Hacker News Reader

_nhyneson PostgreSQL Encryption: The Available Options

This is really slow unless you figure out how to encrypt large batches of rows. It’s harder to do as a postgres plug-in. Do you have an example of enclaved today/transparent database encryption?

_nhyneson India fails to re-establish communication with its Moon probe

Oil and water separating into layers when mixed also looks orderly, but is in fact the higher entropy state https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/111955/homemade-...

_nhyneson GitHub Actions could be so much better

    git commit --amend --no-edit && git push -f

_nhyneson Unlimited Kagi searches for $10 per month

I use the OpenAI playground because I'm paranoid that third party frontends will steal my API keys and I don't have enough time to audit the code or set up firewall rules.

_nhyneson Texas paid a Bitcoin miner to use less electricity during hottest month

Previous discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37418866

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37428605

_nhyneson Griffin – A fully-regulated, API-driven bank, with Clojure

Yes, I completely agree. There's plenty of tech available to achieve many of the goals of functionality, affordability, and privacy a motivated team of developers could have. Just that it's often unnecessarily difficult to build and use. Probably things will be much better in a(nother) decade, but the whole thing is still a work in progress. In the meantime, why pay the cost 100% of the time for avoiding a bad thing that happens 1% of the time? Cryptocurrency has its utility, but much less when minimizing trust isn't a requirement.

_nhyneson Griffin – A fully-regulated, API-driven bank, with Clojure

With the introduction of CBDCs, FedNow, and platforms like TFA, it's starting to look like TradFi is getting the second-mover advantage. Cryptocurrency introduced programmable money, which is great, but it also came with other features like self-custody, extreme transparency & privacy, and immutability that have ended up being more than average users are willing to accept as a bundle.

TradFi entities now have the ability to pick what they like out of the mix and offer that to customers while also benefiting from the convenience of trust assumptions, something cryptocurrency eschews. TradFi is building atop thousands of years worth of UX improvements in how people can come to trust each other. It's difficult for cryptocurrency to compete there.

I still love the developer convenience of blockchain since it nicely combines serverless with auth with payments. But for the most part, given the existence of trust, these benefits could also come from a system like in TFA having a Wasm runtime and maybe a dash of WebAuthn. Like a mashup of Cloudflare Workers and Stripe.

_nhyneson Electric cars aren't affordable because America's workforce is underpaid

Ah, thanks for catching that. On the website (https://www.volkswagen.co.uk/en/configurator.html) I read "up!" as "Golf" for some reason. Indeed the Golf is about the price you quoted.

_nhyneson Electric cars aren't affordable because America's workforce is underpaid

Is that the Dacia Sandero? The VW Up! (not Golf, my mistake) is ~15k EUR. My knowledge cutoff transitively only goes up to 2021, so I can't be sure which one you mean, but I am curious.

_nhyneson OpenAI is doubling the number of messages customers can send to GPT-4

This is welcome because GPT-4 actually requires a few iterations of prompts to actually do its job now. Before it took no more than a prompt and one clarification to get a good output. Now it’s just a GPT-3.5-turbo that hallucinates slightly less.

_nhyneson ChatGPT loses users for first time, shaking faith in AI revolution

MJ’s problem for me at least is that it is incapable of generating unaesthetic things. I gave it the classic list of negative prompts (blurry, grainy, deformed hands, etc.) and got a pretty image back, so I cancelled and switched to Microsoft’s DALL-E, which better spans the full range of creativity.

RLHF is a scourge.

_nhyneson Purchase and manage domains directly through Bluesky

A less uncharitable interpretation of the parent comment is that decentralized platforms are the only way to guarantee personal freedom, save a saintly BDFL or government regulation. Not likely to happen.

The “even if it’s the centralized version” is an acknowledgement that some users may prefer centralization, or the platform is still too young to usefully decentralize. As long as there is a way out, or a credible plan, freedom is preserved.

The third Matrix succeeded due to choice—even at the subconscious level.

_nhyneson FakeToxicityPrompts: Automatic Red Teaming

I’ve found that the RLHF’d ChatGPT is way too submissive these days. I really do not enjoy asking for minor clarification and getting back “I apologize for the confusion…” followed by a completely and incorrectly revised reply.

_nhyneson A Dive into the Math Behind Bitcoin Schnorr Signatures

I was searching for implementations to get a more concrete idea of the algorithm and came across https://github.com/Yawning/secp256k1-voi which appears to be well commented, robust, and oddly entertaining. It’s got Schnorr, and ECDSA for comparison.

There’s also a musig2 one by the same author.

_nhyneson Psilocybin Decelerates Cellular Senescence

This study has some nice data in it, but they didn't really start with a very strong hypothesis, to my understanding. The paper starts with a citation about stress being inversely associated with telomere length, and proposes that psilocybin decreases psychological stress, but then goes on to demonstrate decreases in entirely different in vitro physiological stress markers. How is one to tell that this isn't just cherry-picking dependent variables that look good?

_nhyneson A New Theory for the Assembly of Life in the Universe

And that units of computation are called cycles is no coincidence right?

_nhyneson US 5-year credit default swaps rise to highest since 2011

> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.

The site guidelines suggest not accusing posts of being written by bots :(

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

_nhyneson Ask HN: People who were laid off or quit recently, how are you doing?

I quit my job of five years three weeks ago to work on building what I'm calling autonomous computing [0].

I'd always been hoping to do a startup, having read all of the varying experiences here. The opportunity arose during the EthDenver hackathon where I hacked up a winning proof of concept. The decision to set off was easy since I felt if I didn't at least try to make secure serverless for web3 work, I'd regret never taking the opportunity.

So far, with ChatGPT as my legal and marketing assistant, things are progressing and I remain optimistic about controversial things like trusted hardware, blockchain, and human-AI interaction. Actually, what I would really love is an AutoGPT for bizdev if anyone has that...

[0]: https://enshrine.substack.com/p/enshrine-computing

_nhyneson In-Flight Entertainment Challenge

No offer, no worries. Catch the next interview back.

_nhyneson Redox OS – A Unix-Like Operating System Written in Rust

How did that giant TC-associated crypto donation end up going for them?

_nhyneson Ask HN: What are some of your “buy it for life” purchases?

My Osprey Daylite+ backpack cost $80 and has been used every day for five years now. It has a small tear and broken zipper pull, but neither affects functionality. If it ever has a problem, I can always send it back to Osprey for repair or replacement under the warranty. It’s too good, actually. I want to get a GR1 but the Daylite+ leaves almost nothing to be desired.

_nhyneson Cached Chrome Top Million Websites

“The 5% rule”

_nhyneson NY Supreme Court reinstates NYC's fired unvaccinated employees, orders backpay

I think that the confusion is with the word my. If you had said a sibling comment, it would likely have been immediately clear. Linking or quoting the sibling comment would avoid linguistic ambiguity altogether.

_nhyneson NY Supreme Court reinstates NYC's fired unvaccinated employees, orders backpay

> sibling (n.) (computing theory) A node in a data structure that shares its parent with another node.

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/sibling

> share (v.) To have or use in common

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/share

> another (det.) Not the same; different

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/another

Being one’s own sibling is incompatible with the accepted definitions, so no.

_nhyneson My next Mac might be the last

I turned stage manager on after learning about it from the article. Maybe it's my OS version, but it's super buggy, and I can't seem to turn it off. I'm with the author on this one :\

Update: closing and reopening the windows puts them back into normal mode. Apparently the little close buttons in the sidebar still work (along with the rest of the window). Really weird...

_nhyneson FaCT: Constant Time Programming Language

Rust has some great constant time libs already, for instance `subtle` [0]. A `derive(ConstantTimeEq)` might get you most of the way, but a constant-timeifier would be great for wrapping whole algos where you might not want to think too hard about timing side channels.

For your sleeping proposal, it sounds a little like differential privacy [1] where you can add some randomness to gain some privacy but spend some of the predetermined privacy budget. In that case, `N` depends on the (roughly) variance of the computation time, the noise amount, and your privacy budget. If you get it right, it has provable security properties. However, that doesn't work as well when the adversary has access to the machine and can observe the intermediate state (or side channel leaks thereof).

[0]: https://github.com/dalek-cryptography/subtle

[1]: https://blog.openmined.org/privacy-series-basics-definition/

_nhyneson Hacking Google

They use this honeypot to weed out all of the non-security people.

_nhyneson What to Do If a Nuclear Disaster Is Imminent

Rust will keep us safe, right?

_nhyneson Show HN: Get conversational practice in over 20 languages by talking to an AI

您好！我也正在学中文，但是我也很初学者。What do you do for speaking practice? I live in China, so I get plenty of listening practice, but not too much on speaking (it's hard to keep people's attention with broken sentences :P). I made this an (https://letsyiya.com) to help with that. It's not as good as I'd like it to be, but I've found it helpful. I'd be glad to hear your setup :)

_nhyneson Lunatic: Erlang-Inspired Runtime for WebAssembly