HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

tmp10423288442

646 karma · joined February 3, 2025

submissionscomments
tmp10423288442··on How Bluesky draws its logo on screenshots
It doesn’t copy the brightness AFAIK
tmp10423288442··on On AI regulation and messaging
Maybe yes, maybe no. Measles cases have been on a long-term upward trend in the US since the bottom around 2000: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-measles-cases?t...

In Canada, measles cases suddenly exploded in 2025 as well, and they don't have RFK Jr. there: https://health-infobase.canada.ca/measles-rubella/

The policies around measles vaccines have shifted a little since RFK became HHS Secretary, but not in a material way. Generally the messaging has focused on putting measles, mumps, and rubella in individual vaccines rather than combined, but at no point has the federal government recommended not to get vaccinated. That, combined with the Canadian data, implies that RFK or other changes to US health policy are not likely to be the cause of the measles outbreaks.

tmp10423288442··on Anthropic's ‘watermark’ text adulteration in Claude is a perversion of writing
Scott Aaronson basically invented this form of watermarking, so it's not surprising he has a good description of it.
tmp10423288442··on Anthropic's ‘watermark’ text adulteration in Claude is a perversion of writing
LLMs never are limited to "exact words", because their output is inherently probabilistic. The method Anthropic (along with Gemini, who has been using the exact same watermark for at least a year) uses doesn't bias the output token distribution, just reseeds the PRNG in a way that can be detected after the fact: https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-text-watermark#which-s...
tmp10423288442··on Anthropic's ‘watermark’ text adulteration in Claude is a perversion of writing
Anthropic actually tells you the approach they use, and it's not that. From their Claude Text Watermark page[0]: "Claude’s text watermark is a version of the SynthID-Text approach published by Google DeepMind in a Nature paper in 2024."

The Nature paper is "Scalable watermarking for identifying large language model outputs"[1]. This method does not separate out tokens into separate classes, but merely uses a seed for the PRNG that selects which among the most likely tokens generated by the LLM will actually be output. This has the advantage that there's no green and red token sets, so no token is systematically favored or disfavored. If a particular token is overwhelmingly predicted to be the most likely candidate, it will almost certainly be selected, so the watermark doesn't affect that. Even if there are several choices of output token at a point that have similar probability of selection, the watermark doesn't systematically bias in favor of one token or the other.

This is actually a quite elegant method of watermarking that, contrary to people's fears, won't adversely affect the model output. The main concern I have with it is that it appears that you can't actually test the watermark locally, without uploading it to Anthropic. I'm not sure why that's the case, since there's no particular reason the watermarking key has to be private, except if you want to prevent others from generating text with their own LLMs that is watermarked to look like it's generated by Anthropic - but everybody wants their text to not have the watermark.

[0]: https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-text-watermark#:~:text...

[1]: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-08025-4

tmp10423288442··on France's top court blocks social media ban for under-15s
In Western countries, the judiciary and the executive (which contains the day-to-day operations of the government) generally operate independently and can rule against each other. I'm most familiar with the US, and I think its constitution was the first to encode judicial independence - and constitutional review by the Supreme Court was established early on in US history. But all Western countries these days have had judges rule against executive policy and the executive obey it.

The details of how to override a ruling against the executive does differ between countries, and also on whether its considered just an interpretation of law or a constitutional question. Both the US and France have a written constitution that's binding on other branches, while the UK does not.

tmp10423288442··on Dropbox is an obvious PE Target?
I’m guessing their “momentum” wasn’t on the path of building a sustainable business, particularly given the existence of Microsoft. From a market position standpoint, Paper could have become what Notion is now. Notion even released at around the same time as Paper.

Was it that Notion from early on supported Markdown compatibility, which is a distinguishing feature when selling to software startups? Was Paper too aggressively coupled to Dropbox storage, when Google, Microsoft, and Box already had a large share of that market?

tmp10423288442··on Dropbox is an obvious PE Target?
Everyone makes fun of #1 for good reason, but #2 and #3 were actually reasonable objections at the time.
tmp10423288442··on New Mexico court orders Meta to pay $567m over harms to children’s mental health
A lot of people on this story are making the usual snarky remarks that, oh, this is just a slap on the wrist—some trivial proportion of Meta’s global revenue. And that is true, but unlike the EU, for example, New Mexico is a tiny jurisdiction. It only has a little bit more than 2 million people.

So actually, a fine—or a judgment—of $942 million that applies just to New Mexico is enormous. If you look at Meta’s revenue from the U.S. and Canada and assign it proportionally by population, you find that Meta only earned about $1.5 billion to $2 billion total from New Mexico over the past five years. The exact figure depends on whether you allocate purely by population or account for purchasing power, which makes the estimate a little lower because New Mexico is a poorer state than the U.S. average.

Given that, the judgment is a half to two-thirds of what Meta could have obtained from New Mexico. So it is actually a serious deterrent, assuming Meta thinks New Mexico would continue to impose fines of that size.

I also think that there’s a good chance this judgment gets overturned or significantly reduced on appeal, but even if the fine drops to half its current level, it would be proportionately larger than almost any fine against any company, let alone tech, that I’ve heard of.

tmp10423288442··on New Mexico court orders Meta to pay $567m over harms to children’s mental health
This is a lot of money for just New Mexico - they only have a population a little more than 2 million.
tmp10423288442··on Apple is getting this wrong
Which is what OpenAI will argue - that Apple is negligent in protecting their trade secrets. Trade secrets are not protected in the USA if the company doesn't take reasonable effort in protecting them. I would feel quite confident as a lawyer arguing against a company that intentionally has their employees use personal accounts on their corporate devices, long after using separate work accounts and devices has become SOP for large companies with serious security concerns (almost certainly including OpenAI itself).

This is better explained in The Information article (which is paywalled): https://www.theinformation.com/articles/apple-icloud-policy-.... Emphasis mine:

> When new employees join Apple, the company often issues them an iPhone and Mac and pays for an iCloud account with a large amount of online storage capacity. Crucially, during the onboarding process, Apple encourages new hires to use their preexisting personal Apple IDs with this iCloud account, through which their co-workers can share internal Apple documents and other files with them.

tmp10423288442··on Apple is getting this wrong
Apple certainly uses Numbers, Pages, etc. internally extensively, so you really do have to sign into an iCloud account as an employee.
tmp10423288442··on Apple is getting this wrong
> If company can handle BYOD model then they should solve that on hardware level - by issuing work phones (and other devices).

But OpenAI's allegation is that Apple doesn't do that, either out of incompetence or malice (to add legal uncertainty when their employees go to competitors).

tmp10423288442··on Apple is getting this wrong
> Whether Apple's tech was copied or not is almost secondary. The real existential threat for OpenAI is the legal discovery process, which could expose their internal AI architecture and training data to the public (and to Apple). That risk is exactly why OpenAI is playing this out in the court of public opinion—to force Apple's hand.

Why would that be relevant for a hardware project? Discovery doesn't mean carte blanche to dig around in arbitrary company secrets - and there's significant danger to Apple as well. Did Apple give corporate secrets gathered from the former OpenAI-Apple deal to Google for their Gemini integration, or for Apple's own AI?

tmp10423288442··on Apple is getting this wrong
> I would tend to believe they are implying some casual racism

There's probably a little bit of that, but also simple carelessness.

tmp10423288442··on Apple is getting this wrong
Even if Westerners maintained the characters for the names rather than transliterate them, there's still the problem that common surnames are used by literally hundreds of millions of people of Chinese descent, and there are a lot of commonly-used given names as well. I think in all of Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese almost all given names are 1-2 syllables in length, so there's even less space for disambiguation, even before you get to the additionally ambiguities introduced by transliteration and dropping of diacritics.

Japanese has several advantages:

1. Both given names and surnames often use more than 2 syllables. This makes it more familiar to speakers of European languages, where multi-syllable words are no big deal.

2. English speakers find Japanese easier to pronounce and remember due to its simpler syllable structure and use of globally more common sounds compared to the other languages.

3. Unlike the other languages, Japanese names are always given in Given Name, Surname order in English media, while names from the other languages are inconsistently transcribed in either order.

4. Japanese is the "default" East Asian culture for the West in many ways, since it's the one that at least the US has most deeply engaged for the longest time. Many, many cultural exports that actually originated in China were introduced to the West via Japan with Japanese names. Also, Japan has been an advanced industrial economy since the late 1800s, while China only achieved that status a few decades ago.

5. Japanese transcription into Roman characters has remained consistent for a long time (helped by the simpler phonology). Chinese and Korean have been cursed with several incompatible transcription systems over the years - although Pinyin has been winning out for Chinese, there are still many names with legacy transcriptions, not to mention the other Chinese languages needing their own transcriptions. Vietnamese does exclusively use Latin characters, but the diacritics and unfamiliar pronunciation makes them harder to remember.

tmp10423288442··on Google fixed more Chrome bugs in June than over the past two years, thanks to AI
You'd have to be a pretty stubborn software engineer to not find AI useful for anything at this point, unless they're making you use Github Copilot or something far behind the frontier. You don't have repetitive tests to write? You never need to write a script to run something?
tmp10423288442··on NSF pilots 4-year PhDs with industry research placements
Wouldn’t be the first time the US took inspiration regarding the PhD from the leading advanced manufacturing power of the day, nor from Germany for that matter.
tmp10423288442··on US citizen charged after GrapheneOS phone wipes during airport search
You need it to look set up enough to do critical communication / tourist activities. It should look like you had to reinstall your OS right before your trip, and only had time to get the basics on there. Most people will prioritize communications, maps, and payments over anything else, with video/music/books/podcasts following that, and signing into the vast universe of social apps later if ever.
tmp10423288442··on US citizen charged after GrapheneOS phone wipes during airport search
> I am not a lawyer but if you are a citizen they probably can't deny you entry but can probably detain you for an uncomfortable amount of time, and seize whatever they want. Your best defense is to have a burner phone and no other devices nothing they can seize that would hurt you.

Even having a burner phone without any personal information on it can be deemed suspicious. It would be best for your phone to have a recently-reinstalled OS, with a few critical apps like Whatsapp or iMessage set up with a few personal messages sent. You need to be able to set those up without a password manager. Anything else needs to take place on devices that you aren't carrying with you. Fortunately enough people don't update their Facebook these days that just having an account that exists but you don't use will probably work, assuming you don't look like someone that would be obsessed with their socials.

Maybe there are USB thumb drives that operate like a YubiKey unless special setup is performed to access the storage inside? That's one way to carry data with you if you have to.

tmp10423288442··on AI Companies Are Trying to Hide a Staggering Amount of Debt
But it's behind a paywall, so not that easy
tmp10423288442··on Five US tech giants' hidden debts soar to $1.65T on opaque AI funding
Seemed fine with adding that much during Covid
tmp10423288442··on Reviving a 15-year-old netbook with Arch Linux
I am a Sith - I prefer to speak in absolutes. Hedging is useless - either say what you mean outright, or quantify it if you can’t say it absolutely.
tmp10423288442··on What I learned selling 2,500 MIDI recorders: Hardware is not so hard
Blog posts:

https://www.uber.com/us/en/blog/how-uber-deals-with-large-io...

Comments about a Twitter thread talking about the same thing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25373462

tmp10423288442··on What I learned selling 2,500 MIDI recorders: Hardware is not so hard
>your JS is too big, you can't ship until you get it under 50 kB

Back in the glorious past, the iOS App Store either didn’t allow apps larger than 100 MiB, or at least forbade them from being downloaded over mobile connections. There’s an old blog post/Twitter thread you can find on Hacker News where an Uber engineer describes the challenges they faced in trying to keep their app under that limit. They were also rewriting the app in Swift, so some compiler patches were necessary.

tmp10423288442··on Reviving a 15-year-old netbook with Arch Linux
Yes, they seemed like a good idea - they were really cheap, and had decent battery life for the time - but the compromises were such that you really wouldn’t want to buy another netbook if you could. After the first few releases, the MacBook Air became what the non-cheapskate buyers of netbooks wanted.
tmp10423288442··on Reviving a 15-year-old netbook with Arch Linux
And you can remote control it from the Codex Desktop app (now the new ChatGPT app) or from the ChatGPT mobile app.
tmp10423288442··on Japan now has human refrigerators inspired by Japanese vending machines
In the US I would generally pop into a store in such circumstances, or in larger events in a field there might be a cooling tent. What makes this useful in Japan?
tmp10423288442··on Short sellers notch $8.7B profit as SpaceX shares dip to IPO price
The ocean poses two major threats to any construction - water pressure and corrosion.
tmp10423288442··on Short sellers notch $8.7B profit as SpaceX shares dip to IPO price
The ocean is worse than space from every perspective but cooling, radiation shielding, and cost/ease of installation. But that just highlights how bad of an idea space-based data centers are at this time.
← PreviousPage 2 of 6Next →