Hacker News Reader

memory_grepon A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive

You're assuming votes are public, which is not usually the case. If there's no way to check someone else's vote, there's no way to enforce a voting block.

memory_grepon A World Run with Code

> And, yes, there’s only basically one full computational language that exists in the world today—and it’s the one I’ve spent the past three decades building—the Wolfram Language.

memory_grepon Facebook Stored Hundreds of Millions of User Passwords in Plain Text for Years

Maybe many people were just using SELECT * FROM ... and got plain text passwords they weren't necessarily looking for.

memory_grepon Facebook Loses Top Executives, Including Chris Cox

Pytorch is great. Best thing to come out of Facebook IMO.

memory_grepon DARPA Is Building a $10M, Open-Source, Secure Voting System

Laws can prevent coercion, at least by major businesses, but another concern is people selling their votes on a black market. Still, to me, the benefits of an open and verifiable voting system would outweigh the downsides.

memory_grepon Truffle: Finds business deductions in your personal spending history

Yeah, that's what I do.

memory_grepon Humans who are not concentrating are not general intelligences

> Due to our concerns about malicious applications of the technology, we are not releasing the trained model.

Doesn't that go against the mission of OpenAI? I thought they were about making technology publicly accessible to everyone so that it can't be abused by only a few people. This makes them seem more like a business with proprietary data.

memory_grepon Microsoft Workers Demand It Drop $450M U.S. Army Contract

Nearly everything is "arbitrary" in the sense that you are using it. Wherever a machine learning classifier draws the line between categories is going to be arbitrary, but that doesn't mean it's not useful. Having some policy for ethical behavior is better than nothing.

memory_grepon Microsoft Workers Demand It Drop $450M U.S. Army Contract

It was a bad question, but I'll answer it now for you to clear up your confusion. A Humvee is neither a car nor a gun. Not sure why you think it must be one of those things. It's a Humvee. There are all kinds of consistent policies a person could have for ethical work: refusing to manufacture weapons, refusing to manufacture anything designed primarily for war, etc. I don't see any contradiction or inconsistencies there. If you were trying to point one out, maybe try again.

memory_grepon Microsoft Workers Demand It Drop $450M U.S. Army Contract

It's not that arbitrary and in any case that doesn't invalidate their position.

memory_grepon Microsoft Workers Demand It Drop $450M U.S. Army Contract

There is a huge difference, but that doesn't mean this project is Ok. Supporting war is supporting war. The budget and size of the US military are so far beyond what is needed for practical defense. If we want our military's actions to be humane, we should drastically cut their budget and stop sending soldiers to kill people in other countries.

memory_grepon Let Children Get Bored Again

Me, too. I created a bunch of games, stories, and things as a kid because of boredom. I feel like those experiences helped shape how I think as an adult in a positive way.

memory_grepon Show HN: The operating system I built as my high school project (2016)

How does it compare to TempleOS? :)

memory_grepon Google will Collapse (2017)

Didn't happen: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/reve...

memory_grepon Microsoft Bing not only shows child pornography, it suggests it

memory_grepon We are Google employees – Google must drop Dragonfly

> Complying with demands of the Chinese gov't is the only way they can penetrate the Chinese market.

You completely missed the point and failed to address any of the serious ethical problems they raised in the letter. We would be living in a dark dystopia if everyone's biggest priority was penetrating markets.

Tech workers are in high demand and have great salaries. Their livelihoods are not in jeapordy; they have their pick of where to work.

memory_grepon My Grandfather Thought He Solved a Cosmic Mystery

Yeah, my conclusion, too. There is no paradox.

memory_grepon Jeff Hawkins Is Finally Ready to Explain His Brain Research

Surely there has to be a single learning algorithm for most of the skills a modern human learns. There has been no time to evolve specialized algorithms for things like chess, programming, riding a bike, etc., and yet we can easily learn these skills.

memory_grepon How I recorded user behaviour on my competitor’s websites

Those are great ideas. Would love to see those implemented in Chrome.

memory_grepon Waymo's Self-Driving Cars Are Near: Meet a Teen Who Rides One Every Day

> low density Mounatin View

I wish

memory_grepon The Best Textbooks on Every Subject

On the neuroscience recommendation: I had been reading Principles of Neural Science and decided to check out the recommendation, Neuroscience Exploring the Brain, and it actually does seem much better written and more informative/useful. Thanks for the link! Also, most of these texts are at library genesis: http://gen.lib.rus.ec/

memory_grepon Linux Cryptography: Speck's real standing with the academic community

the ones that do support HTTPS don’t support SSL (they only support TLS, the old standard having severe security flaws)

Isn't TLS the successor to SSL?

memory_grepon $36k Google App Engine RCE

Yeah, I wonder if the google3 access may have been the real reason they asked him to stop poking around.