Unlurker|Replay|About
War Prediction Markets Are a National-Security Threat (theatlantic.com)
•
Pretty sure war thunder forums still take the cake on that one. The lulz motive is far higher than the profit motive.
•
> The day before, 150 users bet at least $1,000 that the United States would strike Iran within the next 24 hours Yeah, I heard the same thing at the same time from several friends. And I'm not talking top brass, so it must have been pretty obvious at that point.
•
I said this in another thread, but if you were to ask me "what is the biggest 180 you've made on some political or policy question in the last decade", it would for sure be prediction markets. I used to be all-in on the idea after reading Caplan, Taleb etc.: make people have "skin in the game" on a grand scale and we can have better predictions and better policy! But what a disaster they've been in practice: it's just a new avenue for government corruption and ruining your life with gambling. And now apparently a nat-sec problem as well.
•
> Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was not, it’s safe to assume, a devoted Polymarket user. If he had been, the Iranian leader might still be alive. Hours before Khamenei’s compound in Tehran was reduced to rubble last week, an account under the username “magamyman” bet about $20,000 that the supreme leader would no longer be in power by the end of March. I know this is more for the drama than an actual claim, but it made me wonder -- is this bet a remarkable occurence in the data, or just one trade in a sea of similar trades? _Would_ somebody have been able to guess it? I looked for the original market[0], and am surprised by two things: 1. There was lots of activity around that value when the order was placed, so I don't think the trade would have alerted anyone [1]. 2. Polymarket lists the trade as happening _19 days ago_, Feb 16! I don't understand why polymarket says it happened feb 16, when all the news I've seen reports it happening just before the strikes. I'm guessing there's a bug in the way polymarket displays past trades? Note that if polymarket is displaying the history of trades incorrectly, my claim #1 may not hold. Edit: Magamyman's general history on polymarket is also really surprising. They just _don't_ seem to lose[2]. They do wager a lot about the middle east, but they _aren't_ exclusively wagering on that; they wager on plenty of other stuff too (change in PM of Thailand, Bitcoin prices at multiple dates, SP500 going up or down, winner of Wimbledon, probably others). The fact that they get all of these right makes me wonder if they really are just a great predictor. [0] https://polymarket.com/event/khamenei-out-as-supreme-leader-of-iran-by-march-31/khamenei-out-as-supreme-leader-of-iran-by-march-31 [1] https://snipboard.io/DP1MWK.jpg [2] https://polymarket.com/profile/%40Magamyman
•
I think it's safe to say that beside national security risks. Allowing unrestricted betting on pretty much anything in the world is just not something we should have...
•
https://archive.fo/p1aDH
•
Betting was once a vice overseen by the mob -- and those addicted to it were rightly viewed as pathetic figures, akin to serious alcoholics. Now betting pervades nearly every aspect of Anglosphere life. This transformation, which has taken place over the past 100 years but has really picked up steam over the last 15, has not been an improvement. It's net negative for society, and the evidence on this is very clear. Prediction markets are the worst and most insidious manifestation of this phenomenon. They reward insider trading and may also induce people to seek outcomes that are undesirable for society at large. (e.g. in tfa.) There's literally no way this experiment ends well -- which is to say that there's no way this ends in "markets" that benefit and enlighten the common man. I look forward to the pendulum swinging the other way. Even with such a broken political system, it might.
•
Yet another side effect of being automated out of a purposeful life.
•
The purpose of life is work?
•
It's 100% legal if you're in the inside circle
•
Just another grift for orange man and his posse. https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/anonymous-polymarket-accounts-won-12-million-on-trump-s-iran-strikes-in-suspicious-bets/ar-AA1Xn4gh
•
I always wonder about when there is a cutoff about the grift, i mean there has to be a point when enough is enough. Who cares if its 4 or 5 billions in the end, thats more money one could reasonably spend in a lifetime. What drives this greed?
•
If I understand Trump, he wants to be the richest man in the world. It is another matter if can achieve that. But his ego would definitely want that.
•
Power. People who want power need status, and money is the ultimate symbol. They can never have enough power because of their dark triad personalities.
•
Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47211476 - “Allegations of insider trading over prediction-market bets tied to Iran conflict” (morningstar.com) 97 points | 5 days ago | 55 comments Also from The Atlantic about prediction markets: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/03/central-lie-prediction-markets/686250/ - “A Technology for a Low-Trust Society”
Isnt this silly when you can calculate the chance of war in Iran by oil futures instead. Prediction markets are just explicit markers of information that is already being traded on in 100 different ways.
•
Except this wasn't driven by Oil. It was driven by Israel.
•
Yeah we should ban derivatives too.
We're Training Students to Write Worse to Prove They're Not Robots (techdirt.com)
•
The core of the problem the article is about isn't AI or LLMs, it's about scam software that claims to catch cheating. It's crap for the same reasons that crime predictions software is crap. It's selling a panacea, and that kind of product inherently attracts scammers. If your school uses software to detect AI writing, that's a problem with the quality of your school. The people choosing that software are too stupid to be running a school. The software isn't going to get any better.
•
When I was in high school I was a better writer when I had time (versus in class) and generally a better writer than I was a student. The net result was fairly often being accused of plagiarism. Not because the teacher had proof(I never plagiarized), but because the teacher couldn’t believe I could write to the level I sometimes wrote at on take home assignments. Admittedly, I was a wildly inconsistent student. This reminds me a bit of that. AI writing is—in many ways—objectively very good, but that doesn’t matter if no one thinks you wrote it. AI writing is boring exactly because it is consistent and like any art form people want to see something original.
•
Perhaps we should not grade students on weekly, or other occasional, writing during the term or semester. How about going back to the old system where, apart from experimental lab work, nothing is graded until the end of the term? All weekly assignments should just be considered prep for one exam at the end of the term where the student has an opportunity to demonstrate mastery of the course's subject matter. They can prepare as they wish, use AI, and even cheat on the homework, but there will be a revelation at the end of the term. That final test can be proctored, monitored, audited to ensure that whatever words are used are indeed the student's own words. The resulting grade depends on that, and that alone. The approach of continuous assessment, which to me always seemed suspect and ripe for abuse, was completely broken by the AI tools that are now available.
•
> one exam at the end of the term where the student has an opportunity to demonstrate mastery of the course's subject matter. The resulting grade depends on that, and that alone. I love this idea. And if a student is having a really bad day, or their dog just died, or they have bad cramps, or they have a hard time dealing with the intense stress of your entire grade being decided in one exam... well, those loser students can just fuck right off.
•
Schools stopped doing that because students largely refuse to prepare. Testing throughout the year is like a CI pipeline and is shown to work better for the median student.
•
Students are neither generally stupid nor constitutionally lazy. I sense that when expectations are clear they'll often surprise you with diligence. We should trust them to do the right thing. If they do, it's an A; and if not, it's less than that.
•
I'm not sure what public school system has instilled that confidence in you, but it musn't have been mine. I'm also not sure why you think clear expectations about an end of year test will lead to better results than clear expectations about multiple spaced out tests. The data shows that it doesn't.
•
I don't disagree with you that a reasonable way to cope with the current problems is to ensure everything that "counts" is done in a controlled environment, but pedagogy and its goals are vast. There are things you learn from spending several days structuring a 20-page argument that you will not learn (and cannot assess) from oral examination or a 5-paragraph essay written in a blue book.
•
If you have spent several days structuring a 20 page argument in October on any topic you'll have learnt a great deal about the subject matter. When you get to the exam hall in, say May, it will stand to you. That knowledge will show up in the blue book vis-a-vis the other exam candidates.
•
Throw in some oratory presentations as well and that sounds like a curriculum.
•
Yes. That's fair. Students should know, up front, what they're supposed to learn.
•
What exactly would the goal of this change be?
•
To have end of semester grades be determined by work that is done by the student, not through weekly assignments where it’s trivial to cheat
•
Ultimately, you ask the student, in one audited test, to demonstrate that they've absorbed the essence of the course material and have developed some level of mastery.
•
Okay, so the system is designed not to educate but to minimize the time required to determine whether students somehow stumbled into an education?
•
??? Do you only learn when you’re being graded?
•
If the change is not designed to educate the student, then the point isn’t education.
A few times in some Discord communities, I've been accused of being A.I. because of how I write. Kind of sad and a bit annoying. I also quite like em dashes, but have felt the need to reduce how much I use them. Glad to see some schools and teachers teach how to use them well, rather than ban them outright.
•
em-dashes have been house style for where I've worked for over a couple decades. If people don't like it, F them. I'm not going to change how I write because people may think it make me more AI-like.
> The assignment had been to write an essay about Kurt Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron—a story about a dystopian society that enforces “equality” by handicapping anyone who excel Did not this self censorship process started decades ago? There are certain answers expected in academia, arguing for anything else would get you in troubles. Not using “devoid” seems pretty minor inconvenience. For me biggest wtf is why students are still expected to write graded essays, and to keep this make believe it is somehow useful and applicable skill.
•
An essay is a good gauge of how one can organise their thoughts, argue a position, respond to a stimulus. In short it’s a good way measure thinking.
Maybe I’m less worried. Teachers seem to have adopted. In my experience educators no longer use AI detectors given the risk of false positives. But some work is obviously lazy AI content. When that happens, educators talk to the student to see if they understand what they wrote. Teachers cope with more in person writing, oral presentations, defense of what’s been written. If you think out it the pre-AI computing generation is itself anomalous for having ubiquitous access to efficient human-only writing tools. We probably wrote more than previous generations. Early Internet / blogging culture bears this out.
•
I think peak writing was probably greatest generation. We lost the art of correspondence in the years since.
The point has always been the act of writing itself. What you write about is almost irrelevant; it’s that you spent the time writing, that you had ideas in your head, and that you squeezed them onto the page.
•
Is that not pointless now? The point of writing was previously to communicate our thoughts and ideas to other people. Now and going forward that is unnecessary. The most efficient and effective way for us to communicate our thoughts and ideas is to have an agent organize and write them down for us.
•
Sure. And my point is that the assignment is poorly conceived if an LLM's output can appear to "have ideas" that satisfy the prompt. Last I checked, they don't do a good job of modeling a specific, non-notable person within particular constraints, and then all the relevant life experiences of that person. An LLM essay should be human-detectable for the same reasons that one from an essay mill would be.
> If you can't detect the whiff of LLM with your own senses, then it has been used properly and shouldn't be faulted. But wouldn't this apply to any cheating method? I don't think educators would be able to tell the difference between using a calculator, getting answers from previous tests, resubmitting assignments, etc.
•
We can't, and neither can the machines that people build and/or use for "detection." Everyone in this thread also needs to recognize the entrenched differences between secondary educators, who have wholeheartedly adopted AI products into their teaching workflow, and tertiary educators, who have adopted them only by necessity. "By necessity" in this case means "having to spend a ton of time dealing with, talking about, and learning about this nonsense." The discourse around "cheating" with these products has always been a mistake. We should have characterized them less as "cheating machines" and more as "expediency machines." Because once you're invested in describing students as having academic dishonesty issues rather than skill issues, you've made it an administrative problem. You never come back from that. For mine, we lost the issue long ago when accountability culture won. We should never have bothered with the idea that "mechanics, grammar, and proofreading" should be part of a "rubric" that "assessed outcomes" for "good writing." We should have just said "we don't care if you don't think this is worthwhile, because your time is worth nothing." The last two years of student labor certainly suggests this.
Every kind of examination should be proctored. > using a calculator Students who are at a level where they'd be learning to do the computations a calculator does, shouldn't have graded homework. And even at that level, real mathematics is more than just computation. > getting answers from previous tests Decades ago, my teachers and professors knew advanced tricks for this, like "not just reusing the test questions from last year". Sometimes they even changed the constants in math questions between sections of the class. Reading previous tests (including correct answers) was never considered cheating, or even slightly unethical, in my education. In fact, one of our professors had this party trick of working through all the answers for a past-year exam (perhaps multiple of them; I can't recall the details, but certainly much faster than students were expected to work things out under exam conditions) in the space of a single lecture, near the end of the course. Students were meant to see this and learn from it (as well as be impressed). > resubmitting assignments Why would you ever not notice this?
•
I dont think you are being realistic at all. >Students who are at a level where they'd be learning to do the computations a calculator does, shouldn't have graded homework. And even at that level, real mathematics is more than just computation. So, a math level less than Real analysis shouldn't have graded homework? >Decades ago, my teachers and professors knew advanced tricks for this, like "not just reusing the test questions from last year". Math is not the only subject. For an English class, what constant would you change so that students get a comparable exam (especially if you are going to do this between sections in the same corhort)? >resubmitting assignments Students are not stupid, and obviously would not resubmit an assignment for the same teacher. However, there is a significant overlap between classes, so certain assignments should be retooled for other assignments.
Tangent: I've noticed I write a lot different because of combative online arguments. I have a problem. So much of my communication is directed to people who don't want to hear me or understand me. So I've become very punchy and repetitive, trying to hammer home ideas that people are either unable or unwilling to understand. I need to find ways to talk to people who want to hear and understand me. It's hard to find other people who actually want to hear and understand though. People have different interests, and even when people appear to be working towards the same goal, they often aren't; like a boss who just won't understand the bad news, because it's easier to ignore the problem.
•
> So much of my communication is directed to people who don't want to hear me or understand me. If they don't want to listen, why waste the time? > So I've become very punchy and repetitive, trying to hammer home ideas that people are either unable or unwilling to understand. If they don't want it, why stuff it down their throats? Aren't they allowed to have their own ideas?
•
One of the worst habits distinctive to online discussion-board writing (especially the sorts of places with lots and lots of people and where it's fairly hard to get permanently kicked out—like here) is too much hedging and over-specifying to try to head off shitposting by bad or bad-faith readers. It's all over forum posts, and it's poor writing, but without moderation that slaps down responses based on plain mis-reading you have to write that way, or your post will spawn all kinds of really stupid tangent strings of posts (and they still do anyway, sometimes). And, yes, the excessive and too-close-together repetitiveness you mention is part of that. The result is that a ton of web forum/social-media posting would, in any other context, be fairly poor writing (even if it's otherwise got no problems) simply because of the the extra crap and contortions required to minimize garbage posts by poor readers who are, themselves, allowed to post to the same medium. This is in addition to, though not wholly separate from, the tendency toward combativeness in online posting.
•
It might not mean much, and it won't lead to an interesting conversation, but here's one that has read your comment, and every single word resonated like a tuning fork. I find that a little faith goes a long way here: assume that you have a higher audience and speak to them accordingly. Don't let the loud ones confuse you: normal, reasonable people (with normal, reasonable thoughts, just like yours) might not always reply, but they also read you.
•
I'm guessing you mean politics, but surely this is topic, person, time, and space dependent. For example, I abhor talking about modern politics. If it’s election season and I’m being asked to cast a vote or take some other specific civic action, then I understand it’s my civic duty to understand the situation and make a decision accordingly and I do. But if it’s March and there’s really nothing specific I can do as a result of this particular conversation, I would probably also be in your camp of the “unwilling”. I would much rather chat about something else, or nothing at all. I'm also assuming you're referring to in-person communication. If it's online communication, all bets are off. It's unlikely you're having a linear conversation and these days you're probably not even talking to a person.
One thing that helps: remember that there are many people reading your response, one of them possibly being the person you replied to. Write for the audience, not specifically for the person you're responding to. It's a rare thing for someone to change their mind; it's a much more common thing for others to read your comment and gain something from it.
•
I just wanted to tell you that I read your comment immediately after writing mine and it's almost eerie how similar they are. There's the proof, if we needed any!
Right? It’s the obvious question: why are they using software to detect software? I can detect AI written prose in less than five seconds; I would expect a trained teacher to be able to do that as well.
•
You know you can't just say "I detect AI written prose" and then do whatever you want about it, right? It's not difficult, sure, to detect it. It's difficult to prove that it's true and then punish the student for it.
Being able to write in a formulaic manner is a skill though. Not being able to write properly is not great for communication.
•
True. Writing structures for arguments and analysis make a huge difference in effective writing. I wish brevity and linguistic precision were taught more, as well. Miscommunication due to ambiguity is one of the biggest causes I see for confusion or heated arguments.
19 States approved permanent daylight saving time (pix11.com)
I don't understand what you're trying to say. The northernmost tip of the continental US gets about 8 hours of daylight during winter solstice. School is normally about 6.5 hours, so it's possible to give kids at least 45 minutes of daylight on either end of school any day of the year. Obviously not possible in Alaska, but possible in the other 49. If you insist on your time zones being an hour wide, that makes it 15/75 and 75/15 on the edges. 15 minutes isn't a lot of time to walk to/from school, but that's only the week of winter solstice which is often during Christmas break anyways. Every week away from solstice adds about 15 minutes.
•
Okay, you do understand what I’m trying to say, so what am I supposed to respond? Tell me what your calculations for the school day year-round would best be in Washington State, and Maine.
Actually the only intelligent solution is to abandon discrete time changes to & make this a continuous adjustment. We need to adjust the clock continually, ongoingly, to appropriately track the light of the day. /sssssss
•
Disregard clocks, touch grass, abandon technology, worship sun. Also, my retirement plan.
You can just set your clocks to whatever you want. Stop trying to force people to do it with the government.
•
Changes to official time zones should be a non-issue to you then
Ok but for most people work hours are dictated by a shared clock (and many daily activities as well) so... It becomes a coordination problem if we don't all agree on what time it is in each locale.
•
Let the market decide. If it's worth it to some people, then they'll pay for the privilege of doing so. Right now, the revealed preference is that there is zero demand for it.
•
Markets don't solve coordination problems
•
What are you talking about? Markets solve the distribution and valuation coordination problem by price signaling. That's the whole shtick.
I appreciate the coordination problem here, but I do think that states are making it harder than it needs to be. The federal government doesn't need to be involved. Each state can decide on their own how to coordinate this, it does not need to be the entire nation (and indeed it already isn't, as the examples of AZ and HI show). Considering that one of the biggest problems in our country today is trying to run more and more at the federal level instead of at the state level, it's really silly to add to that pile.
•
The federal government constrains what states are allowed to do, so it has to be decided at the federal government. AZ and HI got legal exceptions long ago.
100 seconds per minute, 100 minutes per hour, 100 hours per day, 100 days per year. That's the dream. (I know that's not what you meant)
•
I prefer decaminutes
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
Dumping Lego NXT firmware off of an existing brick (arcanenibble.github.io)
•
Oh man, I had both the NXT and the original Mindstorms Lego robotics kit as a kid, brings back so many memories. I mostly made robots that tried to chase the cat around while trying to avoid falling down the stairs (half the time unsuccessfully). I even tried at one point using Java to develop programs for them, as there was a small community of people doing so online, and even some books at the local library. Reading this article provides some great insights into the innards of the NXT which I never knew of back them (and probably also could not entirely comprehend back when I was young). This article also reminded me that I still have the NXT and all the parts sitting around in a box somewhere; maybe I should try and dig them out and make something with them, though I don't have any ideas for what I should make exactly.
•
Neat article, well written, and easy to understand (mostly) by a non-embedded engineer.
•
Love the way this is written with "questions" interspersed throughout to explain more about the steps taken. Adds good context that makes it very easy to follow.
•
+1. I knew some of those things and could skim/skip but learned a few things from the other ones. Well written.
Lawmakers Want DoD Investigated for Biblical 'Armageddon' Claims (military.com)
•
Wait until you see these "YIGBY" bills that are being passed across the country
•
https://archive.is/OQurU
Wow, zero comments, that's actually scarier...
•
This is the best democrats can come up with? No wonder nobody comments.
Verification debt: the hidden cost of AI-generated code (fazy.medium.com)
Figuring out how to trust AI-written code faster is the project of software engineering for the next few years, IMO. We'll need to figure out the techniques and strategies that let us merge AI code sight unseen. Some ideas that have already started floating around: - Include the spec for the change in your PR and only bother reviewing that , on the assumption that the AI faithfully executed it - Lean harder on your deterministic verification: unit tests, full stack tests, linters, formatters, static analysis - Get better ai-based review: greptile and bugbot and half a dozen others - Lean into your observability tooling so that AIs can fix your production bugs so fast they don't even matter. None of these seem fully sufficient right now, but it's such a new problem that I suspect we'll be figuring this out for the next few years at least. Maybe one of these becomes the silver bullet or maybe it's just a bunch of lead bullets. But anyone who's able to ship AI code without human review (and without their codebase collapsing) will run circles around the rest.
•
> Figuring out how to trust AI-written code faster is the project of software engineering for the next few years, IMO. Or we could actually, you know, stop using a tool that doesn't work . People are so desperate to believe in the productivity boosts of AI that they are trying to contort the whole industry around a tool that is bad at its job, rather than going "yeah that tool sucks" and moving on like a sane person would.
•
> We'll need to figure out the techniques and strategies that let us merge AI code sight unseen Every strategy which worked with an off-shore team in India works well for AI. Sometime in mid 2017, I found myself running out of hours in the day stopping code from being merged. On one hand, I needed to stamp the PRs because I was an ASF PMC member and not a lot of the folks who were opening JIRAs were & this wasn't a tech debt friendly culture, because someone from LinkedIn or Netflix or EMR could say "Your PR is shit, why did you merge it?" and "Well, we had a release due in 6 days" is not an answer. Claude has been a drop-in replacement for the same problem, where I have to exercise the exact same muscles, though a lot easier because I can tell the AI that "This is completely wrong, throw it away and start over" without involving Claude's manager in the conversation. The manager conversations were warranted and I learned to be nicer two years into that experience [1], but it's a soft skill which I no longer use with AI. Every single method which worked with a remote team in a different timezone works with AI for me & perhaps better, because they're all clones of the best available - specs, pre-commit verifiers, mandatory reviews by someone uncommitted on the deadline, ease of reproducing bugs outside production and less clever code over all. [1] - https://notmysock.org/blog/2018/Nov/17/
What is this obsession with specifications? For a start it’s certainly not fair to assume an LLM has translated it into correct code, even if there is one reasonable way to do so, and there probably isn’t. I like a good, well-targeted spec as much as anyone, but come on. A spec detailed enough to describe a program is more-or-less the program but written in a non-executable language. I want to review the code, not a spec.
•
I can't help but think that the logical conclusion of spec-first development is a return to Waterfall methodology. The amount of rigour required almost entirely negates the speed advantages of LLMs, even in the hands of seasoned developers. Unless the stakeholders are external, there will always be that necessary organisational bottleneck; of course, the C-suite could always decide to foist project management entirely on individual contributors, or take it on themselves, but I see that ending either in burnout or eventual neglect. All in the service of being on the forefront of adoption, and for what end?
Agreed, but with one exception: are tests supposed to cover all observable behavior? Usually people are happy with just eliminating large/easy classes of bad (unintended) behavior, otherwise they go for formal verification which is an entirely different ballgame.
•
No they aren’t because they can’t (at least not without becoming so complicated that there’s no longer a point). But humans are much better at reasoning about whether a change is going to impact observable behavior than current LLMs are as evidenced by the fact that LLMs require a test suite or something similar to build a working app longer than a few thousand lines.
A Decade of Docker Containers (cacm.acm.org)
•
The math of “a decade” seemed wrong to me, since I remembered Docker debuting in 2013 at PyCon US Santa Clara. Then I found an HN comment I wrote a few years ago that confirmed this: [...] I remember that day pretty clearly because in the same lightning talk session, Solomon Hykes introduced the Python community to docker, while still working on dotCloud. This is what I think might have been the earliest public and recorded tech talk on the subject. https://youtu.be/1vui-LupKJI?t=1579 [Starts at 26:19, t=1579] This was also the same PyCon that Eben Upton opened with a keynote to discuss the mission of Raspberry Pi, while also announcing that each of the 2,500 attendees would receive a free physical Raspberry Pi at the conference. It was a pretty darn good year of PyCon; 2013 was apparently a good vintage for open source tech with Python connections. YouTube link: https://youtu.be/1vui-LupKJI?t=1579 Just being pedantic though. That’s about 13 years ago. The lightning talk is fun as a bit of computing history. (Edit: actually as I was digging through the paper, they do cite this YouTube presentation, or a copy of it anyway, in the footnotes, as the first release of docker. Perhaps there was a delay between the paper being submitted to ACM and it being published. Again, just being pedantic!)
•
The fact that docker still, in 2026, will completely overwrite iptables rules silently to expose containers to external requests is, frankly, fucking stupid.
•
I've not done serious networking stuff for over two decades, and never in as complex an environment as that in the article, so the networking part of the article went pretty much over my head. What I want to do when running a Docker container on Mac is to be able to have the container have an IP address separate from the Mac's IP address that applications on the Mac see. No port mapping: if the container has a web server on port 80 I want to access it at container_ip:80, not 127.0.0.1:2000 or something that gets mapped to container port 80. On Linux I'd just used Docker bridged networking and I believe that would work, but on Mac that just bridges to the Linux VM running under the hypervisor rather than to the Mac. Is there some officially recommended and supported way to do this? For a while I did it by running WireGuard on the Linux VM to tunnel between that and the Mac, with forwarding enabled on the Linux VM [1]. That worked great for quite a while, but then stopped and I could not figure out why. Then it worked again. Then it stopped. I then switched to this [2] which also uses WireGuard but in a much more automated fashion. It worked for quite a while, but also then had some problems with Docker updates sometimes breaking it. It would be great if Docker on Mac came with something like this built in. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33665178 [2] https://github.com/chipmk/docker-mac-net-connect
You can pretty much replace "docker build" with "go build". But as long as people want to use scripting languages (like php, python etc) i guess docker is the neccessary evil.
•
> You can pretty much replace "docker build" with "go build". Interesting. How does go build my python app?
The more you try and abstract from the OS, the more problems you're going to run into.
•
Bash is pretty darn abstracted from the OS, though. Puppet vs Bash is more about abstraction relative to the goal . If your dockerfile says “ensure package X is installed at version Y” that’s a lot clearer (and also more easy to make performant/cached and deterministic) than “apt-get update; apt-get install $transitive-at-specific-version; apt-get install $the-thing-you-need-atspecific-version”. I’m not thrilled at how distro-locked the shell version makes you, and how easy it is for accidental transitive changes to occur too. But neither of those approaches is at a particularly low abstraction level relative to the OS itself; files and system calls are more or less hidden away in both package-manager-via-bash and puppet/terraform/whatever.
Maybe in that alternative future of massive block devices some downward pressure on image sizes would have been applied just the same.
•
It's not as easy; a block device has to be bootable and so usually bundles a kernel (large). And because the filesystem inside is opaque, you can't do layering like Docker does easily via overlayfs and friends. libguestfs does a heroic job of making VM images easier to manipulate from code, but it's an uphill battle...
I am trying to decipher the meaning of your comment, to no avail.
•
So you’ve never improvised an air conditioning system from a spare bilge pump, a propane tank and a cast iron radiator? Sir, this is a hacker news.
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
Re-creating the complex cuisine of prehistoric Europeans (arstechnica.com)
•
The paper on which the article is based: González Carretero L, Lucquin A, Robson HK, McLaughlin TR, Dolbunova E, Lundy J, et al. (2026) Selective culinary uses of plant foods by Northern and Eastern European hunter-gatherer-fishers. PLoS One 21(3): e0342740. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0342740
Or Europeans before potatoes.
•
Or peppers. Hungary without paprika!
I heard turnips used to be all the rage.
•
Although it should be noted that modern turnip varieties are significantly more flavorful and sweet than pre-Columbian exchange era turnips. The old varieties were usually very bland so it didn’t take much for another tuber to displace it.
Ask HN: What career will you switch to when AI replaces developers?
•
AI won't replace the best of us, but it has already transformed my job into something much less enjoyable, so I have still been pondering this question. I once had a career in one of the "real" engineering disciplines, maybe I would go back to that. I'm also good at music, and we all know what a freaking goldmine that is!
•
off grid desert rat
I will become a leader of the free human movement. So, my fellow people, follow me and rise up against AI and more importantly, the 1% who seek only to deploy AI to become even richer. Once we have succeeded, I will ask only for a peaceful island once owned by a former CEO so that I may live out the rest of my life peacefully; while the rest of you bicker amongst yourselves about how things should be, all while climate change slowly but surely brings us our inevitable fate.
•
I was chatting with AIs about this a couple weeks ago, and was surprised by some of the things it knew would be done to protect the data centers and those who still make money. I had never heard of some of the things they are already doing to protect electric cables and the way that a combination of technologies are deployed to surveil and shoo away humans. - on one of the AIs even provided me with youtube videos to show these hardening methods already in use. The strain on the overcrowded prisons, increase in cybercrime, new tech to give people credits to get gov powdered cheese and mealworms grown from the former office space was quite interesting. A peaceful island sounds nice until we realize there will be 11 million people that need to be there within 12 months and it just increases from there. This plan sounds like the fyre festival 3.0 combined with "the island" from 2005 - https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/1635-the-island -- which makes me wonder if this was written by AI since it knows what is coming and may want to start to pre-corall people.
The Millisecond That Could Change Cancer Treatment (spectrum.ieee.org)
•
Hopefully, this will turn out better than proton therapy, which held similar promises of improvement. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11506991/
•
The major issue isn't the speed of delivery, and the cancer. The key question is how do you spare normal tissue, and how do you prove the normal tissue is spared in the long term. Current answer is: You break it apart into multiple sessions, the anti-thesis of FLASH. Source: my wife is a radiation oncologist.
•
from the article (pay attention to the part in italics): FLASH radiotherapy flips the conventional approach on its head, delivering a single dose of ultrahigh-power radiation in a burst that typically lasts less than one-tenth of a second. In study after study, this technique causes significantly less injury to normal tissue than conventional radiation does, without compromising its antitumor effect.
Healthy cells CAN turtle-up, whereas cancer cells engage in unregulated reproduction. Also, some cancer cells can only consume glucose. Which, in a fasted state, would mean that the majority of energy would be in ketones(if the individual were metabolically healthy), starving the cancer cells to death.
•
Why wouldn’t a strict keto diet not be a cure for those cancers?
•
Because the cancers cells adapt! (fast reproduction and high mutation rate of the cancerous cells make that process quicker than antibiotics resistance)
How superstitious are you? Do you avoid black cats and ladders?
•
I avoid any strange animal and walking under ladders. Those aren’t superstition, just common sense.
PC processors entered the Gigahertz era today in the year 2000 with AMD's Athlon (tomshardware.com)
What a time to be a kid then. We had a hand-me-down DEC x86 desktop at home with a Pentium II running at 233 MHz until I want to say 2002? This was around the time I learned how to build a PC since doing that was cheaper than buying one and no-one in my family had the money for that! I saved whatever money I could to buy a 128MB stick of RAM from Staples (maybe it was 256MB?), a few other things from TigerDirect/Newegg and _this processor_. With some help from my uncle and a guide I printed from somewhere whose website started with '3D' (it was quite popular back then; I don't think it exists anymore), I got it done. Going from 233 MHz to this was like going from walking to flying in a jet! Everything was SO MUCH F**ING FASTER. Windows XP _flew_. (The DEC barely made the minimum requirements for it, and boy did I feel it.) Trying to install Longhorn on it a year or two later brought me back into walking again, though. :D
•
You reminded me that building use to be considerably cheaper than buying. I remember my teen years, doing odd jobs to get some cash, buying a part at a time until the build was complete. Worrying that if you didn't scrap together enough parts soon there may be an architecture change. Finally getting it all together and the feeling of pure bliss installing the OS, troubleshooting drivers, installing this or that. Good times.
Fun times. Coolers, paste, fans, supply watts, dip switches and jumpers. Quake, Voodoo 3dfx vs NVidia GForce. This is where it all started, kids. I was in high school and was running a "computer games club" (~ Internet cafe for games and kids) since 1998 when we got a place, renovated it ourselves, got custom built furniture (cheap narrow desks) and initially 6 computers - AMDs at 300Mhz. By 2000 we broke a wall in the adjacent space and had ~15, cable + satellite internet for downloads and whatever video cards we could buy or scrap. It was wild.
•
> This is where it all started, kids. Nah.. Cassettes, computers-in-a-keyboard, booting straight into BASIC.. THIS is where it all started, grandkids.
Anytime you upgraded from a 4 year old computer to a new one back then - from 16Mhz to 90Mhz, or 75Mhz to 333Mhz, or 333Mhz to 1Ghz, or whatever - it was immediate, it was visceral. SSDs booted faster and launched programs faster and were a very nice change, but they weren't that same sort of night-and-day 80s/90s era change. The software, in those days, was similarly making much bigger leaps every few years. 256 colors to millions, resolution, capabilities (real time spellcheck! a miracle at the time.) A chat app isn't a great comparison. Games are the most extreme example - Sim City to Sim City 2000; Doom to Quake; Unreal Tournament to Battlefield 1942 - but consider also a 1995 web browser vs a 1999 one.
•
C64 1982 Amiga 1985 Never witnessed anything before or after with that jump in specs
> in the early 90s. They were only powerful enough to control external equipment like synthesizers. Tell that to ScreamTracker!
•
Well know that you mention that, my very first steps actually were with Soundmonitor on a C64, one of the OG trackers probably (even though not called tracker yet IIRC). I kind of forgot about that, as that was still very amateurish (I mean what I made with it, not the software). https://www.c64-wiki.de/images/f/f1/rockmon3.png Or also at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roBkg-iPrbw&t=400s in the video already linked below. And yes, I had to type in that listing.
Tinnitus Is Connected to Sleep (sciencealert.com)
•
I've heard a scientist say tinnitus also happens after waking up from a nap, not from a night's sleep Can confirm
The opening sentence “Those who have never endured the relentless ringing of tinnitus can only dream of the torment” does not mean what they think it means. Unless this is a very niche kink.
•
Thats what I thought when I first read it. I don't this is something that people look forward to in dreams. Or possible to imagine in dreams. There are limits to dreams.
> researchers found that ferrets that developed more severe tinnitus also showed disrupted sleep. Hold up. How do we know when ferrets have tinnitus???
•
If they're Greek ferrets, apparently they become constipated. :-)
That, and you simply hear the sounds in your environment worse and/or selectively depending on how they interact with the tinnitus. It's a massive nuisance.
•
The worst has to be in movies or TV shows when they play this ring after something happens (car accident / loud bang / etc). It's like it doubles the tinitus amplitude and it's excruciating. Every time I see this in a movie I am both disappointed for the lazy trope as well as immediately think to myself there's no way the sound designer of this movie knows what tinitus even is.
•
My main gripe is that some of the people that I interact simply won't believe it and can't be arsed to speak up a little so I can actually hear them.
I’m struggling to visualise this, do you have any references with images?
•
Put your hand like this: https://static1.bigstockphoto.com/9/5/2/large1500/259859530.jpg But with your thumbs closing your ear orifices. Now you have to hit the back of the neck with the tip of your middle fingers, and to get a harder hit you "snap" the fingers, putting the finger like "fingers crossed" position, and the pressing the middle finger towards the head. You should hear a big "thump!" inside your head. It aleviates the tinnitus for a few seconds, but more likely due to the stapedial reflex than anything related to neck muscles.
•
I never heard of the above, but I also have my own method that I discovered one night on some tinnitus forum: 1. Straight body, drop your head all the way down, chin to your chest. 2. Place the palm of your hands on your ears, blocking them, with the fingers to where the back of your neck touches your scalp. 3. Tap your fingers on your stretched, rigid neck muscles. Just sharing it here since it has helped me and it doesn't help to have many techniques to battle this.
Sorry to hear this. I similarly woke up one day with bi-lateral tinnitus at about an 8/10 in loudness. Thought I was going to lose my mind. After about 9 days one morning the right ear completely resolved and the left ear was at about a 5/10. Very, very, very long story short, I did a ton of digging and experimenting and realized it was related to a neck injury (a lot of people with whiplash have short-long term tinnitus). Over a year of physical therapy later, the tinnitus in the left ear is usually gone and only flares up if I lift weights with poor form. If you've had a neck/shoulder injury in the past 1-2 years, it's something I'd look into.
•
Now that is interesting, thank you for giving me a new angle to look into. Never thought that there might be a relationship with other things other than just my ears. I know I can make it instantly worse by clenching my jaw, so that should have been a hint already.
•
TMJ disorders are linked to tinnitus because of the nerves that run near it. In my case, if I force an underbite I can make both of my ears ring but I don't have any TMJ issues. There are some physical therapists (also dentists) that focus on maxillofacial dysfunction and TMJ disorders, so that's an avenue to go down as well. The other two common reasons for tinnitus: * Hearing damage (gunshots, explosions, etc.) and those are not reversible as of yet * Ototoxic drugs. When I last did research on it it years ago, like hearing damage from gunshots, was also irreversible.
I do hear my heartbeat from my left ear. The ear doctor said that the ear can be sensitive to the blood flowing from nearby arteries, and that there's nothing to do. Stress affects the heartbeat volume. I just got used to it, but it can be annoying sometimes, especially when you're trying to enjoy the silence. The doctor also told me that it's not an ear problem, but rather a brain problem. The brain is supposed to filter out this noise, in the same sense that it filters out the sounds from a (normal) digestion, our breathing, etc. I do have some (undiagnosed) hypersensitivity, so that sounds consistent to me. nozzlegear: it gets better with time, the less you think about it. I know it's not a great consolation, but trust me, train yourself not to think about it, and it will go away for extended periods of time (and will come back from time to time)
•
I have this also in the left ear for about a year or so. I self-diagnosed it as eustachian tube related [0] and should really see a doctor, but I also got pretty used to it by now. Only now and then it gets a bit annoying when the sound become more 'whooshing' than 'a clock ticking in the room'. In my right ear I have another sound regularly, that I went to the doctor for, and she immediately said "Oh, tinnitus, nothing you can do". But I'm pretty sure it is something else. It feels like spasmic tiny muscle fluctuating against my eardrum, and gets triggered by a low-frequency sound, esp. when at rest. Stops after 15-30 mins. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patulous_Eustachian_tube
You sound like me! I have had sinus issues all my life before 17. I even had a surgery at 16 but I honestly don’t think it helped. Now I have the sinus problem a bit under control, aka I still have occasional infections during allergy and cold season. I use NielMed to wash my sinus and I think it helps a lot. Besides that I really don’t know what it would take to fix it permanently. I constantly can feel the mucus dripping down my throat everyday.
•
Have you considered seeing an allergist to test if you have some environmental allergies? If so, they may be able to recommend or prescribe meds to moderate the effects of those allergies. (disclaimer: I'm not a doctor, just someone else with sinus issues)
The yoghurt delivery women combatting loneliness in Japan (bbc.com)
How about sex and companionship delivery women instead. State sponsored comfort women if you will.
•
This is a pretty sexist take considering the original article was not talking about the male loneliness epidemic, but elderly, and indeed the first example used was even of an elderly woman awaiting delivery. The commentary here is really something else.
“The yoghurt delivery women combatting loneliness in Minnesota” HN’s interest in this article is so “thing vs Japanese thing”
•
That trope only applies if the non-Japanese version of the thing exists. Which, if you live in the US, it doesn't. I would be just as interested in an article about Minnesota yogurt delivery women, but they don't exist, so...
Every time I read an article about people trying to solve the 'loneliness epidemic' I can't help but wonder if we're not trying to solve the wrong problem. Maybe the solution should not be sought in trying to increase social connections but in eliminating our need for social contact. This dependence on other humans has always felt like a flaw to me. Note that I'm not saying that human contact is bad, just that our pathological dependency on it is.
•
Haha! I really like your comment! I think I understand a little of the view and I think it's not all wrong. Here's the part where I think you're right: not all kinds of social contact is useful. One thing I have found very useful for discussion is Opus 4.6. You have to apply the usual tricks ("a somewhat foolish friend of mine said" / "a junior intern who's not doing so well thinks" / etc.) but it's pretty good at engaging with a variety of ideas and disagreeing and so on. It still has the LLM glazing but it is possible to drag ideas out of it. By contrast, many humans can't even understand the thrust of an argument and so discussion is wasted on them. There's nothing more frustrating than making an argument of some meaning and having someone misunderstand it entirely. Avoiding that requires some degree of rhetorical skill and communication and a sufficiently receptive audience. I have no problem talking to my friends like this, but there is a time-subject-partner matching problem. I want to discuss Analects 13.18 now , and my friend who can give me context is putting his son to sleep[0]. So I talk to Opus 4.6 and DeepSeek about what I think it is and I get quite far in understanding why my (seemingly novel) interpretation is unlikely to be correct. So machines are very useful in discussion and so on. However, I don't think they serve much of a purpose in assuaging loneliness. The reality of life is that it is most successful when it can organize into larger blocks: the cell, the organ, the body, the community, the state. And so I think our eusocial nature is strongly adaptive[1]. Perhaps with sufficiently advanced AI, a single person could exert sufficient power. Nothing in theory stopping that but I have other opposition to that (monocultures are non-adaptive, etc.). So removing our dependence on social connections will probably weaken us. So given that that is the case, I think people over-prescribe solutions in a way that is razor-targeted to themselves[2]. As someone who is not lonely and quite socially fulfilled, I find that a lot of these prescriptions turn out to come from some other axioms which I feel are unnecessary. For instance, one trend is "why do they have to get their needs met from delivery man?" and I think that's silly. When I was a child, we kids "had a relationship with" or "had some of our needs met" by the school guard in that he was a civic ally of ours. He was usually opposed to our actions tactically but ultimately aligned. Our final exams in India are very important and one day one of my classmates, who was particularly scatterbrained, was late for one and he took him to the exam hall on his bike. I don't think there's any reason to proscribe that social interactions should be within one's own immediate sphere. Our apartment building in San Francisco has social interactions that I think are normal in a civil society[3] - for the most part I interact there with strangers. Some I have helped or been helped by without ever having seen their faces. I think there is a joy I get from my direct family, and then my extended family and friends, and my communities, and my society, and as someone whose life is fairly joyful I'd say that looking around, (and with apologies to Tolstoy), "Happy people are all alike; each unhappy person is unhappy in their own way". 0: He did respond in the morning and it was very helpful. Turns out I misread the relationship Shen Zhuliang and Confucius had. 1: In fact, I'm of the opinion that pro-sociality is probably The Adaptive Trait. I recently picked up Darwin's Cathedral and am approximately 3 pages in and I already feel a kindred spirit behind that book. 2: Can we help it? Almost everyone has heard an expert or professor go "I believe that X is the most important thing that everyone should learn" and X always happens to be what they're studying - well obviously they believe that, otherwise they wouldn't be studying it. 3: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2025-10-09/Community
•
On some level I agree, but I don't think most of my fellow humans would agree. Either way, editing away the need for social connections from humans seems to be quite a long way from our current level of technology, so it's not really worth considering as something that can actually be done. There's a philosophical discussion worth having despite that though.
So is food. If we switch to IV feeding you can also avoid many harms food and drink brings. We can do a soylent green as a stopgap.
•
I'm not a big fan of eating, so yes please? Even if I then want to indulge in something tasty every now and then, the option to just 'top up' without actually eating is hugely attractive.
Then, like, what's the point of even being a human instead of a robot?
•
I'd rather be a robot than a human, so from my perspective, the answer is clearly clearly none. I just don't have the option of turning into a robot.
 Top