Hacker News Reader

zipwitchon Neuralink Progress Update [video]

"it was rumored that hackers for big media companies had figured out a way to get through the defenses that were built into such systems, and run junk advertisements in your peripheral vision (or even spang in the ... middle all the time - even when your eyes were closed. Bud knew a guy like that who's somehow gotten infected with a meme that ran advertisements for roach motels, in Hindi, superimposed on the bottom right-hand corner of his visual field, twenty-four hours a day, until the guy whacked himself."

-Neal Stephenson The Diamond Age

zipwitchon Neuralink Progress Update [video]

Want this job? Even if it doesn't get to the level of "all employees need to be running OurCorp Headware (tm)", being required to be running Microsoft Headwindows in order to get a job with medical benefits seems ominously plausible.

zipwitchon Partying like it’s 1999 – Initial public offerings are back in Silicon Valley

"The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent."

Here's a piece on the origin of the quote: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/08/09/remain-solvent/

zipwitchon Volunteers spot almost 100 cold brown dwarfs near our sun

As the wikipedia article states, the WISE survey[1] results would have turned up Nemesis or anything like it, and did not. Currently most likely theory for the improbable distribution of objects beyond the Kuiper Cliff is Planet Nine.[2]

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide-field_Infrared_Survey_Exp... [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_Nine

zipwitchon Roblox is a MUD: The history of MUDs, virtual worlds and MMORPGs

Yep. Vanilla had a few little bits of actual RPG peeking out here and there. They have long since been buffed out. Cash-extracting skinner box inside a pretty show, with a dash of e-sport and lobby game on the side seems to be a state WoW's owners are quite satisfied with.

zipwitchon Roblox is a MUD: The history of MUDs, virtual worlds and MMORPGs

As someone with a pair of nieces who are Roblox junkies and who did dabble with MUDs back in the day, I can assure you that Roblox has a ton of content that is put together by enthusiastic amateurs. And while it often has heart, soul, and seems fun for those playing, it definitely doesn't have excess polish. If anything, I'd say Minecraft content tends to be far more polished than Roblox content, even after allowing for relative graphics differences.

zipwitchon AI slays top F-16 pilot in DARPA dogfight simulation

That's before taking into account enemy attempts to jam, spoof, or otherwise disrupt your control link.

zipwitchon Satellite warfare: An arms race is brewing in orbit

"Orbit War was a magazine game published by Steve Jackson Games in Space Gamer (Issue 66 - Nov 1983). This release was followed by an expansion published in Space Gamer (Issue 67 - Jan 1984) and later by the boxed edition.

It is a simulation of satellite warfare in low Earth orbit. The players are the USA and the APU (Asian-Polish Union). The object is of course to destroy your opponent's satellites and such..."

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/2101/orbit-war

zipwitchon The Suspected Poisoning of Alexey Navalny, Putin’s Most Prominent Adversary

>Every decent chemist can produce that stuff.

After reading, "Novichok agents: a historical, current, and toxicological perspective"[1] it looks like the only places to have produced such agents are Russian chemical weapon labs and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons Central Analytical Database.

Maybe someone who works in the field can provide some more evidence either way?

[1]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6039123/#R19

zipwitchon Citibank's $900M Blunder

I find it interesting that everyone is presuming this is an accident.

If something like this were to happen in cyberpunk RPG the players would assume that with a billion dollars on the line the hedge fund had either hired a hacker or suborned a Citibank employee in order to make certain they got paid. (As a hedge fund, lawyering up to hang onto the money once you have it is comparatively cheap.

zipwitchon The best way to exercise self-control is not to exercise it at all

Which is a far more convincing argument when someone can point to a well-documented set of predictions, than when they claim "I'm right a lot" and try to get you to fall for an association fallacy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_fallacy

zipwitchon The best way to exercise self-control is not to exercise it at all

"But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.” - Carl Sagan

If you want to see what someone who is credibly trying to predict events look at the work of Nate Silver or Nassim Taleb. When you obsess over one prediction by person most known for comedy and questionable personal statements, it's neither difficult nor inappropriate to put them in the clown category.

If Adams himself wants to build his reputation as a prognosticator, he can easily create a publicly-verifiable record of them and any questions of his ability will answer itself in short order. That he has not (to the best of my knowledge) done so makes him look like a huckster.

zipwitchon The best way to exercise self-control is not to exercise it at all

Here's a small piece on a few of Scott Adams' predictions, discussing how they weren't anything special: http://helvegr.com/2018/09/29/lets-score-the-accuracy-of-sco...

Before he pegged my personal BS meter and I just started ignoring anything from him that I happened across, I noticed that Adams seemd fond of a lot of "cold-reader" type tricks: vagueness that can be turned into specifics after the fact, ignoring their own failures while hyping their successes, that kind of thing.

If you want to see what actual serious prediction attempts look like, search for Nate Silver or Nassim Taleb.

zipwitchon ATM Hackers Have Picked Up Some Clever New Tricks

I guess I'm out of sync with the times. For some reason, my first thought on seeing the title was that it would be about some clever new tricks with the ANSI ATM standard.

zipwitchon Did fish sauce in Vietnam come from ancient Rome via the Silk Road?

That lost legion probably is. The ones Publius Quinctilius Varus lost (along with his head) are quite well documented.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Teutoburg_Forest

zipwitchon Afghan opium growers have switched to solar power

The median age in Afghanistan is ninteen.[1]

When the Soviet-Afghan War started in 1979, the population of Afghanistan was 13.41 million. Current population is 38.93 million.[2] Afghans who were 14 or older when that war started make up less than 7% of the population.[1]

While I don't doubt that many Afghans would like a more stable country, I'm skeptical that a large portion of them have any real idea of what their country was once like. (Nor do I know how accurate and the Westernized portrayals I've seen really were.)

1 https://www.indexmundi.com/afghanistan/demographics_profile....

2 https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/afghanistan-popu...

zipwitchon Scientists pull living microbes, possibly 100M years old, from beneath the sea

SF author and marine biologist Peter Watts has a trilogy on a very similar premise, where an early "fork" of life (that is actually more efficient than our entire tree of life) got stuck down in the ocean depths at the dawn of time, until we accidentally bring it up.

https://rifters.com/real/shorts.htm

zipwitchon Cryptography is not magic

Mentioning cryptography and magic makes me think of Steganographia written in 1499 by Johannes Trithemius.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganographia

"Trithemius' most famous work, Steganographia (written c. 1499; published Frankfurt, 1606), was placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum in 1609 and removed in 1900. This book is in three volumes, and appears to be about magic—specifically, about using spirits to communicate over long distances. However, since the publication of a decryption key to the first two volumes in 1606, they have been known to be actually concerned with cryptography and steganography. Until recently, the third volume was widely still believed to be solely about magic, but the "magical" formulae have now been shown to be covertexts for yet more cryptographic content."

zipwitchon How Iceland got teens to say no to drugs (2017)

The Girardoni air rifle was used in military service from the late 18th through early 19th centuries, and saw civilian use for some time after that. It was a very high-tech weapon for the time, and while finicky and expensive offered some unique advantages and was quite deadly. The Lewis & Clark expedition famously used a couple.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girardoni_air_rifle

zipwitchon Ancient human ancestors carved handaxe from a hippo femur 1.4M years ago: study

Perhaps not less intelligent, but just possessed of a mental framework that was less capable.

From a paper describing "the Romulus and Remus hypothesis"[1],

"the leap from rich-vocabulary non-recursive communication system to recursive language 70,000 years ago was associated with acquisition of a novel component of imagination, called Prefrontal Synthesis, enabled by a mutation that slowed down the prefrontal cortex maturation simultaneously in two or more children"

1 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/166520v9.full

And here's a summary: https://neurosciencenews.com/language-imagination-evolution-...

zipwitchon Who’s behind Wednesday’s epic Twitter hack?

In SF author Neal Stephenson's latest book, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell there is a hoax to convince people that Moab, Utah has been destroyed by a nuclear weapon. A cyberattack takes the city's communications offline, paid actors describe seeing the flash and mushroom cloud from passenger planes, etc.

Twenty years later, a substantial part of American society is still insisting Moab really was nuked, drives around with "Remember Moab" bumper stickers, and considers the purported continued existence of Moab to be something like a Deep State plot.

zipwitchon Twitter internal panel linked to account hijackings

Possibly politically motivated?

Especially if the real motivation is not the BTC scam, but the access to who knows how many DMs for possibly blackmail/propaganda down the line. (And not necessarily just DMs from the known compromised accounts, either.)

zipwitchon I Know What You Download on BitTorrent

From an 1841 speech to the British House of Commons on the dangers of increased copyright times:

At present the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. Everybody is well pleased to see them restrained by the law, and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains. No tradesman of good repute will have anything to do with such disgraceful transactions. Pass this law: and that feeling is at an end. Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot… Remember too that, when once it ceases to be considered as wrong and discreditable to invade literary property, no person can say where the invasion will stop. The public seldom makes nice distinctions. The wholesome copyright which now exists will share in the disgrace and danger of the new copyright which you are about to create.

Source:https://www.thepublicdomain.org/2014/07/24/macaulay-on-copyr...

zipwitchon The Fourth of July

As an American from birth, and speaking for myself, it's not hating my country. It's frustration and sometimes anger at our failure to do better. I believe that doing better than we are is within our grasp, but we, as a nation, so often seem to turn away from positive change in favor of a comfortable and easy (for many Americans) status quo that is ultimately inadequate and often blindly hypocritical.

zipwitchon Oklo (YC S14), maker of 'micro' nuclear reactor, aims to prove doubters wrong

Airborne aircraft carriers were pretty cool when they were operating 90 years ago:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akron-class_airship

zipwitchon Oklo (YC S14), maker of 'micro' nuclear reactor, aims to prove doubters wrong

The whole article reads like the punchline for another joke involving Admiral Rickover's famous letter. (We had a thread on this same topic, involving a company mentioned in this article, not three months ago, and a thread on Admiral Rickover's letter two weeks before that!)

"An academic reactor or reactor plant almost always has the following basic characteristics: (1) It is simple. (2) It is small. (3) It is cheap (4) It is light. (5) It can be built very quickly. (6) It is very flexible in purpose (’omnibus reactor’). (7) Very little development is required. It will use mostly off-the-shelf components. (8) The reactor is in the study phase. It is not being built now."

Link to the other thread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22851622

Link to the recent HN discussion of said letter by Admiral Rickover here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22715730

zipwitchon Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse

See the paradox of tolerace for why people might not agree with you.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

zipwitchon Dems pitch $100B broadband plan

That depends on how many more bonuses their executives need.

zipwitchon Tolkien’s Mythic Plan for England

Malazan Books of the Fallen by Steven Erikson.

They've got more than a few roots in fantasy gaming, which in turn does owe something to Tolkien, but they're unquestionably high fantasy, and they certainly struck me a very diffent from Tolkien.

zipwitchon Tolkien’s Mythic Plan for England

When you say "ripoff of Tolkien" my mind immediately goes to The Sword of Shannara which even when I first read (and enjoyed) it in grade school had me constantly thinking how much it copied Lord of the Rings.