Hacker News Reader

rahmeeroon Southern Europe in extreme heat, with Greece seeing temperatures of 40C or more

It's all a hoax, said the frog in the saucepan.

There are many relevant things that already exist in the physical world and are not currently considered dangers: ecommerce, digital payments, doordash-style delivery, cross-border remittances, remote gig work, social media fanning extreme political views, event organizing.

However, these are constituent elements that could be aggregated and weaponized by a maleficent AI.

rahmeeroon Perfectly secure steganography using minimum entropy coupling

I can see how steganography applied to images can result in hard-to-detect watermarks or provenance identifiers.

But I don't see how these can be effectively used in text content. Yes, an AI program can encode provenance identifiers by length of words, starting letters of sentences, use of specific suffixes, and other linguistic constructs.

However, say that I am a student with an AI-generated essay and want to make sure my essay passes the professor's plagiarism checker. Isn't it pretty easy to re-order clauses, substitute synonyms, and add new content? In fact, I think there is even a Chrome extension that does something like that.

Or maybe that is too much work for the lazy student who wants to completely rely on ChatGTP or doesn't know any better.

rahmeeroon Apple is rewriting Foundation in Swift

An example is smart contracts on the Corda blockchain, which is programmed in Kotlin. It may be me, but I have seen more Kotlin outside of Android than on it.

rahmeeroon Show HN: A little web server in C

Interesting. Would be good to get more info, beyond having to read the code.

Curious to know how it compares to micro_httpd [1] which is about 200 lines of C. Or others like thttpd and tiny_httpd.

[1] https://acme.com/software/thttpd/benchmarks.html

rahmeeroon Parts for stolen Hyundais and Kias are so scarce the cars are being totaled

My business partner is an attractive young woman living in Seoul. I am based in California. She and I have regular phone meetings at 2 am her time. She uses our meeting time to jog around the city while talking. She's been doing this routine for 2 years and never had a problem.

When I visited Seoul, we went all over the city and I realized after 4 days that I had not seen a single policemen nor heard a single police siren. Seoul is 25 million people. I live in a "safe" California town of 60,000 people and see policemen all the time, and hear sirens regularly. I would caution any friend from jogging at 2am here.

In coffee shops in Seoul, people leave their wallets and laptops unattended while they go to the bathroom. By contrast, in my hometown in California, thieves have walked in, punched customers, grabbed laptops out of the customer's hands and run.

A very different world -- not just Seoul, but other cities in Asia.

rahmeeroon Btn.social – Social Authentication in Seconds

I don't understand why I have to give my email address and define password to sign up with this site, instead of using social authentication.

Shouldn't they be eating their own dog food?

rahmeeroon Monthly Fediverse posts cross 1 billion for the first time

I consider myself somewhat plugged into social media (Twitter, Insta, Tiktok, etc). But I admit I didn't know what Fediverse was and though it was some kind of government project, maybe for contractors to share documents relating to grants.

Still don't understand the connection between "Fed" and "Mastodon". I think a Mastodon-based social network should be called "Tuskverse" or "Pachyverse" or "Stompverse"

rahmeeroon Understanding large language models: A cross-section of the relevant literature

Just tried it. I like that it lists the information sources in the right-hand panel, and provides the digested information in the main panel

rahmeeroon Substack Notes Launched

Also, for whatever reason, the quality of conversation has declined on Twitter since Elon.

rahmeeroon Microsoft fixes 5-year-old Defender bug, reducing Firefox-related CPU use by 75%

Not sure if this is related, but Chrome on my Macbook regularly gets to a state where one process (a tab?) is consuming 4 Gb RAM and 20%+ CPU. This happens on both M1 and Intel CPUs, on multiple releases of OS.

Situation seems to happen some time after visiting ad-heavy sites (yeah I know I should install an ad-blocker). Have others noticed this? Seems to be Chrome. I also use Firefox and occasionally Safari but have not noticed that with those browsers.

rahmeeroon Rhind Mathematical Papyrus

Can new notation also create new physics, not just mathematics? Thinking about Feynman diagrams. I am neither physicist nor mathematician, so I don't know if this makes sense. Wondering if Feynman diagrams were not just a crisp articulation of existing concepts, but did they also pave the way for new ideas in physics?

rahmeeroon Less than half of California students read or do math at grade level

This data is from the California Dept of Education. I wonder if other states track this also.

My guess is that some states don't even bother, and their students likely don't perform as well. Then there are other states, small ones like Connecticut, Rhode Island and Vermont, whose students might fall on the high side of the curve.

Just a guess. Anyone know?