Hacker News Reader

beautifulfreakon Alignment whack-a-mole: Finetuning activates recall of copyrighted books in LLMs

Language Models are Injective and Hence Invertible https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.15511

beautifulfreakon FBI tries to unmask owner of archive.is

News aggregator The Drudge Report recently started using archive.is links to articles. That might have angered some publishers.

beautifulfreakon Diamond Thermal Conductivity: A New Era in Chip Cooling

The article says 400C

beautifulfreakon Nvidia GPU roadmap confirms it: Moore's Law is dead and buried

Maybe bismuth oxyselenide https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/chinese-univ...

beautifulfreakon Help Identify the Photographer Who Captured Many Images of 1960s San Francisco

Reminds me of the photos of Vivian Maier, discovered in a storage locker after her death. The documentary "Finding Vivian Maier" tells the story. Amazing photos! https://www.vivianmaier.com

beautifulfreakon Global coffee trade grinding to a halt, hit hard by brutal price hikes

No one has mentioned China's uptake of coffee drinking, or their long term contracts with coffee growers, buying up whole crops. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_aR4RCqw-gg

beautifulfreakon Heaviside’s Operator Calculus (2007)

You must have missed this: "In the end Laplace transforms, easier to use with a more rigorous structure and incorporating the powerful tool of convolution, overtook the operational calculus of Heaviside, and his methods largely fell victim to history."

beautifulfreakon John Hopfield and Geoff Hinton Win Physics Nobel Prize [pdf]

reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%BCrgen_Schmidhuber#Credit...

beautifulfreakon FDA approves a novel drug for schizophrenia, a potential 'game changer'

"Double down" has a similar chart, another annoying phrase.

beautifulfreakon US Fed: US export controls to China wiped out $130B

China is actually dumping US treasuries, as of the start of 2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSbzefh0VEM They've found new ways to trade in dollars without using US or European banks, so their assets can't be frozen (such as by the use of Tether) so US banks aren't getting paid. As for cross-border trade, 53% of it is now conducted in RMB, with USD falling to 41% (and continuing to decline). US economic policy towards China is backfiring on many fronts, the worst being that Chinese companies have adapted and now produce what they used to import, even advanced technologies. If the export controls were lifted, Chinese companies would not resume business with US companies, because they don't need them anymore.

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/start-de-dollarizatio...

beautifulfreakon Ozempic's biggest side effect: Turning Denmark into a 'pharmastate'?

Who makes the real profit on Ozempic/Wegovy? In the US, that would be Pharmacy Benefit Managers, who are middlemen between drugmakers and US health insurance companies. They have no shame in the exorbitant amounts they mark up prices. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYP5urTEWIA

beautifulfreakon MPPP – The first 'designer drug' disaster (2023)

https://archive.ph/QfrcT

beautifulfreakon Show HN: AI assisted image editing with audio instructions

It didn't just replace the sky and background, it replaced the trees. That wasn't part of the instructions.

beautifulfreakon U.S. home prices have far outpaced paychecks. See what it looks like

I'd like to see an overlay showing which red areas are also college towns. Did easy student loans help fuel the increase in rents? That's what happened where I live, where dormitories are mainly for new undergrads. After a year or two, students are expected to find apartments. (And I wonder if something similar would happen if Universal Basic Income became a thing.)

beautifulfreakon When will computer hardware match the human brain? (1998)

~2.6 teraflops FP32 (CPU) for the M3 Max.

beautifulfreakon The xz sshd backdoor rabbithole goes quite a bit deeper

That's from Body Heat, said by Mickey Rourke to William Hurt. "...you got fifty ways you're gonna fuck up. If you think of twenty-five of them, then you're a genius - and you ain't no genius." (But a million sounds closer to the truth.)

beautifulfreakon 4T transistors, one giant chip (Cerebras WSE-3) [video]

So it's increased from 2.6 to 4 trillion transistors over the previous version.

beautifulfreakon Could Modified Gravity Kill Planet Nine?

Perhaps you meant...

DM = Dark Matter, BAO = Baryon Acoustic Oscillations, CMB = Cosmic Background Radiation, MOND = Modified Newtonian Dynamics

beautifulfreakon House cleaners find two of the first desktop PCs in random boxes

It's mentioned briefly in the article, "History of Personal Computers," which gives some links to external content. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_personal_computers

beautifulfreakon Making steel without emitting CO2

A phys.org article goes into more detail about its cost effectiveness: https://phys.org/news/2024-02-team-green-steel-toxic-red.htm...

beautifulfreakon Making steel without emitting CO2

I was more impressed by the Science article from two weeks ago about cost effectively making iron from the toxic residue of aluminum refining: https://www.science.org/content/article/zapping-red-mud-plas...

beautifulfreakon Where Will Virtual Reality Take Us?

That conflation is what Baudrillard addressed in Simulacra and Simulation (a book that the cast of the Matrix were required to read before filming started). When environments are designed, the blueprint is what one experiences in those environments, the conceptual underpinning, even if the environment consists of matter. In a sense, they try to tell us what to think. The book came out in 1983, so these are old ideas, not really vanguard anymore, but it raises legitimate points that are becoming a lot more noticeably believable with the rise of information technology. I think the OP has a point.

beautifulfreakon Electric Field in Cells Stop Nanoparticles Entering Membrane

"The electric field right near a membrane in a salty solution like our bodies produce can be astoundingly strong. Its strength falls off rapidly with distance, creating large field gradients that we figured might repel nearby particles."

beautifulfreakon Apple Vision Pro available for pre-order

The iPad Death Watch is pretty funny: http://aaplinvestors.net/stats/ipad/ipaddeathwatch/

beautifulfreakon Major outages across ChatGPT and API

I've used it to interpret messages in the Mac console app. I wish it could explain what causes certain messages to appear over and over.

beautifulfreakon Thousands of programmable DNA-cutters found in algae, snails and other organisms

Emmanuelle Charpentier

beautifulfreakon A Harvard professor became the world’s leading alien hunter

Before him there was John Mack, the Harvard professor who turned serious attention toward alien abduction stories and was the world's leading authority on them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_E._Mack#Psychology_of_ali... https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/aliens/johnmack.html https://www.nytimes.com/1994/03/20/magazine/john-mack.html

beautifulfreakon Auditory illusions with examples from Daft Punk

The Brainstorm/Green-Needle auditory illusion is more noticeable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g88BXUhR2a4

beautifulfreakon Want to buy a West Texas ghost town? Now’s your chance

DailyMail says the asking price is $100,000. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12081261/West-Texas...

beautifulfreakon Salvador Dalí is the most faked artist?

You didn't read to the end. "Not to be confused with honestly thinking that Seinfeld is not funny."