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rdhyee

532 karma · joined November 22, 2010

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/rdhyee; my proof: https://keybase.io/rdhyee/sigs/nZh-ft9Mz9bzSL8uQVYowfc98TOmSFWsc8AhXpNpYfc ]
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rdhyee··on Simons Foundation launches $15M effort to help mathematicians navigate AI era
I'm curious what you as an early-career math student would want the Simon Foundation to do differently from what it says it will do. I hope there is a way for students like to you to get a slice of the pie.
rdhyee··on Deno Sandbox
Took this idea and ran with it using Fly's Sprites, inspired by Simon's https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/3/introducing-deno-sandbo.... Use case: Claude Code running in a sandboxed Sprite, making authenticated API calls via a Tokenizer proxy without credentials ever entering the sandbox.

Hit a snag: Sprites appear network-isolated from Fly's 6PN private mesh (fdf:: prefix inside the Sprite, not fdaa::; no .internal DNS). So a Tokenizer on a Fly Machine isn't directly reachable without public internet.

Asked on the Fly forum: https://community.fly.io/t/can-sprites-reach-internal-fly-se...

@tptacek's point upthread about controlling not just hosts but request structure is well taken - for AI agent sandboxing you'd want tight scoping on what the proxy will forward.

rdhyee··on How China's New AI Model DeepSeek Is Threatening U.S. Dominance [video]
The interview with Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas on DeepSeek is a good listen on a Friday afternoon as we ponder the implications of DeepSeek.
rdhyee··on LinkedIn is now using everyone's content to train their AI tool
I can get to that setting (when logged in) at https://www.linkedin.com/mypreferences/d/settings/data-for-a...
rdhyee··on ACM Honors Study on Facial AI's Synthetic Data Problem
Full title of news blurb from UC Berkeley's I School:

> Award-winning Research Explores Risks of Using Synthetic Data to Train Facial Recognition Technology

rdhyee··on Physical systems that can learn by themselves: UCB 2024 Oppenheimer Lecture [video]
Lecture description:

Physical systems that can learn by themselves Andrea Liu

Brains learn and perform an enormous variety of tasks on their own, using relatively little energy. Brains are able to accomplish this without an external computer because their analog constituent parts (neurons) update their connections without knowing what all the other neurons are doing using local rules. We have developed an approach to learning that shares the property that analog constituent parts update their properties via a local rule, but does not otherwise emulate the brain. Instead, we exploit physics to learn in a far simpler way. Our collaborators have implemented this approach in the lab, developing physical systems that learn and perform machine learning tasks on their own with little energy cost. These systems should open up the opportunity to study how many more is different within a new paradigm for scalable learning.

rdhyee··on Health-care hack spreads pain across hospitals and doctors nationwide
From the article:

    The fallout from the hack of a little-known but pivotal health-care company is inflicting pain on hospitals, doctor offices, pharmacies and millions of patients across the nation, with government and industry officials calling it one of the most serious attacks on the health-care system in U.S. history.
[....]

    Change Healthcare is a juggernaut in the health-care world, processing 15 billion claims totaling more than $1.5 trillion a year, the company says. It operates the largest electronic “clearinghouse” in the business, acting as a pipeline that connects health-care providers with insurance companies who pay for their services and determine what patients owe. It supported tens of thousands of physicians, dentists, pharmacies and hospitals, handling 50 percent of all medical claims in the United States, the Justice Department wrote in a 2022 lawsuit that unsuccessfully tried to block UnitedHealth from acquiring the company.
rdhyee··on The Future of Artificial Intelligence (Talk by Melanie Mitchell)
From <https://www.nasonline.org/programs/distinctive-voices/upcomi...>:

Wednesday, January 31, 2024 The Future of Artificial Intelligence AI is all around us—recognizing our faces in photos, transcribing our speech, constructing our news feeds, navigating our driving routes, answering our search queries, and much more. But rapidly improving AI is poised to play a much bigger role in all of our lives. In this lecture, AI expert Melanie Mitchell will demystify how current-day AI works, how “intelligent” it really is, and what our expectations—and concerns—about its near-term and long-term prospects should be.

» Melanie Mitchell, Santa Fe Institute

rdhyee··on Former White House scientist was scammed out of $655,000
The scammers are very effective. One of my family members almost fell for a similar scam recently.
rdhyee··on Introduction to Modern Statistics
I think the referenced episode is https://learnbayesstats.com/episode/61-why-we-still-use-non-... Thanks for pointing it out!
rdhyee··on Like-minded sources on Facebook are prevalent but not polarizing
Accompanying podcast: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02425-8

I'm surprised by the results (from what I've heard so far on the podcast) and a bit skeptical given the involvement of Meta. Looking forward to reactions from various scientific and technical communities.

rdhyee··on AI Text Classifier
Description of the service (made by OpenAI):

> The AI Text Classifier is a fine-tuned GPT model that predicts how likely it is that a piece of text was generated by AI from a variety of sources, such as ChatGPT.

> This classifier is available as a free tool to spark discussions on AI literacy.

rdhyee··on Brain on Fraud Apologetics
"Brain on Fraud Apologetics" is a follow-up post by Cory Doctorow on his twitter thread (https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1628948906657878016) about how he and his friend had been scammed. The Twitter thread was discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34920760
rdhyee··on Universal Summarizer
One of the things I find myself doing a lot is trying to make sense of a given HN discussion -- so I fed an archived version of this discussion to the summarizer: (https://labs.kagi.com/ai/sum?url=https://archive.is/HdWx7):

> Universal Summarizer is a tool developed by Kagi that is able to quickly and accurately summarize articles, videos, and other texts. It is able to pick out unique and interesting details from the text, such as Ratz having a prosthetic arm in the bar in the novel Catch 22. It is also able to summarize technical documentation and Moby Dick, as well as provide a summary of the themes in Walden. It is able to summarize videos as well, and is a useful tool for developers to familiarize themselves with academic papers. It is also able to provide summaries in multiple languages, and is able to detect jokes and humorous elements in the text. It is an impressive tool that is sure to be a hit with developers and researchers alike.

rdhyee··on Universal Summarizer
Compare the summary of the book to the summary of the Wikipedia article on Moby Dick (https://labs.kagi.com/ai/sum?url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wi...)

> Moby-Dick is a novel by Herman Melville about the obsessive quest of Ahab, captain of the whaling ship Pequod, for revenge on the white sperm whale Moby Dick, which crippled him on the ship's previous voyage. The novel follows Ishmael, a sailor on the Pequod, as he narrates the story of Ahab's monomaniacal pursuit of Moby Dick. Along the way, Ishmael and his fellow crew members encounter a variety of characters and situations, including the mysterious Fedallah, a harpooner who prophesies Ahab's death; Pip, a young African American cabin-boy who jumps in panic from Stubb's whale boat; and the Delight, a whaling ship that is badly damaged and with five of her crew left dead by Moby Dick. The novel also contains a variety of themes, including the nature of evil, the power of fate, and the search for identity. Ultimately, the novel suggests that while revenge may be a powerful motivator, it can also lead to destruction and death.

rdhyee··on Universal Summarizer
Not sure what to make of its summary of Moby Dick (as presented in the Project Gutenberg text version) -- https://labs.kagi.com/ai/sum?url=https://www.gutenberg.org/f.... The summary is full of platitudes. I'm wondering how they were generated. Did they actually arise directly from the text itself or from outside commentary of Moby Dick that Kagi had ingested?

> The story follows the adventures of a whaling crew led by Captain Ahab, who is obsessed with hunting down a white whale named Moby Dick. The crew includes Queequeg, a harpooner from a distant island, and Starbuck, the first mate. Along the way, they encounter many dangers, including storms, sea monsters, and the wrath of Moby Dick himself. The story is a meditation on the power of nature, the dangers of obsession, and the importance of friendship and loyalty. The message of the story is that even in the face of great danger, it is possible to find courage and strength in friendship and loyalty.

rdhyee··on Cars are rewiring our brains to ignore all the bad stuff about driving
A summary from the article:

> A new study reveals how unconscious bias leads us to neglect negative externalities of driving. You may call it ‘car brain,’ but this research team calls it ‘motornormativity.’

rdhyee··on What’s in a PR statement: LastPass breach explained
Thanks for providing the detailed comparison among the many password managers. I think it's more accurate to describe 1Password's CLI as "yes" rather than "yes?poor" and submitted a PR for consideration: https://github.com/Soft-wa-re/password-manager-comparer/pull...
rdhyee··on B.C. man shocked after $700 drained from his Walmart gift cards
I submitted this article because I didn't know about the new(?) type of fraud around gift cards. From the article:

> Walmart's gift cards are worthless until customers load them with cash. Once loaded, the company requires shoppers to input a card's hidden security code when using it to make purchases online, but not at self-checkout.

> Wilson says a fraudster could easily take photos of a bunch of the cards' bar codes at Walmart, and then try to buy goods with them at self-checkout at a later date — in the hopes the cards have since been loaded with cash.

> "It's sort of, like, egregious," he said. "All the cards in Walmart are on bulk display. The bar codes are in plain sight."

rdhyee··on Drowning in AI Generated Garbage: the silent war we are fighting
I looked at your profile and see your platform qbix. I'd love to hear how you've been adapting your projects to this AI seachange.
rdhyee··on Dan Olson explores the Viral Case Against Crypto
The podcast episode struck me (as someone with a superficial understanding of crypto) as a devastating critique of crypto. This episode is a companion to an episode of the Ezra Klein Show featuring Katie Haun (partner, a16z), who is also a crypto booster: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/15/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...

I'm hoping that this episode attract comments in the HN community.

rdhyee··on Show HN: Tuchu – Automatically highlight the important parts of a document
Very interesting. I'd love a way to download a highlighted version of the PDF that I fed to Tuchu.

I uploaded a PDF version of a Wikipedia article to see what was selected, and at a quick glance, it's not obvious to me that the most important parts of the article have been highlighted. On the other hand, it's not obvious that trivial parts have been selected either -- leaving me intrigued to look further.

rdhyee··on The Plague Year
A long essay by Laurence Wright detailing "the mistakes and the struggles behind America’s coronavirus tragedy". Wright talks with New Yorker Editor David Remnick about the article in https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/the-new-yorker-radio-hour/...
rdhyee··on PG&E power shut-off map
I've been impressed by how the SF Chronicle has been tracking the PG&E power outages of Oct 9-?, 2019 when PG&E web presence has been lackluster. How is the SF Chronicle sourcing this data?
rdhyee··on Cat and Cloud Coffee Told by Caterpillar Inc. To Stop Using “CAT” in Trademark
IANAL for sure -- but isn't trademarking "Cat and Cloud" as a single unit an important fact to consider? Caterpillar's trademark is focused on "CAT" alone. I don't see much potential for confusing the two companies.
rdhyee··on 2019 Pulitzer Prize Winners
The first example that comes to mind is the Pulitzer Prize-winning work by the Washington Post around Watergate. Granted, that was almost fifty years ago. See https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/washington-post
rdhyee··on Two Google alums just raised $60M to rethink documents
From the TC article:

""" We like to describe it as a new document that blends flexibility of documents, the power of spreadsheets, and the utility of applications into a single new canvas,” Mehrotra said. “It really started from an observation that we think that the world is full of all these different types of applications but most work gets done on documents and spreadsheets. Every team we looked at, you’d ask them what they use to run things they’d name off all these different applications. They have task trackers, CRM tools, inventory tools, but if you looked over their shoulders they’d spend all day in documents and spreadsheets.” """

This description reminds me of the "universal canvas" that Jon Udell wrote about in 2001: http://jonudell.net/bytecols/2001-06-06.html. I'm wondering how far along coda.io can be to justify a $60M investment. Has anyone seen or used the product?

rdhyee··on 'I did not build the bomb. I only showed that it exists'
A summarizing paragraph about the difference between approaches taken by the campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump (https://hyp.is/u4tphuVzEea0AVcCYuOojw/motherboard.vice.com/r...):

> Again, this is nothing new. The Democrats did similar things, but there is no evidence that they relied on psychometric profiling. Cambridge Analytica, however, divided the US population into 32 personality types, and focused on just 17 states. And just as Kosinski had established that men who like MAC cosmetics are slightly more likely to be gay, the company discovered that a preference for cars made in the US was a great indication of a potential Trump voter. Among other things, these findings now showed Trump which messages worked best and where. The decision to focus on Michigan and Wisconsin in the final weeks of the campaign was made on the basis of data analysis. The candidate became the instrument for implementing a big data model.

rdhyee··on First they came for the Iranians
I've wondered about this question myself. Wondering whether a financially well-resourced group would just use money to get access as an easier and more efficient approach to influence of a member of Congress. That to simulate an avalanche of calls from concerned citizens by paying people to call is a less financially efficient method to get influence. (I'm just speculating.)
rdhyee··on To Know If the Election Was Hacked, Look at the Ballots
Verified Voting the non-partisan umbrella organization that connects many leading election technology experts (including Halderman the author of the piece; Ron Rivest and Philip Stark -- http://news.berkeley.edu/2016/11/22/election-hacking-audit/) has been in the business of ensuring the integrity of the voting system since 2003. https://www.verifiedvoting.org/about-vvo/
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