Hacker News Reader

nathan_comptonon Study: 'Security Fatigue' May Weaken Digital Defenses

The number of times I have to "single sign on" is truly maddening.

nathan_comptonon Student beauty and grades under in-person and remote teaching

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=IQ

Yes, crickets.

nathan_comptonon Juggalo makeup blocks facial recognition technology (2019)

Don't sully the good name of Juggalos this way.

The point of university isn't to get things done - it is to imprint knowledge into your brain. If you are approaching school with the attitude of "how do I get this over with as fast as possible," you are wasting your time and the time of the teacher.

nathan_comptonon Nano Banana 2: Google's latest AI image generation model

So this is an ultra-minimalist software platform to farm work out to enormous energy chugging AI models?

nathan_comptonon Nano Banana 2: Google's latest AI image generation model

People here like to say "Commoditize your Compliment" but to a company the size of google or amazon literally EVERYTHING is your compliment. Too bad no philosopher or political scientist or economist every thought about this stuff before or we might have some kind of plan to make the future less miserable and alienating.

nathan_comptonon Burger King will use AI to check if employees say 'please' and 'thank you'

I find making employees say please and thank you substantially more offensive.

nathan_comptonon Americans are destroying Flock surveillance cameras

> "Instead of ending slavery the civil war simply made everyone a slave to the government."

Look, I hate the elites as much as anyone and bemoan their outsized power over regular citizens, but to compare literal chattel slavery to the post-civil war U.S. is wild. Actual, real life, slavery was a deeply integrated part of their culture. Our democracy has a ton of problems, to be sure, but I find it very hard to blame that on the civil war.

nathan_comptonon Cardiorespiratory fitness is associated with lower anger and anxiety

I find this confusing, but most people do not like to exercise. I think most people know how.

nathan_comptonon Americans are destroying Flock surveillance cameras

Throw a constitutional conventions so that the slave owners could get their votes in (not the slaves, of course, though the owners should get to vote FOR them).

I understand that the civil war was about a lot of things, but the precipitating issue was slavery. Slavers should be obliterated by war if they aren't willing to give up their slaves unconditionally.

nathan_comptonon Americans are destroying Flock surveillance cameras

Not really a secret. The slogan was "No taxation without representation" not "no taxation."

The degree to which legislation in the US is bought by big companies and rarely reflects democratic desires we may be in another "no taxation without representation" era.

nathan_comptonon Hello Worg, the Org-Mode Community

I think you are right. My real issue is that I don't have an "outliner" brain. I've never really understood why people make outlines or even, really, take notes.

Org's utility to me is then the making and keeping track of todos. But markdown can do that without much trouble.

nathan_comptonon Hello Worg, the Org-Mode Community

I sort of bounce off of org over and over because I find it very unreadable. Compared to Markdown (I know Markdown isn't quite the same thing), org feels very crusty and noisy.

nathan_comptonon Show HN: Llama 3.1 70B on a single RTX 3090 via NVMe-to-GPU bypassing the CPU

I'm not sure, but I suspect that LLM weights don't compress all that well. The intuition here is that training an LLM is compression of the training data into the weights, so they are probably very information dense already. Can't squeeze them down much.

nathan_comptonon Sewage Spill in the Potomac River

Get RFK down there to take a dip.

nathan_comptonon We're no longer attracting top talent: the brain drain killing American science

I wrote a snarkier reply originally, but a more tempered summary would be: I can't imagine really caring about this. You cannot take it with you.

nathan_comptonon Trump's global tariffs struck down by US Supreme Court

Presumably such future attempts would be stopped immediately given this ruling.

nathan_comptonon We're no longer attracting top talent: the brain drain killing American science

I feel like if you care about taxes on capital gains you are rich enough not to care about taxes on capital gains.

nathan_comptonon Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest reveal the severity of U.S. surveillance state

Maybe I'm just America Pilled but I'll support almost anyone against a hereditary monarchy. The idea should be fundamentally disgusting to any self-respecting human being.

nathan_comptonon What color are your bits? (2004)

It has been very interesting to watch how discourse on copyright and ip has evolved over the years. In the end, however, what seems to happen is that copyright always "works" when powerful people benefit from it working and "doesn't work" when its less powerful people being victimized. Or vice versa, really. It seems like we've entered into a period of history where any little legal or cultural power differential is very rapidly exploited to produce profit and I'm curious (to say the least) how we are going to fix this.

nathan_comptonon Polis: Open-source platform for large-scale civic deliberation

"Culturally normal values" is such a crazily loaded phrase. I personally don't have a strong desire to see people with culturally normal values be in charge, since, as far as I can tell, the "normal" person is neither very smart nor very thoughtful.

nathan_comptonon Scientist who helped eradicate smallpox dies at age 89

> you can get the MMR vaccine as an adult if your parents were neglectful

if you are still alive.

nathan_comptonon Sometimes your job is to stay the hell out of the way

A thing can become controversial exactly by appearing intellectually interesting on a superficial level but being dumb on a deep read. This splits the audience in the superficial readers and those with the time or expertise to read the piece with a deeper view. Both teams see the other as missing the point.

nathan_comptonon A lot of population numbers are fake

This is actually insightful: we usually don't know the question we are trying to answer. The idea that you can "just" find the right question is naive.

nathan_comptonon A lot of population numbers are fake

Haha.

nathan_comptonon U.S. government has lost more than 10k STEM PhDs since Trump took office

Really think about this claim: "private sector does some things better." What evidence is there of this really that isn't anecdotal? There are so many things tossed around like this which sound plausible but for which I can't think of a definitive, conclusive, account.

For example: the public sector literally send humans to the moon with technology vastly inferior to that which we currently have at our disposal. Heck, the Soviet Union put a probe on the surface of Venus and sent back images. To me, it is not at all clear that "private sector better" is a foregone conclusion. At best you could make the strong claim that contemporary economic theory predicts that private sector companies do better.

nathan_comptonon ChatGPT Containers can now run bash, pip/npm install packages and download files

Fun to play with all this stuff before the bad actors make it dangerously useless.

nathan_comptonon TikTok users can't upload anti-ICE videos. The company blames tech issues

I don't think its any sort of "grand struggle" in any sense other than the human condition is a grand struggle for peace in a world which perhaps fundamentally encourages conflict, but it doesn't have to be a grand struggle to appreciate the fact that people are dying and being treated inhumanely.

I really do think you're fundamental warning is spot on: people really should consider how power is going to be used against them when calculating how much of it to give up in the pursuit of a goal. I also happen to think its sort of ridiculous (and impossible) for us all to wail and gnash our teeth each time a person dies unjustly. But I also think its probably wrong to be amused by it, even if it is commonplace in human affairs.