Hacker News Reader

crotchfireon What happened with the Web Monetization API?

KYC exists to make life hard. It solves no real problems, just like the TSA at airports.

I love this analogy.

crotchfireon First-gen social media users have nowhere to go

You're confusing Tox with something else.

crotchfireon It's time to admit that genes are not the blueprint for life

the lineage of this intelligence goes back in an unbroken line to their first common ancestor billions of years ago,

Nonsense. If cell walls ever had the ability to replicate themselves, totally autonomously, without the rest of the cell -- they've very certainly lost that ability. That loss of self-sufficient replication is quite a big "break" in the line.

Your argument might apply to ribosomes, however. The nucleus needs the ribosome for replication every bit as much as the ribosome needs the nucleus. And the ribosomal DNA is one of the very, very rare things that has hardly changed at all in the history of life -- humans and yeast have 75%-identical ribosomal DNA. Yeast!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ribosomal_DNA

crotchfireon It's time to admit that genes are not the blueprint for life

What makes you think that a machine any less complex than the entire organism is capable of "grokking what is actually going on"?

I agree with you that humans may never be able to understand most of what's going on in biology. But I'm even less enthusiastic about gradient descent. The interesting results in machine learning for biology all seem to amount to better ways of indexing the data we already have (like crystallographically-discovered protein shapes) and interpolating between the existing matches nearest to a query term.

I don't claim to know what "understanding" really truly is, but I do know what it isn't.

crotchfireon Somewhere along the way we forgot about software craftsmanship

Github deserves a lot of the blame here.

Teletubby-candy-crush blingware UI blended with manipulative social upvote features does not engender Göedel-level greatness.

crotchfireon Somewhere along the way we forgot about software craftsmanship

Oh it'll come together, and quite quickly too! Moments before eating all your data :P

crotchfireon First-gen social media users have nowhere to go

Tox is by far the most stable in my experience.

It's the only one that is truly decentralized -- no DNS, no WebPKI, no Tor "authorities". Its DHT is rock solid, second only to bittorrent's. And Tox's NAT-holepunching capabilities are amazing, due to the way they're integrated with the DHT.

Tox was being used for a lot of the stuff that people think Tailscale invented -- five years ago.

crotchfireon The tragedy of mathematics in Russia (2013)

German culture is not individualistic in the sense being discussed here.

A lot of reports and surveys about "level of individualism in country XYZ" use "individualistic" to mean the opposite of "driven by extended family relationships". This is a very misleading way of using the term "individualism". A more accurate term would be "anti-nepotistic". German culture is certainly less nepotistic than the average for the world or even for Western Europe -- but to describe this as individualism is extremely inaccurate.

crotchfireon Out-of-bounds read and write in the glibc's qsort()

which is definitely a comparison function I've seen before.

In which setuid-root program?

crotchfireon OnlyFake: A site where ‘neural networks’ churn out fake IDs

If that worked at a scale that mattered I have a feeling we would have heard about it by now. Election ink has been used extensively for quite some time -- just not in the countries HN readers are likely to live in.

crotchfireon OnlyFake: A site where ‘neural networks’ churn out fake IDs

This does not affect the collecting website's security or revenue in any way. They don't care.

They don't do this for their own security. They do it because they're required to. And the requirement is idiotic, which is why the result is... idiocy.

crotchfireon Out-of-bounds read and write in the glibc's qsort()

Note that this can only be exploited if the program is already using a nontransitive comparision function, which is an egregious bug, and the program is setuid root.

The odds of a setuid root program having this particular, exotic flaw are miniscule. None have been found in the wild.

crotchfireon Prioritizing software right to repair: engaging corporate response teams

Right to Recycle.

crotchfireon OnlyFake: A site where ‘neural networks’ churn out fake IDs

This has been an easily-solved problem for quite a while: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Election_ink

crotchfireon Stract: Open-souce, non-profit search engine

Where does their crawl come from?

crotchfireon Taggers have sprayed graffiti on 27 stories of a downtown Los Angeles skyscraper

Pay no attention to the banking crisis... there is no banking crisis... riiight.

Apparently this building is also a target pratice range: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-02-03/lapd-inv...

crotchfireon A brief history of the U.S. trying to add backdoors into encrypted data (2016)

And ed25519 was out of the question, since -- being brand new -- its use would have given away the fact that DJB was among the group of people who presented themselves as Satoshi Nakamoto.

crotchfireon A Partisan Solution to Partisan Gerrymandering: The Define–Combine Procedure

This is a great example of why the paper's methodology is so utterly bogus. A Markov chain algorithm isn't going to come up with strategies like this, but humans certainly will.

crotchfireon Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

move to another jurisdiction such as Ireland

The size tax should be applied to imports, just like VAT is.

crotchfireon jj init – getting serious about replacing Git with Jujutsu

You seem really fixated on this "fork" thing, which is not mentioned anywhere in my comments.

crotchfireon jj init – getting serious about replacing Git with Jujutsu

It's a downstream consumer of (lib)git.

crotchfireon Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

I am not proposing to cap anything. Please re-read the entire comment you're replying to, not just the first line.

crotchfireon Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

you have to pick where

Everywhere.

and how quickly to ramp

Yes, that is the one and only tuneable variable. It's a single, obvious scalar, like the interest rate set by a central bank. There's no room for favoritism or shenanighans. Of course, like central bank interest rates, it will be an object of impassioned political debate. That's expected.

which will eventually lead to you having to make some “assumptions” about what size (range) is “too big”

Absolutely false. You're confusing a value with its rate of change. The speed limit on the highway doesn't constrain the length of the road.

crotchfireon jj init – getting serious about replacing Git with Jujutsu

Wake me when they upstream it.

I can't afford to invest in Google's soon-to-be-abandonware projects.

crotchfireon Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

Please read the comment again; you have not understood it.

No cap is proposed.

crotchfireon Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

This supposes that there's some naturally-right size for a corporation to be

No, in fact, it doesn't. Please re-read the comment you're replying to.

There is no cutoff, limit, or threshhold. It doesn't prescribe a naturally-right size any more than a graduated income tax "prescribes a naturally-right amount of income".

crotchfireon Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

The Commanding Heights, eh?

I think this has been tried already, unfortunately.

crotchfireon Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

Will you cap the wealth of corporations too?

Because if not, people with insatiable appetites will simply seek control of those corporations rather than direct control of piles of money.

Personally I'm an advocate of the exact opposite of what seems to be proposed here: controls on corporate size rather than individual wealth. Living cells don't grow without bounds; at a certain point they get too big and are forced to divide. Simply imposing a tax on corporate size (not a limit) would accomplish this.

Industries where massive size is simply unavoidable (e.g. passenger airplane manufacturing) would simply pay the tax; any economic distortions can be nulled out by reducing the industry's VAT rate in proportion to average size-tax paid by that industry. In all other industries smaller competitors would have the persistent advantage of lower tax costs, allowing them to eventually undermine the bloated colossuses.

crotchfireon A Partisan Solution to Partisan Gerrymandering: The Define–Combine Procedure

You cut, I choose becomes I choose, you un-cut.

Note that this paper contains no optimality proofs.

There's a lot of mathy-looking stuff, but then instead of a proof we get "yeah we took this one particular Markov-chain algorithm and had it play against itself and it failed to generate a gerrymander".

If deployed in real life, an immense amount of power -- and therefore money -- will be at stake: certainly more than enough money to hire persons with intelligence equal to or greater than the creator of "the ShotBurst Algorithm" as consultants.

If an optimality proof is not possible, the only alternative is to test using real humans and (very substantial) real rewards.

crotchfireon Comcast reluctantly agrees to stop its misleading "10G Network" claims

I don’t know what this means (although I can maybe guess). Can you explain it for sake of clarity?

Basically it means that whoever owns the "last mile" can't sell it only directly to the customer as part of a larger (bundled) product like "internet access." They have to sell access to that last mile of fiber or copper "unbundled" from anything else (such as "internet access"), and they have to offer it to other ISPs. This is how it has been for ~25 years in NL, and people there understand how important it is.

By forcing the monopoly (local loop) to be a separate company from everything else it makes it totally obvious when there are ridiculous shenanighans. Like, if local-loop company X has only one ISP customer Y, that's an obvious red flag. Also since they are separate companies regulators can subpoena the contracts, communications, and payments which flow between the two companies.

It's essentially the internet version of what the US did to voice telephony after we broke up our telephone monopoly back in the 1970s: no single company was allowed to do both local loop and long distance.

Currently the Netherlands has this for local-loop fiber, and a few counties in the US State of Washington have it due to the odd fact that their local-loop fiber is owned by the electric utility (not the phone or cable companies). It is an awesome system.

Here's the Dutch cases:

- copper (2000): https://www.acm.nl/en/publications/publication/9225/KPN-is-r...

- fiber (2015): https://www.acm.nl/en/publications/publication/15093/KPN-mus...

General background info:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unbundled_access

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_loop_unbundling

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit-stream_access