csense

Was this a jury trial?

Perfect attendance is not a good goal to aspire to. Kids force themselves (or get forced by parents) to go to school while sick, which is probably bad for their health and also risks everybody else's health.

This is a great link. The most interesting feature of the solar graph is the amplitude of the seasonal variations. It looks like we typically generating ~100% more solar power in July than December.

If "we need to store solar energy from summer to winter" is indeed a significant issue, maybe you could use the extra power in summertime to make natural gas [1] and then store the gas until you need it in the winter.

[1] https://www.terraformindustries.com/ is a startup working on turning solar power into natural gas

they shouldn't be allowed to?

Anthropic addresses this head-on in the final section of the paper titled "What should we do?" If you convince the US government to slow AI development, you have to convince China too, otherwise you're not stopping self-improving AI at all, you're just throwing away the lead to China. If you convince China too, China or the US or both might go back on their word and build self-improving AI secretly, for greed of the benefits it could bring or fear the other will go back on their word.

What you really need is a non-proliferation regime like the one for nuclear weapons, where every country makes potentially dangerous AI illegal and lets foreign or international inspectors monitor to check that nobody's building illegal AI in secret. But monitoring seems hard; it's general-purpose computation. How do you check whether a given datacenter is training an illegal AI and not just serving websites, running detailed protein folding simulations, or mining crypto? For that matter, how do you know that a nondescript industrial facility hasn't been repurposed into a hidden datacenter for training illegal AI?

Central control of heat pumps sounds like a dystopian nightmare. I don't want to give somebody outside my house the ability to shut off my heating or cooling.

The real problem is that the price of electricity isn't high enough. When supply is running out, raise the price so supply and demand can find equilibrium, then invest the new revenue into increasing capacity.

Let's be honest. If someone did send in the troops to restore order, people would be screaming "How dare you invade a sovereign country" or "You're only doing this because you want oil" or "The President wants to make Sudan the 51st state" or "You're wasting money and soldiers' lives messing around in a place most of us can't even put on a map" or "You're just doing whatever the Jews tell you to do."

Miller-Rabin primality test immediately came to mind. But apparently he improved Berlekamp's algorithm, and is responsible for the pumping lemma [1] as well.

I agree with other posters; Rabin deserves an HN black bar.

[1] Basically, the pumping lemma says if you feed a finite state machine a long enough input, the FSM must loop. You can delete the looping part of the input or insert extra copies of it; the FSM can't tell the difference, it has to give the same output. In theoretical computer science, the pumping lemma is usually introduced early, as the simplest example of a theorem that proves there are things that cannot be computed by a certain class of computing machines (FSMs).

"It’s not a safety movement. It’s a priesthood with an origin story written in fanfiction." Is that the opinion of the author, or an LLM?

I feel like this is one topic where using an LLM detracts from the author's thesis; doubly so if they don't disclose it.

From a layman's point of view antimatter seems like an ideal spacecraft fuel. It's as energy dense as E = mc^2 allows, and if you have infrastructure to make it, the only input you need to produce it is electricity.

Being able to transport it seems like an important piece of that puzzle.

Production and storage would need to be scaled by many orders of magnitude, but that's merely an engineering problem...right?

We used to believe in freedom of speech and freedom of association.

Since the dawn of the Internet era, we've had a legal principle that platforms are relatively shielded from liability for what their users do.

It's the Internet. There's sexual content and sketchy characters on it. Occasionally people will encounter them -- even if they're under 18.

Anyone who grew up in the mid-1990s or later, think back to your own Internet usage when you were under 18. You probably found something NSFW or NSFL, dealt with it, and came out basically OK after applying your common sense. Maybe it was shocking and mildly traumatizing -- but having negative experience is how we grow. Part of growing up is honing one's sense of "that link is staying blue" or "I'm not comfortable with this, it's time to GTFO". And it seems a lot safer if you encounter the sketchy side of humanity from the other side of a screen. Think about how a young person's exposure to the underbelly of humanity might have gone in pre-Internet times: Get invited to a party, find out it's in the bad part of town and there are a bunch of sketchy people there -- well, you're exposed to all kinds of physical risks. You can't leave the party as easily as you can put your phone down.

I stopped logging onto Facebook regularly around 2009; I only log in a couple times a year. I hate what Facebook has become in the past decade and a half.

But giving a site with millions of users a multi-hundred-million-dollar fine because some of those users behave badly seems...asinine.

If your kid is old enough and responsible enough to be given unsupervised Internet access, you'd better teach them how to deal with the skeevy stuff they might encounter.

I'm pretty sure you can get rid of the 0xFFFFFFFF / p and get some more speedup by manually implementing the bitarray ops. You can get another boost by using BSF instruction [1] to quickly scan for the next set bit. And you really only need to store odd numbers; storing the even numbers is just wasteful.

You can get even more speedup by taking into account cache effects. When you cross out all the multiples of 3 you use 512MB of bandwidth. Then when you cross out all multiples of 5 you use 512MB more. Then 512MB again when you cross out all multiples of 7. The fundamental problem is that you have many partially generated cache-sized chunks and you cycle through them in order with each prime. I'm pretty sure it's faster if you instead fully generate each chunk and then never access it again. So e.g. if your cache is 128k you create a 128k chunk and cross out multiples of 3, 5, 7, etc. for that 128k chunk. Then you do the next 128k chunk again crossing out multiples of 3, 5, 7, etc. That way you only use ~512MB of memory bandwidth in total instead of 512MB per prime number. (Actually it's only really that high for small primes, it starts becoming less once your primes get bigger than the number of bits in a cache line.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Find_first_set

Just in case your answers to the parent post's three questions were "Yes, yes and yes" here are some additional questions:

- Have you ever uploaded a container to Dockerhub or Quay.io?

- Does that container have an OS inside it that has user accounts?

- Before you answered parent post's questions, did it occur to you that you might have to update your Docker images to comply?

- Did you remember on your own that you also have to delete or update older Docker images to comply, or did you not think of that until you read this question?

After you've answered these questions, please re-answer the parent post's questions.

A lot of people people contributing to FOSS are volunteers. The calculus of working on stuff for free involves an assumption that your worst-case outcome is you make $0. This act's punitive fines change the worst-case outcome to somewhere around -$9999999 or more.

If you work on any programming project at all in any capacity:

- Are you confident your work doesn't fall afoul of this?

- Are you confident they won't decide to come after you anyway for insane political, bureaucratic or "seeing-like-a-state" dysfunctions?

- Are you willing to bet millions of dollars in potential fines that your answers to the previous two questions are correct?

Here's my suggestion for an implementation strategy:

- Keep the "Next" button greyed out until you add three forms of identification.

- Ask the user to take photos of their 3 forms of ID with a webcam. Ask the user to hold them in increasingly bizarre poses -- left hand, right hand, woven between your fingers, behind your ear, between your toes.

- Add an "accessibility" button. This button pops up a text box that advises you if you can't comply because you don't have hands, ears, feet or whatever (hey, some people don't and that's perfectly fine!) you can just use a picture of somebody else's body parts, and helpfully provides a menu of AI-generated pictures of human ears, hands, etc. for you to copy-paste.

- To preserve privacy, send the actual photos to /dev/null.

- The "verify the photo of my ID" button should check whether random.random() > 0.8. On average the user will require 5 tries per photo, or 15 tries total.

- Add a checkbox that says "I am not in the state of California". Upon clicking this checkbox the "Next" button becomes not grayed out and you can proceed without completing the identity checking process.

- If the user does not seem to have a webcam installed, all UI elements are grayed out except the "I am not in the state of California" checkbox.

- If the user is installing via command line, say "Are you in the state of California [y/n]?" If the answer does not start with 'N' or 'n', it will simply repeat the question.

- The list of acceptable identification shall be: Driver's license, learner's permit, Social Security card, library card, school identification, Boy / Girl Scout membership card, school yearbook photo, Burger King Kid's Club membership card, utility bill, ISP bill, Burger King receipt, Mahalo Rewards card, any receipt paid via credit card, birthday card, a photo of a printout of any email from OnlyFans, a photo of a DNS TXT record containing the string "CALIFORNIA", a photo of your X account with a blue check mark.

It seems like sound testing methodology to identify important theorems related to the code, prove them, and then verify the proof.

Verification gets sold as "bulletproof" but I'm skeptical for a couple reasons:

- How do you establish the relationship between the code and the theorem? Lean theorem can be applied to zlib implemented in Lean, what if you want to check zlib implemented in a normal programming language like C, JS, Zig, or whatever?

- How do you know the key properties mean what you think they mean? E.g. the theorem says "ZlibDecode.decompressSingle (ZlibEncode.compress data level) = .ok data" but it feels like it would be very easy to accidentally prove ∃ x s.t. decompress(compress(x)) == x while thinking you proved ∀ x, decompress(compress(x)) == x.

I've tried Lean and Coq and...I don't really like them. The proofs use specialized programming languages. And they seem deliberately designed to require you to use a context explorer to have any hope of understanding the proof at all. OTOH a normal unit test is written in a general purpose programming language (usually the same one as the program being tested), I'm much more comfortable checking that a Claude-written unit test does what I think it's doing than a Claude-written Lean proof of correctness.

This video has an interesting visualization of macroeconomic factors affecting US trade and foreign policy.

An AI agent is doing some actions. Those actions must comply with "controls" like 'ALLOW transfer ON treasury WHERE amount <= 10000 AND currency = "USDC"' and provide public, auditable proof that actions complied with the spec. The action log seems to be verifiable via ZK proofs.

What's the application here? If you want to enforce that an agent's blockchain transactions follow some deterministic conditions, why not just give it access to a command-line tool (MCP / skill / whatever) that enforces your conditions?

If you want auditing of the agent's blockchain actions to be public, why not just make all your agent's actions go through an ordinary smart contract?

I don't mean to kill your enthusiasm for programming or AI. But this project...I'm sorry, but this project just isn't good. It's an over-engineered, vibe-coded "solution" in search of a problem.

This project is about a month old. I highly doubt one person produced 134 kloc in that time. I'm pretty sure a lot of it is vendorized dependencies and AI-generated code that's had minimal human review. Much of the documentation appears to be AI-generated as well.

I don't understand how house prices are set. When I see a house that's $X I often think "$X seems reasonable" immediately followed by "$X/2 seems reasonable" and "$2X seems reasonable".

How does anyone ever set prices for real estate? Why do sellers have such a hard time cutting price 10% or 30% when the whole concept of "value of real estate" seems very nebulous and made-up, and each property is a completely unique combination of age, footage, state of repairs, location etc.?

prediction markets should not exist

If you don't like prediction markets, you don't have to use them.

Why do you think other people shouldn't be allowed to use prediction markets if they want to?

Israel and the US told Iran "Don't try to develop nukes or else." Iran tried to develop nukes and got bombed. Then Iran tried to develop nukes again.

PotUS told Iran "Don't shoot the protestors or else." Iran shot the protestors.

Iran chose to FAFO; "Or else" has now arrived.

I don't like Trump and based on past bad experiences I'm not sure it's wise for the US to start a war in the Middle East.

I feel sorry for the civilians caught in the middle, e.g. the ~50 Iranian schoolkids that ate a wayward bomb. People can legitimately criticize the US and Israel for that mistake, but if they do they need to also criticize Iran ~200 times harder for killing tens of thousands of protestors on purpose.

I don't agree with people who think this war is illegitimate or Iran isn't the bad guy here.

intimidating Chinese dissidents abroad, including by impersonating US immigration officials

I hope those victims of immigration impersonation don't have family within China's borders. AI-enabled impersonation and intimidation are far from the worst of China's crimes [1] against its overseas critics.

China likes to make you an offer you can't refuse [2] [3]: You're saying stuff the Chinese government doesn't like, but you live outside its borders and the secret police can't get at you? You need to come to China and be jailed (or worse). If you don't, your family will be the ones who are jailed (or worse). Or you can unalive yourself, and save the glorious Chinese Communist Party the expense of a bullet.

[1] China would say "the government punishes a criminal's family" is not a crime, it's a perfectly legal implementation of government policy under Chinese law. I respond that the death camps were perfectly legal implementation of government policy under Nazi law, but were still crimes against humanity -- China's actions fall in this category of crimes.

As I understand it: Western societies have a very individualistic view of responsibility. If you didn't commit a crime, you're innocent. Punishing the innocent family members of a criminal is morally abominable.

In the Chinese Communist Party's view, criminal responsibility is collectivist. By their definition, the family members of a criminal share responsibility for the crime regardless of their participation in the criminal acts. "Innocent family members of a criminal" is a logically inconsistent concept in their world view. The family of a criminal is guilty by definition -- being related to a criminal is itself a crime.

This is sickening to me.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Fox_Hunt

[3] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-07-08/fbi-chief-says-china-...

I've taken trips to California in the past for both personal and professional reasons. I'm seriously reconsidering whether I'll do that again in the future.

What happens if I bring a laptop with an "illegal" OS without this unwanted "feature" into the state? Will I be denied access to public wifi in hotels and restaurants? Or will it grant me access, but snitch on me -- make a call to the state police to come deal with someone with an illegal laptop? Will I be forced to install a different OS while a police officer watches? Will my laptop be confiscated and destroyed as contraband? Will I be thrown in a California prison?

I don't want to take a risk and find out.

I find it interesting that a substantial number of people seem to think it's wrong or unethical to cold-email someone about a potential recruitment or business opportunity if they post their email in a public place, such as commits in a public Github repo.

I feel like if you don't want companies to cold-email you, you shouldn't make your email public. Github provides noreply email addresses for this purpose.

My theory: The "long S" in "Congreſs" is an f. They used f instead of s because without modern dental care, a lot of people in the 1600's and 1700's were miffing teeth and fpoke with a lifp.

I don't think tariffs should be imposed capriciously at the President's whim.

But I do think tariffs are an appropriate policy tool that should be used to protect US companies against overseas competitors that get government subsidies or other unfair advantages: Low wages, safety regulations, worker protection, environmental rules, etc.

Trump said "Don't shoot the protestors or else." Iran shot the protestors. US military assets were out of position dealing with Venezuela. Now the assets are in position, the administration now feels obligated to impose "or else."

I doubt Trump's seriously seeking a nuclear deal as he (in)famously withdrew from the deal established by the Obama administration [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_withdrawal_from_...

To get a Let's Encrypt wildcard cert, I ended up running my own DNS server with dnsmasq and delegating the _acme-challenge subdomain to it.

Pasting a challenge string once and letting its continued presence prove continued ownership of a domain is a great step forward. But I agree with others that there is absolutely no reason to expose account numbers; it should be a random ID associated with the account in Let's Encrypt's database.

As a workaround, you should probably make a new account for each domain.

Very neat. To clarify, Qemu can boot it, but I'm pretty sure you need some bootloader (e.g. Grub) to boot it on a physical system.

Anonymous or pseudonymous publishing is an essential element of Constitutionally protected freedom of speech [1]. If the government knows who's posting what, it's a lot easier for them to harass, intimidate, punish, or otherwise suppress people who post uncomfortable or politically inconvenient things.

Recent New York Times headline: "Homeland Security Wants Social Media Sites to Expose Anti-ICE Accounts". I'm sure the administration would be very happy if there was a database of government issued photo ID's for every account on Facebook. And if the government gets the ID's of those accounts, I'm quite sure nothing good will come of it for either the individuals involved, or the ability of the people to understand whether the government department in question is going about its duties in a way that respects the law and the Constitution.

[1] My username refers to an anonymously published pamphlet that played a key role in US history.

I don't like destruction of perfectly usable items, and I think it's terrible that some brands destroy unsold $40 shirts to protect their branding and pricing power, rather than selling them for $20 or giving them away to the poor.

But I like less the implications for private property ownership of this sort of regulation. If I own an item I should be able to destroy it if I want; the government shouldn't be able to tell me "no."

And what if there's genuinely no demand? For example, suspenders went permanently out of style at some point in the 20th century. If this law had been in effect at the time, there might be an "orphaned" truckload of suspenders somewhere, getting wastefully shipped from warehouse to warehouse for decades because they're impossible to sell and illegal to destroy.

Fashion is fickle, prone to fads and flights of taste. Suspenders are by no means an isolated case.

An efficient economy needs a means to delete an item when its current owner doesn't want it, nobody else wants it either, and it imposes ongoing storage costs on whoever holds it.