Hacker News Reader

texaslonghorn5on Intelligence Suggests Pro-Ukrainian Group Sabotaged Pipelines

> U.S. officials declined to disclose the nature of the intelligence, how it was obtained or any details of the strength of the evidence it contains. They have said that there are no firm conclusions about it, leaving open the possibility that the operation might have been conducted off the books by a proxy force with connections to the Ukrainian government or its security services.

There's very little of substance in this article, since it doesn't disclose the intelligence or the officials making the judgement. So it comes across as "x refused to comment, y refused to comment, but we wanted to break the story first so trust me bro"

texaslonghorn5on I'm a very slow thinker (2016)

or they expected autocorrect to catch it but it didn't trigger because no period. this is an entirely unnecessary comment lol

texaslonghorn5on Lifting Discrete Logarithm Based Cryptography to Post-Quantum Cryptography

> rising to the non-associative power indices ... in the last two decades has been analyzed and does not have a quantum polynomial algorithm that solves it. The problem is called Exponential Congruences Problem.

The author uses similar wording a couple times and it is a little ambiguous? Does "does not have" mean a superpolynomial quantum lower bound has been discovered for this algorithm (or is there a reduction to some other important conjectured complexity theorem)? Or is it just that a polynomial algorithm has not been discovered yet?

texaslonghorn5on SymPy makes math fun again

no because k is an argument and you have to pre-write k nested loops

texaslonghorn5on Implant lets those with severe paralysis send texts with just their minds

> The year-long human trials for Synchron's BCI system have been peer-reviewed by a neuroscience medical journal in Australia(opens in new tab), where the study found the technology safe and signal quality didn't degrade for its Australian patients. The study also concludes that "the favorable safety profile could promote wider and more rapid translation of BCI to people with paralysis." We'll give it about another year before someone's running Doom on it.

could not find full text for free unfortunately

texaslonghorn5on The Absurdity of Income Tax

The truly wealthy are making much of their money passively, income tax isn't really something they think about. The government would need to increase the estate and capital gains taxes to actually balance/unburden things.

Regardless, I found the anecdotes entertaining.

texaslonghorn5on Konstantin Tsiolkovsky

> The good thing about being a Russian is that you can only blame yourself for this fate.

???

texaslonghorn5on Silicon or Carbon?

this isn't a materials science article, as it turns out.

if you've already read your three free articles, https://archive.is/VcIcJ

thought it was an interesting perspective, though it's a bit naive or maybe idealistic and it glosses over a lot of the negative harms of some technologies (and factors, economic and otherwise, that motivate these kinds of technologies).

texaslonghorn5on The dystopian underworld of South Africa’s illegal gold mines

fair, my fault for misreading

texaslonghorn5on The dystopian underworld of South Africa’s illegal gold mines

> Europeans have a nasty habit of ravaging any black-majority country that tries to build anything.

"Where the heck" did you see the above poster mention restricted?

texaslonghorn5on Google claims breakthrough in quantum computer error correction

> It's entirely possible Scott was one of the anonymous submission reviewers.

Considering that Scott works in theoretical quantum complexity theory, I highly doubt that he reviewed this experimental quantum error correction paper.

texaslonghorn5on Social media is a cause, not a correlate, of mental illness in teen girls

there's a lot to unpack in this comment but I'll pick off one point and maybe others will contest the rest

> Only a very small minority of people have careers or relationships worth emulating, and they should be setting examples for everyone else to aspire to.

Of those that have relationships worth emulating I doubt they are parasocially broadcasting it for the world to see. To the contrary, most of these images that you see on social media are heavily curated and manicured and don't really reflect reality.

texaslonghorn5on Is there a market failure in child care?

so based on empirical observations I am sure there are a number of people who are making barely enough to support the child care cost quoted in the post I quoted. maybe I misinterpreted the post I responded to

texaslonghorn5on Is there a market failure in child care?

> If you make just enough money at work to pay for childcare, what the heck are you doing?

$540/40hrs = $13.5/hr. Any number of jobs pay this little.

texaslonghorn5on Google claims breakthrough in quantum computer error correction

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05434-1

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04532-4

The FT article is a bit fluffy. here are links to the paper and briefing in Nature.

texaslonghorn5on Google claims breakthrough in quantum computer error correction

You're quibbling over semantics. here's the paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05434-1

texaslonghorn5on The case for hanging out

sounds interesting and well thought out. do you have any viable alternatives for people who don't gamble or drink?

texaslonghorn5on Lesser known tricks, quirks and features of C

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1642028/what-is-the-oper...

texaslonghorn5on The Presocratic Philosophers [pdf]

Google searching "Bard Arendt" yields "Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College" so likely this pdf is generated or hosted by this center's account.

texaslonghorn5on Why I chose OpenAI over academia

This and part 1 are interesting reads.

> The reality is that building systems is really hard. It requires a lot of resources, and a lot of engineering. I think the incentive structures in academia aren't very suited for this kind of costly, risky systems-building research.

I think this is the key point. I've heard similar from friends in industry and academic positions.

texaslonghorn5on The Talk (2016)

This is a classic and always fun to reread, it helps to recalibrate my quantum computing sensor after reading nonsense articles and press releases everywhere else.

I'm not sure how the work was divided in making the comic, but I always appreciate the cleverness that Scott Aaronson has in his writing (especially with analogies) and it really shines through here.

texaslonghorn5on Need help with students who've turned my class into a dating service

considering what we know about Richard Feynman's personal life, I'm not sure this is the great example you think it is.

texaslonghorn5on Need help with students who've turned my class into a dating service

if you take a class purely to offer tutoring to less advanced students for the purpose of looking impressive, finding dates, etc., then you are taking advantage of this power dynamic

sure this is different but if the advanced students are engineering situations where they are leading lab sessions then it's not that different

texaslonghorn5on Need help with students who've turned my class into a dating service

if this post is reflective of how you and fellow male computer science students acted with them then maybe we have a reason why they don't like computer science that much

texaslonghorn5on Need help with students who've turned my class into a dating service

"engineering students looking for fee-males"

texaslonghorn5on Need help with students who've turned my class into a dating service

if you know the material and are offering the tutoring sessions then you clearly have power over the person whom you are tutoring. similar reason why dating your student as a TA is questionable.

texaslonghorn5on Need help with students who've turned my class into a dating service

saw this on stack earlier, this behavior is predatory and I'm disappointed that so many fellow readers think this is respectable behavior

texaslonghorn5on IBM Quantum System Two

I think IBM is superconducting

texaslonghorn5on ChatGPT scores 80% on SAT reading/writing with collective chain of thought

"reading/writing" is actually reading comprehension/grammar. the essay was optional from [####] until june 2021 when it was discontinued. so the ai isn't writing, it's answering "writing" questions which are grammar/sentence structure/correctness/etc.

also if you click the link, it was all multiple choice.