HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

unhammer

2,353 karma · joined September 16, 2010

submissionscomments
unhammer··on Waymo illegal overtake into wrong-way driving
It's the humans fault for not being lawful and considerate to the AI murderbot:

> a former Baidu executive, Drive.AI board member, and one of the industry’s most prominent boosters — argues the problem is less about building a perfect driving system than training bystanders to anticipate self-driving behavior. In other words, we can make roads safe for the cars instead of the other way around. As an example of an unpredictable case, I asked him whether he thought modern systems could handle a pedestrian on a pogo stick, even if they had never seen one before. “I think many AV teams could handle a pogo stick user in pedestrian crosswalk,” he told me. “Having said that, bouncing on a pogo stick in the middle of a highway would be really dangerous.”

> “Rather than building AI to solve the pogo stick problem, we should partner with the government to ask people to be lawful and considerate,” he said. “Safety isn’t just about the quality of the AI technology.”

https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/3/17530232/self-driving-ai-w...

unhammer··on Show HN: Term Typer – Learn a language by typing
If you're taking requests, Greek would be fun :-)
unhammer··on Show HN: Term Typer – Learn a language by typing
Yes! I learn from listening to podcasts and such, and it's somehow more fun, instead of being told "floob means chair, now say floob after me" (one new word out of eight) and being in language-learning-mode, you're just listening to someone talking about something interesting and they're trying their best to convey the information – but it happens to be in a language you don't really know. The https://www.russianwithmax.com/ podcast does this very well (though you need a bit of basics, e.g. Pimsleur, first) – I'm still trying to find comparable podcasts for other languages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TPR_Storytelling seems to be an adjacent method, TPRS .

See also LINGVA LATINA PER SE ILLVSTRATA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_%C3%98rberg#LINGVA_LATINA... / https://archive.org/details/lingualatinapers0000oerb_x3i0/ :)

unhammer··on Object that slammed into Florida home was space junk for ISS, NASA confirms
This time it was. Maybe there's actually a bunch of unreported "dark debris" hitting roofs of people who aren't NASA aficionados with Xitter accounts :)
unhammer··on Libgourou: A Free Implementation of Adobe's Adept DRM on ePub/PDF Files
Is it possible to use this libgourou to fix this situation? So that it's possible to both pay for books and read them without wasting hours? I didn't quite understand from the readme if this is specific to library things. So far all solutions i've seen are either

1. Pay and not be able to read (on device of my choosing)

2. Not pay and be able to read wherever

3. Pay and spend hours fiddling with weird windows-only software and forget why i wanted the book in the first place

unhammer··on How I tripped over the Debian weak keys vulnerability
The AAAA (and several of the following characters) is just a header showing what type of key it is: https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/5944/why-do-all-s...
unhammer··on The xz attack shell script
> In the beginning of Unix, m4 was created. This has made many people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.

autoconf creates a shell script by preprocessing with m4. So you need to know not just the intricacies of shell scripting, but also of m4, with its arcane rules for escaping: https://mbreen.com/m4.html#quotes

If autoconf used m4 to generate python scripts, they would also look like https://pyobfusc.com/#winners

unhammer··on Show HN: Glossarie – a new, immersive way to learn a language
hm, maybe region-restricted? I get a "not found"
unhammer··on Show HN: Glossarie – a new, immersive way to learn a language
Is there a waiting list for Android? :)
unhammer··on The Good Soldier Švejk (2018)
Yes! "Moominpappa at Sea" is wonderful. There's melancholy, sea horses, mischief, the creeping gothic horror of the Groke, whisky and pipe smoking, existential crises, dilapidated lighthouses and confused fishermen. Something for kids of all ages.
unhammer··on Asynchronous clean-up
https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/parallel-and-concurrent... explains how Haskell does async exceptions and cancellation, for comparison. I found that the most challenging chapter of The Concurrency Book, but even so it feels like a solved problem in Haskell (especially once you've read the next chapter, on stm)
unhammer··on Useful Uses of cat
I have an old note named the same as this blog post:

    cat /dev/sdb > backup.img # make a disk image

    cat /dev/sdb > /dev/sdc   # clone disk

    cat ~/Downloads/*         # play Russian roulette with your terminal

    cat > file                # minimalistic text editor, ^D to exit saving, ^C to exit erasing the file

    cat << wq > file          # nearly complete emulation of ed

    grep -r bongo . | cat     # shorter than typing --color=never

    cat -v file               # cause 20 points of damage to wizards of bell labs

    cat file > file           # empty a file without removing the file

    cat meow meow > meows     # duplicate file contents
unhammer··on Films about virtual reality
They missed the most realistic depiction, in Community: https://youtu.be/z4FGzE4endQ?feature=shared&t=40s
unhammer··on Multilingual transformer and BERTopic for topic modeling: The case of Serbian
> Serbian [and] other morphologically rich low-resource languages

What term do we use for the ~6000 languages of less resources (and typically richer morphology)?

unhammer··on Zed, a collaborative code editor, is now open source
1. Install from stable.melpa (or gnu elpa) instead of melpa (and pin to that)

2. git add .emacs.d/elpa

3. Don't click update all the time.

unhammer··on Keeping a long shell history
You may need to enable it

HISTCONTROL=ignorespace

unhammer··on Fewer people are buying electric cars in the US
> Though the new-vehicle sales figure is high, data from Statistics Norway indicates the total share of EVs on Norwegian roads in 2022 was only about 20%

I followed the link buy couldn't find the source for this claim. The linked page talks about Registered vehicles (many of which will be car#2 etc), while https://www.ssb.no/en/transport-og-reiseliv/landtransport/st... about miles driven isn't split into EV/fossil. Anyone see where the 20% comes from?

unhammer··on You've just been fucked by psyops [video]
> People want to believe that govt and big tech are this omniscient, monolithic entity.

    The main thing that I learned about conspiracy theory, is that
    conspiracy theorists believe in a conspiracy because that is more
    comforting.
    The truth is, that it is not the Jewish banking conspiracy, or the
    grey aliens, or the twelve-foot reptiloids from another dimension
    that are in control.
    The truth is far more frightening; no-one is in control.
    The world is rudderless.
    -- Alan Moore
unhammer··on Librum: Open-Source e-book platform
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37939796
unhammer··on 'Like we were lesser humans': Gaza boys, men recall Israeli arrest, torture
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/11/07/middleeast/palestinian-is...
unhammer··on PeerTube v6
> also from P2P via WebRTC

Does this mean the list of IP addresses of people currently watching a video is necessarily public?

unhammer··on Talks from the TUG Conference 2023 in Bonn
KeenWrite looks very nice :-) How does it compare to LyX?
unhammer··on Detexify: LaTeX Handwriting Symbol Recognition
Maybe https://github.com/kirel/detexify-hs-backend/blob/master/src...

on

https://github.com/kirel/detexify-data

unhammer··on Like Clippy but for the CLI
That seems handy, maybe this way I can keep using jq on the command line without ever having to learn jq's syntax.

I made a pure bash version since I don't always have php installed:

    gpt () {
        api_key=$(cat ~/.config/openai.key)
        verbose=false
        if [[ $1 = -v ]]; then
            verbose=true
            shift
        fi
        userinput="$*"
        # shellcheck disable=SC2016
        system='You are an interactive shell command line shell agent.
    You just get things done, rather than trying to explain.
    Do your best to respond with 1 command that will meet the requirements.
    Start a line with `$ ` to have it sent directly to the shell VERBATIM.
    All other output is just echoed.
    Favor 1 line shell commands.
    Be terse.
    Important: Every command you output will automatically be executed in this env: bash'
        systemj="$(jq -Rs . <<<"${system}")"
        userinputj="$(jq -Rs . <<<"${userinput}")"
        payload='{ "model": "gpt-3.5-turbo",
                "messages": [{"role":"system", "content": '"${systemj}"'},
                                {"role": "user", "content": '"${userinputj}"'}],
                "temperature": 0.15,
                "stream":false }'
        if $verbose; then
            set -x
        fi
        if ! res=$(curl -Ss -f https://api.openai.com/v1/chat/completions \
                        -H "Content-Type: application/json"               \
                        -H "Authorization: Bearer ${api_key}"             \
                        -d "${payload}"); then
            echo "ERROR: ${res}" >&2
            return 1
        else
            $verbose && echo "RESULT: ${res}"
            jq -r '.choices[0].message.content' <<<"${res}"
        fi
        set +x
    }
-----

I even tried using GPT to help me develop it!

    $ gpt -v get the actual completion from an openai /completions request using jq
    RESULT: {
      "id": "chatcmpl-8IZvb4lQaFgcDdnSnsU4t6zhFRrbN",
      "object": "chat.completion",
      "created": 1699438703,
      "model": "gpt-3.5-turbo-0613",
      "choices": [
        {
          "index": 0,
          "message": {
            "role": "assistant",
            "content": "$ jq '.choices[0].text'"
          },
          "finish_reason": "stop"
        }
      ],
      "usage": {
        "prompt_tokens": 116,
        "completion_tokens": 9,
        "total_tokens": 125
      }
    }
… there's probably a lesson in there.
unhammer··on Why banks are suddenly closing down customer accounts
See also: - https://aisnakeoil.substack.com/p/the-bait-and-switch-behind... - https://predictive-optimization.cs.princeton.edu/ But see https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S026736492...

    > human oversight policies provide a false sense of security in
    > adopting algorithms and enable vendors and agencies to shirk
    > accountability for algorithmic harms.

    > propose a shift from human oversight to institutional oversight as
    > the central mechanism for regulating government algorithms.
    > First, agencies must justify that it is appropriate to incorporate
    > an algorithm into decision-making and that any proposed forms of
    > human oversight are supported by empirical evidence. Second, these
    > justifications must receive democratic review and approval before
    > the agency can adopt the algorithm.
Also https://predictive-optimization.cs.princeton.edu/
unhammer··on Running the "Reflections on Trusting Trust" Compiler
Wow, the attack was implemented nearly ten years before the lecture, maybe right after reading https://seclab.cs.ucdavis.edu/projects/history/papers/karg74... about "the compiler trap door"?
unhammer··on DRM-free e-books are a big deal (2019)
I don't listen to many audio books, but I've bookmarked https://www.downpour.com/ as a DRM-free alternative.
unhammer··on BB(3, 3) is Hard
More like discrete math and automata theory https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automata_theory or theory of computation. Hopcroft & Ullmann's intro book is nice. But there's so much related stuff here, it's just a starting point.
unhammer··on LLMs confabulate not hallucinate
Do most people understand exactly what confabulate means?

I'd rather just say that they're bullshitting. Everyone knows what it means, and it has a precise academic definition[0] within the field of bullshitology.

[0] https://philosophynow.org/issues/53/On_Bullshit_by_Harry_Fra...

unhammer··on Predictive policing software terrible at predicting crimes
Predicting Financial Crime https://whitecollar.thenewinquiry.com/static/whitepaper.pdf

> We are confident that our model matches or exceeds industry standards for predictive policing tools.

;)

Page 1 of 27Next →