Hacker News Reader

cryptozon Sorting 400+ Chrome tabs in seconds

Used to be common to see links on front page with 3 votes, but it’s been a while I think since I’ve seen that.

cryptozon AI-powered Bing Chat spills its secrets via prompt injection attack

The article points out that there are at least 2 different ways that people have found to get Bing/Sydney to spit out the exact same prompt - it seems legit to me.

cryptozon Sam Altman calls Google a lethargic search monopoly

They do own like 6% of SpaceX I think.

cryptozon Kevin Mitnick Hacked California Law in 1983

I also have that business card and also it is a prized possession haha. I met him at The Last HOPE in nyc about 10 years ago ( it wasn’t the last hope in the end) and got one there.

Almost lost it at airport security once so I keep it at home now.

cryptozon “They wanted my Instagram handle, and somehow they've now got it.”

Instagram itself does this kind of thing. Your handle isn't yours anyway, it's theirs. Instagram owns 100% of the handles and you just have to deal with that- same as every site, but Instagram is well-known for stealing your handle and giving it to someone else.

The took somebody's handle and just gave it to the "royal family" who I guess was so entitled beyond belief that they jut couldn't take the idea that they would need to pick a new name if the one they wanted was taken.

https://fashionweekdaily.com/instagram-handle-sussexroyal-co...

cryptozon Amazon Alexa is on pace to lose $10B this year

How do they ‘detect’ the activation word without listening? Seems to me that is tautologically impossible. The definition of detect and listen are identical here. How do you detect sound waves without listening to them?

cryptozon “There will never be more children alive on the Earth than there is today.”

Clickbait - the article barely goes out 100 years, mostly focusing on the next few decades. Too bad because it’s an interesting piece on its own, but no discussion at all about the never.

Obviously we have no idea how things will play out in the next few thousand years or more, but it is certainly possible that in the future there will be more alive than today.

cryptozon SpaceX is now building a Raptor engine a day, NASA says

The Mars plans are medium-term, though, and they need many thousands of Starships+Boosters for that plan to work. In the short-term, SpaceX is 'behind' on launching Starlink, especially v2 which is needed to fulfill the promises of the network and be profitable (and v2 can only launch on Starship).

In the short term, they need hundreds of full stage rockets, and in the medium term, thousands. That's tens of thousands of engines needed in the next ~10 years. I don't think 1/day is fast enough and I'm sure they will increase that rate as soon as possible.

Also for testing, SpaceX doesn't want to be afraid of blowing up rockets and losing engines, so the first few hundred engines will likely not be reused.

cryptozon Falcon Heavy Launch [video]

SpaceX Crew-1 and Thunderbirds mashup

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loPxTnJc9Zk

I cannot wait for the Starship version...

cryptozon Privacy respecting weather app for Android

Privacy in good weather apps that are innovative can be tricky. Phones have enough sensors like barometers to be useful weather stations, and collecting that data could improve forecasts. But that also includes accurate location data, and making a useful forecast model from data collected on device is significantly more challenging when you account for privacy needs.

The “telling state of tech” may be that our hardware has outpaced our ability to socially reason about how useful weather data should be collected and shared, or not shared.

cryptozon Dark Sky iOS app will no longer work from Dec 31

Yes, there have been many ML efforts in weather forecasting, but I'm not sure many/any have been successful. The bar for success is pretty high, because you have to beat raw data collection and real physics equations that model the atmosphere. Generally, the physics and raw data with models are beating the ML. At least, last I checked - some years ago.

cryptozon Dark Sky iOS app will no longer work from Dec 31

Dark Sky did not explain themselves with the barometer data thing. Their actual algorithm did radar-based extrapolation, meaning they used statistics to 'move' radar features like rain into the future. This is why Dark Sky always had a problem with forecasting new rainfall and was better at forecasting existing rain moving into your location based on wind speed.

They claimed something about barometer data but I don't honestly believe that they used it to improve their forecasts. I worked on this problem at different companies for many years, and with academia, and found it to be quite difficult. Possible, doable, but very difficult to demonstrate actual improvement. Significant academic work was done after Dark Sky made their claim, and the papers published used ensemble kalman filters among other on-device data-cleaning techniques that I do not believe Dark Sky implemented. So I doubt their barometer claims.

cryptozon Dark Sky iOS app will no longer work from Dec 31

Does anyone know if Apple is actively using the barometer data from iPhones to work on improving weather forecast accuracy? Dark Sky claimed they were doing this but offered no information about it, so I am skeptical that they actually did work on this.

AFAIK they were not weather nerds / atmospheric scientists, and did not work with researchers on the use of the data, or do any work on statistical verification to know if their barometer data was helping or not, so I expect that they just collected some data but didn't use it.

But Apple could be in a prime position to use the barometers to make weather forecast accuracy improvements.

Google too, of course, but AFAIK they are not working on this.

cryptozon The slow death of the traditional business card

Slightly OT: I met Kevin Mitnick at The Last HOPE in 2008 in NYC and got his 'business card'. The card itself is a lockpick set - super cool! I nearly lost it to airport security because I used to carry it with me everywhere (ha, just in case I need it), but now I keep it at home since it's too cool to risk losing.

cryptozon HN is up again

Obligatory "can't wait for postmortem" comment

cryptozon People are using TikTok as their primary search engine

Why doesn't HN let me link to a Twitter search? I submitted

https://twitter.com/search?q=tiktok%20search

But HN keeps removing part of the URL? Making my submission here useless, as it just goes to twitter search. I deleted my original post, and re-submitted, but got the same result.

cryptozon Amazon builds property empire, quietly buying land across the US

Are you sure you haven't received a fake product? How do you know? The fakes are so good much of the time that you may never know if you have received a fake.

I have received 5+ fake products and stopped ordering on Amazon a few years ago. Not worth it, too much risk. Would never, ever, order food from there, or anything you put on your body, or anything electronic, etc. Way too risky.

cryptozon Lead poisoning probably did not cause the downfall of the Roman Empire

No OP and I don't know about 1988, but lead pipes are still common in the US, either many states have them or all states do. Flint, MI has a plan to eliminate them this year, maybe.

https://www.nrdc.org/lead-pipes-widespread-used-every-state

cryptozon WorldWideWeb.app

I don't get where you are getting the 'insurmountable obstacle' from. I learned about computers from exploring around, typing things, seeing what happened, etc. I loved to know what my computer could do already on its own, without external tools, when I was like 13.

Yes, I knew how to click 'next next next'. Everybody does. That just doesn't have anything to do with learning about computers though - going to a website and downloading a package is not and should not be a prerequisite for learning to code.

Why is going out and finding a python package, downloading it, and clicking 'next next next' a prerequisite for someone to learn coding? I could suggest as well that if you think you need to do that, then you're definitely not ready to learn to code! (Though I would never, because that's silly gatekeeping). Certainly these days you can use a browser to code anyway, without downloading packages at all!

So why is it such a requirement that someone click 'next next next' in order to learn? What if they don't want to? Why is that so offensive that you think they can't learn to code?

cryptozon WorldWideWeb.app

Honestly I couldn't disagree more. Reducing friction is always good for newcomers. I got started writing code on systems that already had compilers installed because they were already installed. When I used Windows I was slower to start because the tools were not already available. 20 years later, I'm now a software developer.

> If you can't figure out how to click next next next then you have no business trying to learn python yet.

This is rude IMO. Who are you to tell people if they have "no business" to learn something?! This is the kind of gatekeeping that keeps curious newcomers out of tech.

cryptozon Hottest May in History for Texas

This is extremely dangerous to our democracy.

(in case someone missed this, it's incredible: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZggCipbiHwE)

cryptozon So you want to run a virtual event

New York City itself seems concerned..

from today: https://www.ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/news/2022/05/17/nyc-hig...

> New Yorkers should “consider avoiding higher-risk activities (such as crowded indoor gatherings)

cryptozon Microsoft Opens New HQ in Toronto

I dunno about that. Most of the team was "very Canadian" and didn't want to move to California - the main reason we rejected the SF deal (I was the only one who accepted in full the acquihire, the team did not move in the end). $300k, staying in Canada, would have gone a long way to providing a stronger team cohesion at the time. Maybe we would have succeeded.

Also, we were near completing a $10k/month enterprise deal but didn't have the runway to finish those sales in time. Additionally, we had Government of Canada contracts at $3k/month in the pipeline, which we did eventually complete. Our software was running on millions of phones, we had enterprise pipeline deals, signed government contracts (hard to come by I hear!) and a darn good team.

Hard to say how it would have played out, but, what's clear to me is that it wasn't clear that the $300k would have been lost.

cryptozon Microsoft Opens New HQ in Toronto

> What Canada doesn’t have is a strong venture capital pool, a culture of risk taking

I tried to raise a ~$300k seed round in Toronto in 2014. Most Canadian investors we met with wanted to see us have something like $10k/month in recurring revenue before considering an investment. We spent a week in SF and left with a $250k offer at a $4M valuation, when we were pre-revenue!

(We declined, and eventually our business failed (acquhired by a team in SF, though....). But still. Wow! What a difference!)

cryptozon The Game: A continually-run D&D campaign, since 1982

My first loss in years. Been 'playing' ~20 years, last time I lost was maybe 5 years ago. Oh well, restart the counter! Playing for life I guess, there's no way out.

cryptozon That time Sony installed rootkit software on thousands of computers [video]

Most people don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care? Additionally, Sony should do it again if they get the chance!

cryptozon Where in the galaxy will we mine lithium?

raises hand

I would love to live on Pluto. I'm sure lots of people would. Anyway, we evolved without Twitter and HN too, but here we are, spending our waking hours online. Many people alive today have never physically even visited 'real' nature and are (probably, mostly) fine without it.

I don't think 'we evolved to X and therefore would never want Y" holds much water.

cryptozon Three areas where Google Search lags behind competitors: code, cooking, travel

> 2. ???

oh Haha, funny old meme. Step 2 though is very clearly to show more ads and more content, to show more 'full results pages', etc, rather than just show me the 1 thing I needed and be on my way.

I should include that Google said next to each result ('"555-555-555" is not on this page') and then show the page. Totally knows that the results are unrelated to my query, but shows them anyway. Why?

cryptozon Three areas where Google Search lags behind competitors: code, cooking, travel

The answer Google gives to the question is wrong. End of story. Google aims to be a question-answering machine with the Info box, so giving the wrong answer is a broken state. Not sure you can really reason you way into how it's kinda-understandable-and-gotcha! to be 'not broken'.

Aside: Going to get real confusing when another Neil Armstrong born in the 2010s does set foot on Mars in the 2030s. I wonder if we will still get the first response from Google, 1969, and if you will still consider it to be 'not broken' then too.

cryptozon Three areas where Google Search lags behind competitors: code, cooking, travel

I googled a phone number recently. It was the first result, got my answer. The rest of the results were websites for physical locations I had been recently, including a hospital, none of which had any relationship to the phone number.

Google is _not_ a good guideline for asking the right questions. It is trying to make as much money as possible and it will scramble anything it can think of to do that. Don't use that as a guideline for how you are thinking about questions.