Hacker News Reader

chxon Texas poised to get own stock exchange – with less red tape than NYSE or Nasdaq

> Busang's gold resource was estimated by Bre-X's independent consulting company, Kilborn Engineering (a division of SNC-Lavalin of Montreal

Ah yes, SNC-Lavalin and fraud, name a more iconic duo.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/snc-lavalin-trading-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNC-Lavalin_affair

chxon Is Microsoft trying to commit suicide?

If Recall is not completely illegal already in the EU then Microsoft is doing an any% speedrun from launch to having EU wide legislation specifically banning your product. There is no scenario where the EU will allow this to exist within its borders. The very valid concern for abusive spouses alone makes for excellent political fodder. You won't find a single soul in the EP who would speak up against a legislation framed that way. The newly elected representatives would certainly enjoy an easy win when most of their work will be complicated and very hard.

chxon Is Microsoft trying to commit suicide?

Even that doesn't load for me, https://archive.is/5sSg1 does

chxon Google Maps is killing Timeline for Web

Yes, absolutely, especially now that any travel is at least five years prior I no longer necessarily remember exactly my favorite restaurants in Florence and Lyon :/

chxon A breakthrough towards the Riemann hypothesis

Remember Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade? They are not in the chamber yet but they did disarm one of the traps in the temple.

chxon A breakthrough towards the Riemann hypothesis

Yes but it's Terence Tao. I mean, the set of living mathematicians is not well ordered on greatness but if it were, Terence Tao would be fairly close to the upper limit.

chxon Security researcher discovers Microsoft's Recall tool is woefully insecure

https://techhub.social/@SomeGadgetGuy/112556398250955057

It just clicked in my brain. What I haven't been able to articulate about why I'm so anxious about #Windows Recall. I'm sure others have already gotten to where I am.

It's worse than "a system that tracks everything you do" and stores that info in a basic database that could be easily compromised. It's worse than a nanny surveillance tool for companies to spy on their employees.

It's inescapable.

It doesn't matter if I make a dozen "how to disable recall" tutorials. The second YOUR data shows up on someone ELSE'S screen, it's in THEIR recall database.

It won't matter if you're a master #security expert specialist. You can't account for EVERY other computer you've ever interacted with. If a family member looks up an old email with your personal data in it, your data is now at risk.

If THEIR system is compromised YOUR data is at risk.

I just went from "vague feeling of unease" to "actively writing templates to canvas elected officials, regulators, and attorneys general."

chxon Security researcher discovers Microsoft's Recall tool is woefully insecure

you press show this password , it's now leaked

that's the mild version

an abused spouse looks for help and is beaten or murdered for it

that's the less mild version

chxon I'm forking Ladybird and stepping down as SerenityOS BDFL

It doesn't but it accumulates cruft and since then new libraries emerge which you might be able to reuse instead of writing your own thing. Just as an example: Boost first appeared in 1999 so very likely at least early on no one used it.

chxon Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

Oh, I got a good neurologist back in Hungary thirty years ago who over two years have sorted what's wrong and set me up and I have been symptom free since 1997 and then I added diabetes T2 on top of a couple years back, all of this is known. That's not the problem, thanks.

chxon Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

Because y'all don't mask any more and if all I can do is sit at home then why not be warm while at it? And be closer to family, too.

I can travel wearing the Halo to visit my brother's family (in the UK) and my parents (in Hungary) but that's all. Otherwise, by and large, I don't go anywhere any more. I can't. That's the new reality. I wear a positive air pressure respirator to risk such activities as boarding a bus. And while it's quiet it's not silent so cinema, theatre etc is totally out. You can't possibly imagine how lonely life became even for an introvent who has worked from home all his life. I didn't quite get suicidal over the 2022 holidays but let's just say I understood why suicide statistics climb up over the holidays and I decided this can not be borne any more and changed things so it's easier to visit what few family I have left. I have no other human contact than these visits every few months. Sometimes I don't leave my apartment for several days at all and if I do, it's mostly for lonely walks (very rarely the post office or the pharmacy). The few friends I had in Vancouver got lost during Covid -- and I know no one in Malta. (Perhaps this helps explaining some of my recent post history.)

chxon Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

I have been living for 12 years in Canada in an apartment with a baseboard heater. Came an unusually cold winter -- for Vancouver at least -- and I have acknowledged the heater just can't cope with this much cold. Old windows, not much insulation, the works. I bought three three 1500W ceramic heaters and AWG 12 extension cords and it was OK.

Then a visitor told me the baseboard heater had a cover which you could remove. How was I supposed to know?? https://i.imgur.com/Gncty0s.jpeg see that long hole in it? Well, the cover was always on it and it got painted over and I had no idea it can be removed. I grew up in Europe, behind the Iron Curtain actually, childhood heaters in prefabricated buildings were like this https://i.imgur.com/8KMuAKO.jpeg but even more modern ones were on the wall https://i.imgur.com/s6NWHDM.jpeg and I never before had a baseboard heater.

There are things you expect to be problematic with immigration. This was certainly was not one. Another was finding a laundry basket when I came over. Not really an online thing, not then, not in Canada at least. So I asked someone in the elevator. That was weird.

Past immigration shopping, surprisingly, even in 2024 is a problem. I just moved back to Europe after more than 15 years. Now I can't find a travel size and packaged lemon juice anywhere. Not in Malta where I live (not a surprise) but neither in the UK either (WTF). https://www.waitrose.com/ecom/shop/search?&searchTerm=lemon%... https://www.sainsburys.co.uk/gol-ui/SearchResults/lemon%20ju... this and Amazon UK has an appropriate size https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07W1KGCZJ but it's a weak cover, it will spill if it gets jostled in the backpack. I am drawing a total blank: https://geizhals.eu/?fs=zitronensaft+100ml&hloc=at&hloc=de&h... In North America I could get https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00BZSUWPY but now that I live within ferry distance of Sicily, I can't? Nothing for succo limone 100ml site:it either. scratches head

chxon PyCon US 2024 Recap

No, Sweden deciding to euthanasia its elderly did not pay off. Try harder.

chxon PyCon US 2024 Recap

Did you check covid wastewater statistic over the last year when you parroted the pandemic is over?

chxon PyCon US 2024 Recap

So let's exclude those people from society, that's what you are saying. It's not just traveling thousands of miles, it's boarding a bus or entering any indoor space with unmasked people. And yes, that exclusion is the reality most of us face.

This has echoes of how people with AIDS were considered back then.

chxon PyCon US 2024 Recap

> I’m really glad there’s a sense of normalcy after the pandemic again

Except we are not after the pandemic, it's made up by politicians and the rich. The second highest measured covid ratio in wastewater across the United States was in 2023 December-January. It's just the virus now kills a lot less people but its long term effects, named "long covid" is a debilitating disability that people prefer to pretend not existing.

chxon PyCon US 2024 Recap

Thanks for excluding me from the conferences you attend.

I am astounded that four years in we still need to explain that a) masks are effective in stopping community transmission b) masks worn by the source are more effective or, in other words, your mask protects me while my mask protects you. How is this new?

No, your stance is absolutely selfish -- not uncommon of course, but it is selfish.

chxon What I think about Lua after shipping a project with 60k lines of code

> Honestly the endless criticism of Rust "fanatics" is far more tedious than anything Rust developers say.

We can agree to disagree. I am sick and tired of Rust people screaming at the top of the lungs in every possible place about how their language is great and want to rewrite everything in it.

So yes I expect people not to praise Rust in a Lua thread, it's completely off topic.

chxon What I think about Lua after shipping a project with 60k lines of code

Yeah that would've been lua2.1 described here: https://www.lua.org/spe.html

chxon “Imprecise” language models are smaller, speedier, and nearly as accurate

> Facts aren't these magical things living in your brain, they're information with a high probability of accurately modeling reality.

Truly people have completely lost it because of the AI hype.

There are facts. They are not probabilistic, they are just that: facts. Despite Mencken's 1917 long essay "A Neglected Anniversary" which became really popular, the bathtub didn't arrive to the United States in 1842 and it didn't became popular because President Fillmore installed one. A Kia ad in 2008 still referred to this without realizing it's a made up story to distract from World War I. https://chatgpt.com/c/6b1869a7-c0d7-46e9-bcb5-7a7c78dc3d53 https://sniggle.net/bathtub.php

Notably in 1829 the Tremont Hotel in Boston had indoor plumbing and baths (copper and tin bathtubs) and in 1833 President Andrew Jackson had installed iron pipes in the Ground Floor Corridor and a bathing room in the East Wing. Well before 1842.

There's nothing probabilistic about this.

chxon Recall: Stealing everything you've ever typed or viewed on your own Windows PC

The real harm in Recall and I so much wish there was an authority who stepped in and slapped Microsoft into next week because of it: abusive relationships. Now your abuser can see everything you've done on your computer so if you try to get out your situation will worsen and also because of this you might not dare to seek help on said computer.

chxon Recall: Stealing everything you've ever typed or viewed on your own Windows PC

chxon “Imprecise” language models are smaller, speedier, and nearly as accurate

It indeed lies on very solid reasoning: a probabilistic predictor doesn't deal in facts. You'd need CyC for that.

chxon “Imprecise” language models are smaller, speedier, and nearly as accurate

Never. As long as it is a probabilistic token generator, it can not be correct, it's that simple.

And it creates plausible text because it is trained on what humans have produced so it looks plausible. As someone put it, they found a zero day in the OS of the human brain.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/may/08/ai-mac...

https://undark.org/2023/04/06/chatgpt-isnt-hallucinating-its...

chxon “Imprecise” language models are smaller, speedier, and nearly as accurate

No, they are not correct -- the answer it gives might accidentally be correct but it can not be trusted, you still need to do research to verify everything it says and so the only usable standpoint is to use it as a bullshit generator which it is very good at.

chxon The QR Backlash Has Won. Restaurants Are Ditching Them for Good.

My problem -- and probably I am not alone in this -- are dietary restrictions. So when I order, it's not going be what's on the menu, rather some kind of meat or fish from one entree and then side from another and maybe something I spotted available as a salad topping and I love it. If a server comes and takes my order they can write it down and most of the time they can make it work. I have no idea how to order this with a QR menu. It's not fungible.

chxon “Imprecise” language models are smaller, speedier, and nearly as accurate

Nearly as accurate? I guess zero is close to zero.

https://hachyderm.io/@inthehands/112006855076082650

> You might be surprised to learn that I actually think LLMs have the potential to be not only fun but genuinely useful. “Show me some bullshit that would be typical in this context” can be a genuinely helpful question to have answered, in code and in natural language — for brainstorming, for seeing common conventions in an unfamiliar context, for having something crappy to react to.

> Alas, that does not remotely resemble how people are pitching this technology.

chxon Cybercriminals pose as "helpful" Stack Overflow users to push malware

> Stackoverflow is strict and pedantic to the point of being very unfriendly to newbies

at what point do you stop being a newbie? I have been on SO for 14 years and have found "lately" or the last five or so years to be extraordinarily unfriendly. I am in the middle of solving a complex problem so I posit a question but it's stripped to bare bones to make it easier to answer -- and the answer is almost always is not what I seek but instead "why are you doing this". Aaaaargh. I would need to post War & Peace to make you understand why so I just go and delete the question when this happens which is too often. Example: https://stackoverflow.com/q/77202800/308851 lots of comments asking why I am doing this were deleted but downvote remains. I kept this one up for whatever reason although downvotes usually are enough to make me delete a question.

My advice: if you can't help then stay away from the question. Alas, this likely won't reach the hopped-on-SO-power idiots but it's worth a try.

chxon Anonymous Source Shared Leaked Google Search API Documents

https://github.com/yoshi-code-bot

Created 1,891 commits in 19 repositories

All 19 is under googleapis

This looks like a bot Google uses to publish their stuff on github and so likely it's a misconfiguration.

chxon Big data is dead (2023)

1U box too.