Hacker News: antientropic

New comment by antientropic in "Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton [pdf]"

antientropic — Tue, 08 Oct 2024 15:18:21 +0000

The economics prize is listed on nobelprize.org ("the official website of the Nobel Prize") along with the other Nobel prizes, so I don't think you can justify calling it "unofficial".

Perhaps if the ACM renamed the Turing Award to "The Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Computer Science", the Nobel Foundation would let them get away with it.

New comment by antientropic in "European court rules human rights violated by climate inaction"

antientropic — Tue, 09 Apr 2024 11:23:28 +0000

Because the plaintiffs are Swiss. Who else should they sue? Similar cases have happened elsewhere, e.g. the Urgenda case in the Netherlands.

Pointing to the inaction of other countries as an excuse for one's own inaction is a weak argument. Good luck suing Russia. (They were actually a member of the Council of Europe until 2022, so this decision would have applied to them...)

New comment by antientropic in "European court rules human rights violated by climate inaction"

antientropic — Tue, 09 Apr 2024 11:18:33 +0000

> There is an international court of human rights.

There isn't. There is the ICJ, which handles disputes between states, and the ICC, which handles war crimes etc. and definitely isn't going to judge climate legislation.

New comment by antientropic in "What We Watched: A Netflix engagement report"

antientropic — Wed, 13 Dec 2023 08:59:17 +0000

Your quote left out "subject to a confidentiality agreement". Streamers are not obliged to make this information public, and I don't expect companies like Amazon to do so since they're extremely secretive about viewership numbers.

New comment by antientropic in "Is the Physics of Time Changing?"

antientropic — Thu, 28 Sep 2023 12:03:05 +0000

How would you define "movement" without reference to "time"?

New comment by antientropic in "AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B"

antientropic — Mon, 18 Sep 2023 09:31:21 +0000

> but it keeps not happening

The article you're responding to is a dramatic demonstration that it has happened: Amazon's IPs would not be worth $4.5B if we hadn't run out. It requires us all to ration a resource (namely numbers) that should be near-infinite and essentially free.

New comment by antientropic in "50TB IBM tape drive more than doubles LTO-9 capacity"

antientropic — Fri, 25 Aug 2023 14:54:10 +0000

Because nobody has yet bothered to sue them for false advertising, so they continue to get away with it.

New comment by antientropic in "X.org Security Advisory: Security issue in the X server"

antientropic — Tue, 07 Feb 2023 11:25:29 +0000

The vast majority of C programmers do not use a formally verified C compiler, and most of them wouldn't care about that anyway.

From a security perspective, demanding a formally verified C compiler is rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Switching to a safer language like Rust will do much more to improve security, even if the compiler is not verified.

New comment by antientropic in "Breaking all macOS security layers with a single vulnerability"

antientropic — Mon, 15 Aug 2022 08:57:44 +0000

This is what happens when a new security model is retrofitted onto an existing one.

In the original Unix security model, there was no security concern with this (except maybe for chroot environments): it didn't allow a process to do something it couldn't otherwise do, since all processes owned by a uid had exactly the same rights. Now that we've started sandboxing user processes in various ways on macOS and Linux, that's no longer the case, and we suddenly need to crack down on useful tools like strace and gdb.

New comment by antientropic in "Germany Ends Ban on Abortion Advertisement"

antientropic — Sun, 26 Jun 2022 12:39:06 +0000

Not a very convincing article, since it presents some statistics about the US (e.g. "only 10% of injured Americans ever file a claim for compensation and only 2% file lawsuits") but does not compare them to other countries, so we can't tell whether the US is more or less litigious than the rest of the world.

New comment by antientropic in "The Supreme Court just made a US-EU Privacy Shield agreement even harder"

antientropic — Tue, 22 Mar 2022 20:13:35 +0000

Looking at the current war in Ukraine, the "martial spirit" seems to be alive and well in Europe.

New comment by antientropic in "Myth 16: ‘What comes after Putin must be better than Putin’"

antientropic — Tue, 01 Mar 2022 13:16:32 +0000

> with Crimea specifically called out, ironically, the United Kingdom and the United States have to immediately declare war on Russia and open hostilities.

It says no such thing (as the Wikipedia article you linked points out). The most it says is that they shall seek "immediate United Nations Security Council action" if "Ukraine should become a victim of an act of aggression or an object of a threat of aggression in which nuclear weapons are used."

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Ukraine._Memorandum_on_Securi...

New comment by antientropic in "In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously"

antientropic — Wed, 23 Feb 2022 09:32:15 +0000

There is no such thing as an inherent right. Rights are a legal construct. They don't grow on trees and are not laws of physics. There are rights that I may believe should be universal, yet very clearly are not.

New comment by antientropic in "Germany is not as stable as we think. Just ask its preppers"

antientropic — Wed, 22 Sep 2021 06:41:22 +0000

East Germany did not "collapse" in any sense relevant to a discussion about preppers. It peacefully re-unified with West Germany and was never in anything resembling a state of anarchy.

New comment by antientropic in "M4 as a templating language (2020)"

antientropic — Thu, 29 Jul 2021 13:48:53 +0000

The GNU M4 manual has a sizable section acknowledging its precursors: https://www.gnu.org/software/m4/manual/m4.html#History

New comment by antientropic in "Compiling Rust is NP-hard"

antientropic — Thu, 08 Jul 2021 10:26:53 +0000

Or worse than NP-hard: C++ template instantiation and the C preprocessor are Turing complete. (Except that I believe C++ requires some fixed limit on the maximum instantiation depth, but even so it's still exponential complexity.)

New comment by antientropic in "The code on the laptop in the stock photo at developer.bbc.com is user-editable"

antientropic — Sun, 13 Jun 2021 06:09:45 +0000

What's the difference between a "photo" and a "photograph"?

New comment by antientropic in "The end of the pandemic is near"

antientropic — Wed, 26 May 2021 11:28:07 +0000

The author isn't conflating anything - by saying "national misery" he is making it very clear that he's talking about the US situation.

New comment by antientropic in "Vaccinated Americans now may go without masks in most places, the CDC said"

antientropic — Fri, 14 May 2021 12:27:50 +0000

> People have memories.

And sometimes they have false memories. For example, regarding:

> 8 Months ago Kamala Harris herself said she would NOT get Trump's Vaccine.

What she said was that she would take the vaccine if the professionals said it was safe, not if Trump told her to take it [1]. A rather understandable level of skepticism given Trump's peddling of miracle cures such as hydroxychloroquine.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dAjCeMuXR0

New comment by antientropic in "In Singapore, Covid vs. privacy is no contest"

antientropic — Mon, 03 May 2021 20:53:04 +0000

According to https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/, Singapore has a total of 31 coronavirus deaths, one of the lowest per capita death rates in the world. So it seems to have worked very well.