jks

Has anyone with a Usenet subscription checked if there's now an alt.binaries.llm.exfil?

Finda <https://keminglabs.com/finda/> is the best file search I've seen for macOS. (Incidentally, it has an Electron UI.)

Doesn't seem to be updated for Tahoe yet, and even the Sequoia version isn't notarized, so it's not really clear if it has a future.

An AI editor, a competitor to Cursor but written from scratch and not a VS Code fork. They recently announced a funding round from Sequoia. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44961172

This may be the case, but as a Helsinki resident I am always surprised when visiting either Stockholm or Tallinn, because their drivers always seem more likely to honor zebra crossings than drivers in Helsinki.

I don't know about German law, but in Finnish law you can only appeal to the trial period if you have an acceptable reason related to the trial period. For example, if the employee isn't performing well, that is a legal reason to annul the work agreement during the trial period. But selling the business to investors or having financial difficulties because of the economy are not acceptable reasons, since they are not related to the specific recently-hired employee.

It cuts both ways: the employee can walk out during the trial period for reasons such as feeling like they didn't fit in, or the work being different from what they imagined. But if they merely find a better-paying job elsewhere, they cannot invoke the trial period but have to give notice in the usual way.

Why the number 2,280? What keeps you from adding peasants until your projectile travels at 0.99c?

I have the "Relax & Sleep" pair. I got mine from a Finnish reseller, and thought they were a global company but they seem to list only European locations. I believe thomann.de delivers to the U.S., but that's little help since the point of these would be to get them made individually.

I would assume that your local audiologist or music instrument store will know what the U.S. equivalent to these is. It seems to me that Elacin's biggest market is musicians who want a comfortable pair of earplugs with a flat frequency response.

These custom earplugs are the most comfortable I've ever worn:

https://www.elacin.com/your-perfect-fit/leisure/relax-sleep/

These are the most comfortable earplugs I've used:

https://www.elacin.com/your-perfect-fit/leisure/relax-sleep/

Currently I use Ozlo Sleepbuds which are not quite as comfortable and a little finicky to operate, but I like the masking noise.

curl wttr.in

Not a full solution, but one thing I've learned not to do is tell Cursor "you got that wrong, fix it like this". Instead, I go back to the previous prompt and click "Restore Checkpoint", edit the prompt and possibly the Cursor rules to steer it in the right direction.

When the model has the wrong solution in its context, it will use it when generating new code, and my feeling is that it doesn't handle the idea of "negative example" very well. Instead, delete the bad code and give it positive examples of the right approach.

You probably mean the USAMO 2025 paper. They updated their comparison with Gemini 2.5 Pro, which did get a nontrivial score. That Gemini version was released five days after USAMO, so while it's not entirely impossible for the data to be in its training set, it would seem kind of unlikely.

https://x.com/mbalunovic/status/1907436704790651166

> it seems not a huge computational task to figure out that ] is a `\right]`

TeX's design was finalised in 1982, when the computational resources were different by a few orders of magnitude. There is a very strong culture of backward compatibility (search for "A torture test for TeX") and there are so many equations written in TeX documents that it would be impossible to change the parsing now.

That said, something like MathJax would be free to create their own TeX-like syntax where parentheses are automatically paired.

I for one often find myself wanting more control, writing `\bigr]` or `\biggr]` instead of `\right]` to get the rendered equation to look good.

> And while rendering `(a+b)/a` as a `\frac` is opinionated, honestly, the only reason why this occurs in my notes is when I was too lazy to type `\frac{}{}`.

Plain TeX has the much nicer syntax `{a+b \over a}` but for some obscure reason LaTeX recommends against that.

He used to send out real cheques for $2.56 but apparently they contained codes that could be used to transfer money out of his account in excess of the sum of the cheque. Now he uses the made-up Bank of San Serriffe, which naturally understands hexadecimal.

https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/news08.html

My experience is that Gmail accepted my emails fine... until one day it didn't. Then some time later it worked again.

I registered for their Postmaster Tools, which says

    No data to display at this time. Please come back later.
    Postmaster Tools requires that your domain satisfies certain conditions before
    data is visible for this chart. 
    Refer to the help page for more details.

The help page has no useful information. I suspect that I sent too little mail for it to register in their systems at all.

Outlook was even worse, and I just told my Outlook users to change providers.

Eventually I capitulated and got Google Workspace, and now everything gets delivered perfectly.

Yes, but the process of getting Gmail, Outlook etc to receive your emails and put them in recipients' inboxes is far from painless or quick. An IP address with a clean history and SPF/DKIM/DMARC are table stakes, but then you get to play the "my emails are randomly dropped today while everything looked fine yesterday" game.

Slirp lives on in QEMU and container engines: https://github.com/rootless-containers/slirp4netns

One such representation is a polynomial with integer coefficients in 26 variables given in

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00029890.1976.11...

which has the curious property that as you substitute nonnegative integers for the variables, the positive values of the polynomial are exactly the set of prime numbers. (The polynomial also yields negative values.)

When put like this, it sounds like the polynomial must reveal something deep about the primes... but it's another cool magic trick. The MRDP theorem (famous for solving Hilbert's 10th problem negatively) implies that this kind of multivariate polynomial exists for exactly those sets of natural numbers that are computably enumerable, so the polynomials could be seen as a really esoteric programming language for set-enumeration algorithms.

More tricks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formula_for_primes

We have that in Finland too: https://viikkonumero.fi/

That one also lets you look up other weeks by number, which is occasionally useful. But the calmer design of https://vecka.nu is very pleasant!

Oliver Burkeman wrote a book about this, named "Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals". The main point (at least as I remember it) is that there are way more books to read, links to click, and things to do than you can fit in your lifetime, so it's a delusion that you could ever get to the end of your to-do list.

Another fun fact: there are three commonly used ways to define week numbers (see `man strftime`, %U, %V, %W; %V is the one used in at least the Nordics). In some years they coincide so you might not notice that you picked the wrong one until next January.

Yet another fun fact: with %V week numbers, the date 2024-12-30 (December 30, 2024) was 2025-W01-1 (the Monday of week 1, 2025). Thus strftime needs two different ways to specify the year: %G denotes the year that goes with %V week numbers, %Y denotes the year that people usually think of when they ask "what year is it". Unfortunately %G comes before %Y on the strftime man page, so people who scan the page quickly can easily pick %G when they really want %Y. I've seen a few bugs caused by this.

I have also seen the corresponding bug in SQL, using IYYY instead of YYYY. This boggles the mind, but apparently when some people read "ISO 8601 week-numbering year", they only see "ISO 8601 ... year", think "yes, that's the date standard we use" and don't care about the "week-numbering" word in the middle.

Heh, U+1D504 MATHEMATICAL FRAKTUR CAPITAL A seems to have been filtered out of my comment, perhaps because it's outside the BMP.

Fraktur is still used in model theory, but I don't believe that is easier to write than A' or  or something like that.

Set theory has aleph א and beth ℶ which are refreshingly not Greek but Hebrew letters.

I've seen Greek computer scientists write Omega as an underlined O. Much easier than trying to approximate the printed letter Ω but still unambiguous, unless you use underlining to denote something in your formulas.

This game (under the "Mafia" name) has been popular in Finnish math-contest circles since some time in the 1990s, probably as a Russian import. In large groups there can be many more roles, such as the axe-wielding lone killer, the police chief who gets reliable information from the game master, and the doctor who can rescue a victim if they guess correctly. Lots of fun.

Someone mentioned Blood on the Clocktower <https://bloodontheclocktower.com/> which has many more roles and a more complicated game that can take hours. The upside is that you aren't out of the game when you are eliminated.

In the other direction, there is a One Night Ultimate Werewolf ruleset <https://www.wargamer.com/one-night-ultimate-werewolf/review> that leads to a much faster game because it's not iterated.

One such tarpit (Nepenthes) was just recently mentioned on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42725147

Their site is down at the moment, but luckily they haven't stopped Wayback Machine from crawling it: https://web.archive.org/web/20250117030633/https://zadzmo.or...

> obviously not the best move for one's career

Apparently he no longer has the "Autoweapons" article from 1987 on the web. It's probably on the Internet Archive somewhere.

(Previous Hacker News discussion on that article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8153341)

Previously:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21668685

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21668685

A friend mentioned using control characters in passwords... like ^F and ^B, but not ^C because that's the interrupt character. Feels vaguely risky to me (does ^U empty the line? does ^W delete the last word? does your terminal emulator do some weird encoding like it does for cursor keys?) but if it works, why not?

Likewise. My last name contains a non-ascii character. In ~2009 I started at a company whose admin conveniently set up an account for me on their Ubuntu server... on which no-one could then log in locally because the login manager crashed when trying to display the list of users. I logged in via ssh and changed my name to the nearest ASCII equivalent.

I always feel slightly worried on sites that demand that I give my full legal name (such as the US ESTA form), and then refuse to handle it because it includes "illegal" characters.