy? Also what firmware did you update to? Also if you could point to a video where it shows how to do all these things that would be amazing

CGMthrowawayon The auto lobby spent millions on media manipulation

EVs are some of the cheapest cars you can get. All of the American manufacturers sell them at a huge loss, due to government regulations around average mpg for their lineups, etc