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epoch_100

1,070 karma · joined December 30, 2016

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epoch_100··on On DeepSeek and export controls
> DeepSeek does not "do for $6M what cost US AI companies billions". I can only speak for Anthropic, but Claude 3.5 Sonnet is a mid-sized model that cost a few $10M's to train (I won't give an exact number). Also, 3.5 Sonnet was not trained in any way that involved a larger or more expensive model (contrary to some rumors).

Wow!

epoch_100··on Clio: A system for privacy-preserving insights into real-world AI use
Anthropic’s privacy policy is extremely strict — for example, conversations are retained for only 30 days and there’s no training on user data by default. https://privacy.anthropic.com/en/articles/10023548-how-long-...
epoch_100··on Launch HN: Lumona (YC W24) – Product search based on Reddit and YouTube reviews
Very cool! It reminds me of https://chord.pub/.
epoch_100··on Show HN: Anytype – local-first, P2P knowledge management
I use Anytype and like it. I do hope they’ll invest more time into the editing experience — there are a few sharp edges that will probably alienate people coming from more mainstream tools like Google Docs and Notion:

- Typography is a bit weird, especially with headings; there is very little line height on headings, leading to cramped documents.

- Bullet points look weird when you look closely at them. (On Mac, they’re not perfectly circular; perhaps an aliasing issue.)

- Can only use cmd+b and cmd+i for bold and italic when selecting text; can't use them to switch on/off boldness on the cursor.

- Can't specify type when creating a new object with the @ symbol inline (Capacities, a related tool, does).

- Bullet points flicker when you first create them.

- Linking inserts a space even when you don't want it, as does formatting using markdown characters (e.g., providing the closing ** in italics.)

- Relatedly: Entering closing markdown characters (e.g., the second **) does not end the formatting effect (the cursor should not have the formatting applied after they're entered, but it does).

Anytype is overall a fairly polished app. I hope they’ll iron out these editing issues — when they do, it’ll really be exceptional.

epoch_100··on A17T: Atomic Design Toolkit and Tailwind CSS Plugin
Author here. I agree. I designed a17t awhile ago (I think nearly four years ago now?) and it’s due for a refresh. I think it has the potential to be excellent but it’s not there yet.
epoch_100··on When your classmates threaten you with felony charges
Really what happened is we checked whether we could set `isAdmin` to `true` on our existing accounts, and... we were able to. Adi's more technical writeup has details: https://saligrama.io/blog/post/firebase-insecure-by-default/
epoch_100··on When your classmates threaten you with felony charges
Adi's writeup is great, and goes much more into the technical detail than my transcript. I really recommend everyone checks out his post.
epoch_100··on When your classmates threaten you with felony charges
I am not a lawyer (of course). But I find some solace/comfort in the new Justice Department guidance to not charge good faith security researchers under CFAA. https://www.theverge.com/2022/5/19/23130910/justice-departme...
epoch_100··on When your classmates threaten you with felony charges
Yes, threatening to report is what was really happening here. But in their effort to scare us, they elided much of that process. From our perspective it was "watch out, you might face felony charges if you don't agree to silence".
epoch_100··on When your classmates threaten you with felony charges
Heh. That's not very nice. If it feels stilted, that's probably because I wrote this primarily to be spoken. But ChatGPT was not involved.
epoch_100··on When an app asks for permissions, it should have a “feed fake data” option
> but you cannot distinguish between limited access and full access

I believe you can check whether you received limited photos access: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/photokit/phauthori...

epoch_100··on Google Analytics 4 was frustrating, so we built our own analytics service
Shynet
epoch_100··on Launch HN: Pynecone (YC W23) – Web Apps in Pure Python
Interesting — what kind of advantages would your hosting service provide over, say, packaging the Pynecone app into a Docker container and then deploying to Fly.io/Render/GCP/Azure/etc?
epoch_100··on Introducing ChatGPT and Whisper APIs
We hacked that together for https://paxo.ai — can be done!
epoch_100··on Rise of ‘zombie’ VCs as startup valuations plunge
If the VCs haven’t made a capital call, then that unallocated money is likely still sitting with the LPs collecting that sweet risk free return.
epoch_100··on Show HN: Self-host Whisper As a Service with GUI and queueing
Ha. I’m also doing something similar with a friend at https://www.paxo.ai. Funny that we all seemed to have an similar idea, all at once.
epoch_100··on Ask HN: Are people considering moving off of Fly.io?
I like them. But the outages have been tough.
epoch_100··on Intelligence – A good collection of great OSINT Resources
There’s https://atlos.org for visual investigations
epoch_100··on Ask HN: Good open source alternatives to Google Analytics?
Shynet: https://github.com/milesmcc/shynet

The goal is to provide modern, privacy-friendly, and detailed web analytics that works without cookies or JS. And it's completely open source.

Full disclosure: I am the primary maintainer.

epoch_100··on Counting website visitors is hard
Author of Shynet here! Hope you like it :)
epoch_100··on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (November 2021)
I have a strong technical background and a passion for digital safety and privacy. I'm especially interested in trust & safety, privacy engineering, human-centered design, tech policy, and open source software.

I'm looking for an internship or fellowship adjacent to trust & safety / privacy engineering.

Some of the projects I’m most proud of are Shynet [0], PrivacySpy [1], PolitiTweet [2], and a17t [3]. I co-instruct CS 106S [4] at Stanford, and I worked on cyber policy for a 2020 presidential campaign. I also work at the Stanford Internet Observatory on both research and technical infrastructure.

Portfolio: https://miles.land

Location: NYC or SF Bay Area

Remote: yes but ideally no

Willing to relocate: no

Technologies: Python, Rust, JS, Java, Kubernetes, C, OSINT, web dev, and more.

Résumé/CV: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wnIBWjEPmgdYXQ_EYZRU--KE...

Email: miles@rmrm.io

[0] https://github.com/milesmcc/shynet

[1] https://privacyspy.org

[2] https://polititweet.org

[3] https://a17t.miles.land

[4] http://cs106s.stanford.edu

epoch_100··on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (October 2021)
I have a strong technical background and a passion for digital safety and privacy. Especially interested in trust & safety, privacy engineering, human-centered design, tech policy, and open source software. Looking for an internship or fellowship adjacent to trust & safety or privacy engineering.

Some of the projects I’m most proud of are Shynet [0], PrivacySpy [1], PolitiTweet [2], and a17t [3]. I co-instruct CS 106S [4] at Stanford, and I worked on cyber policy for a 2020 presidential campaign. I also work at the Stanford Internet Observatory on both research and technical infrastructure.

Portfolio: https://miles.land

Location: NYC or SF Bay Area

Remote: yes but ideally no

Willing to relocate: no

Technologies: Python, Rust, JS, Java, Kubernetes, C, OSINT, web dev, and more.

Résumé/CV: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wnIBWjEPmgdYXQ_EYZRU--KE...

Email: miles@rmrm.io

[0] https://github.com/milesmcc/shynet

[1] https://privacyspy.org

[2] https://polititweet.org

[3] https://a17t.miles.land

[4] http://cs106s.stanford.edu

epoch_100··on “It's open source! We’ll let our customers fix it.”
Author here. It's to encourage people to apply, and to bring attention to what I think is a really awesome place. I don't want it to come across as pompous, though I get that to some readers it'd come off that way. :/

I also feel a bit obligated to include this, because I got a _lot_ of feedback on this piece from other Recursers — if it wasn't for them, this post probably wouldn't exist!

epoch_100··on “It's open source! We’ll let our customers fix it.”
It's absolutely, unequivocally better that these tools be open source (and therefore fixable!) than closed source. My (admittedly small) gripe is just that a large, well-resourced corporation is shifting the maintenance burdens of its product to customers. This situation is certainly better than having to pull out the debugger or beg with customer support.
epoch_100··on “It's open source! We’ll let our customers fix it.”
The article is specifically about the Google-maintained BigQuery component _of_ Apache Beam. But I agree that raising a support ticket is a good idea.
epoch_100··on Stanford CS Curriculum 2021
Stanford student here. You’re right that there aren’t a ton of dedicated ethics classes within the CS department (though there are many tech-oriented ethics courses around the university).

That being said, there has been a major push recently to _embed_ ethics inside the intro sequence.[1] All of the major intro classes (106A, 106B, 107, and 109, to name just a few) have dedicated ethics components.

[1] https://hai.stanford.edu/news/building-ethical-computational...

epoch_100··on Ask HN: What are some tools / libraries you built yourself?
I built Shynet [0], a modern, privacy-friendly, and detailed web analytics tool that works without cookies or JS.

I also built a17t [1], an atomic web design toolkit that makes using Tailwind CSS a bit easier from the start.

[0] https://github.com/milesmcc/shynet

[1] https://github.com/milesmcc/a17t

epoch_100··on Tell HN: Don't put your status page on the same domain as your app
Suppose the outage was caused by an issue with the registrar, DNS, the name server, or the domain registration itself. Having a separate domain for the status page — ideally purchased through a different provider – could prevent a lot of issues.
epoch_100··on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (April 2021)
Looking for an internship/summer job/fellowship/whatever you want to call it! I have sizable development experience (at least relative to my age), so I may be able to really contribute to your team. [0]

Especially in human-centered design, tech policy, privacy, systems programming, and security.

Location: Stanford, CA / New York, NY (depending on pandemic situation...)

Remote: yes

Willing to relocate: yes

Technologies: Python, Rust, Elixir, JS/web stack, C, some Haskell, some Lisp, containerization and Kubernetes, general UX work, Linux/public clouds, some cryptography and networking. Some experience with Erlang/OTP.

Resume: https://miles.land, https://github.com/milesmcc, and http://bit.ly/mccain-resume (gdoc)

Email: miles@rmrm.io

[0] Check out https://a17t.miles.land (a css library I built) and https://github.com/milesmcc/shynet (my open analytics tool) for samples. I also built https://lensant.com, though I'm less happy with its design.

epoch_100··on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (March 2021)
Looking for an internship/summer job/fellowship/whatever you want to call it! I have sizable development experience (at least relative to my age), so I may be able to really contribute to your team. [0]

Especially in human-centered design, tech policy, privacy, systems programming, and security.

Location: Stanford, CA / New York, NY (depending on pandemic situation...)

Remote: yes

Willing to relocate: yes

Technologies: Python, Rust, Elixir, JS/web stack, C, some Haskell, some Lisp, containerization and Kubernetes, general UX work, Linux/public clouds, some cryptography and networking. Some experience with Erlang/OTP.

Resume: https://miles.land, https://github.com/milesmcc, and http://bit.ly/mccain-resume (gdoc)

Email: miles@rmrm.io

[0] Check out https://a17t.miles.land (a css library I built) and https://github.com/milesmcc/shynet (my open analytics tool) for samples. I also built https://lensant.com, though I'm less happy with its design.

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