Hacker News Reader

DisgracePlacardon On 17th century "cocaine"

I'm no chemist, but according to wikipedia, cuscohygrine is found in belladona plants and it metabolizes into hygrine. So that could be what he's referring to?

DisgracePlacardon The Academic Culture of Fraud

IIRC Palladium is mainly run by the more libertarian-oriented rationalist/lesswrong types. Or at least, I've only seen it recommended by those types. I think it's funded by Peter Thiel.

DisgracePlacardon AI existential risk probabilities are too unreliable to inform policy

I don't think there's a real need to justify technological progress as a default. That has been the default for at least a century or so, and I think it's done us quite well. The unorthodox thing is the idea that we should avoid technological progress, and if there isn't good evidence for that, then we should ignore it.

DisgracePlacardon AI existential risk probabilities are too unreliable to inform policy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_mugging

> In philosophy, Pascal's mugging is a thought experiment demonstrating a problem in expected utility maximization. A rational agent should choose actions whose outcomes, when weighted by their probability, have higher utility. But some very unlikely outcomes may have very great utilities, and these utilities can grow faster than the probability diminishes. Hence the agent should focus more on vastly improbable cases with implausibly high rewards; this leads first to counter-intuitive choices, and then to incoherence as the utility of every choice becomes unbounded.

Curiously enough, this idea can be traced to one of the most prominent AI Safety advocates.

DisgracePlacardon Tor: From the Dark Web to the Future of Privacy

AFAIK there is no mechanism for content blocking. The "bad relays" are relays that deanonymize, store, delay, or in any other way hamper user's traffic.

DisgracePlacardon The forgotten war on beepers

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/04/05/israel-idf-l...

Israel used phone location data to target and kill Palestinians, with a sub-90% accuracy rate, supposedly. Probably not a big concern right now in America, but it could always turn into one. So I think it'd be good if this wasn't a possibility. Better safe than sorry.

DisgracePlacardon I Know What Your Password Was Last Summer

If the endgame of passwords is for everyone to use password managers for their passwords, and never to actually learn their passwords, then why bother with passwords at all? It seems to endgame would be for every service to give up passwords, and switch to OTP codes entirely. I'd prefer that world, honestly. Yet I haven't seen many people talk about the possibility, so maybe I'm missing something obvious? I don't know.

DisgracePlacardon Sam Bankman-Fried is a feature, not a bug

I remember! He was happy about it -- until he found out that the NYT was going to doxx him and publish his name, which would've likely had highly negative effects for himself and his psychiatric patients. The NYT didn't care, of course -- and they attempted to cover him a lot more negatively, as a result of the backlash they received.

DisgracePlacardon Keystroke timing obfuscation added to ssh(1)

https://nymtech.net/

DisgracePlacardon This isn’t the way to speed up Rust compile times

> If we're going to be trusting some random guy's binaries, I think we are in the right to demand that it is byte-for-byte reproducible on commodity hardware

I don't think anyone has a right to demand anything of the project. The MIT license specifically has the whole "THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED AS IS" spiel for a reason. Thinking that you can demand anything of an open source developer who, afaik, has no responsibilities in relationship towards you, is a rather toxic mindset that should be kept out of open source.

DisgracePlacardon Os.js – open-source JavaScript web desktop platform with a window manager

I feel that the goal of "cloud computing" is done better using other technologies. Shadow.tech is a good example of this - it allows you to stream a powerful and capable windows machine to your computer. low latency, you benefit from the massive windows ecosystem that already exists, and you're not limited by local hardware, as a javascript OS (presumably) would be.

DisgracePlacardon Hacker News Guidelines

"Freedom of speech" does not simply refer to the 1st amendment - the concept has existed much longer than the USA has. I don't think GP is arguing that shadowbanned users have a "right" to use HN, instead they're saying that it is somewhat unethical because it is a form of lying.

As for shadowbanning being a key tool in managing a community - In HN's case, I imagine any shadowbanning system could be easily defeated, as a malicious actor could create a new account for every comment.

DisgracePlacardon Hacker News Guidelines

IIRC, submissions are downranked as the commment to vote ration gets higher and higher.

https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#flame-...